ANONYMOUS members outside Lismore courthouse and Lismore police station. The anarchist group has officially arrived in the Northern Rivers.

ANONYMOUS members outside Lismore courthouse and Lismore police station. The anarchist group has officially arrived in the Northern Rivers. Jacklyn Wagner

LISMORE residents may see people walking the streets in Guy Fawkes masks (from the movie V for Vendetta) from this week to mark the official arrival of anarchist group Anonymous in the Northern Rivers.

Anonymous became notorious as it has attacked governments, financial institutions and churches around the world, mostly on the Internet.

In 2011 the group launched an aggressive attack against the Church of Scientology, labelling it a cult. A Lismore resident identified as Ecl1psedude is one of the members of Anonymous in Lismore.

He is a 17-year-old who owns a digital business. He said there were no leaders in the group, and they were an anarchist group hoping to serve the community.

"There are people in Brisbane Anonymous that are lawyers, judges, businesspeople and teachers, and in the Northern Rivers we have members from 13 to 75 years of age," he said.

The Anonymous Northern Rivers chapter has members in Lismore, Ballina, Byron Bay and Nimbin.

"We cook your meals, we collect your trash, we connect your calls, we drive you in ambulances and we guard you while you are asleep. We can be your brother or your sister and you would not even know," he said. "We are here for the people, not against them. If someone needs help with housing or food we can help them out," he said.

The Anonymous member said the group is "completely against causing civil unrest, we don't want to hack people, we just want to point out to the government that we are here and we don't like what they are doing at the moment".

"We are 100% for the people. We don't like the privatised banking system; we think the money should be controlled by the people, not by 13 families.

Anonymous originated in 2003 on the website 4chan , as a group of online and offline community users simultaneously existing as an anarchic, digitised global brain, according to Wikipedia. Anonymous members can be distinguished in public by the wearing of stylised Guy Fawkes masks, the same disguise used in the movie V for Vendetta.

Last week, Anonymous published the names and contact details of members of the US Westboro Baptist Church, notorious for targeting high-profile funerals of victims of violence with its anti-gay message. In 2012, Time named Anonymous as one of the most influential groups of people in the world.