The Man Who Cried Volf

Adam Carter - July 9, 2018

Did He Meet Seth Rich, Set Up DCLeaks & Give DNC Leaks To WikiLeaks?

This is the story of how Mark Dougan (aka BadVolf): was involved in a deception attempt in September 2016 and effectively caught out fabricating evidence at that time by a reporter.





created the "badvolf.com" domain in 2017 around the same time I was writing an article about the incident and had been making inquiries about his DCLeaks related claims.





has only recently introduced Seth Rich and DNC emails to his claims and claimed to have been fully responsible for the DCLeaks site.





has also fabricated evidence in the form of forum posts to try to reinforce his recent claims (adding posts citing "DNC" and then adding "DCLeaks" at a later stage) but has been caught out in a couple of different ways.





has jumbled post IDs to conceal the fact he has retroactively injected posts into his forum.





has tried to give invalid excuses for how people were supposedly able to access his site after it had been taken down and before it had returned on it's new domain.





had his new claims initially introduced by a site from a questionable source that was deleted just prior to Dougan giving interviews.



During the past few weeks, a story about a former Palm Beach Country Sheriff's Office deputy by the name of Mark Dougan has been circulating around social media. In it, Dougan has made claims to have met with and received leaked documents from Seth Rich (a DNC staffer murdered in July 2016 that many have suspected of being a source for some of the leaks published by WikiLeaks during the 2016 US general election).

Going further, Dougan also claims to have been the person responsible for the appearance of DCLeaks, a site that appeared in the Summer of 2016 that published a variety of leaked emails and documents. Dougan even claims that he had passed emails on to WikiLeaks.

For those that don't know, Dougan hosted a forum called PBSOTalk, a forum that encouraged PBSO officers and others to blow the whistle on corruption within the sheriff's office. In March 2016, following the publication of personal details of police, FBI officers and others to his site, Dougan was raided.

Dougan has stated that, following the raid, when released, he travelled to Canada and then on to Russia where he sought asylum (citing fears that he would be punished extremely harshly for what had been published despite not being charged with a crime and having his passport handed back to him by the FBI) and, we can only assume, has lived there ever since.

In the past, Dougan has only ever mentioned the publishing of documents on his PBSOTalk site as the reason for the raid, however, more recently, he has claimed he was contacted by Seth Rich (in February 2016), that he was sent some content by Rich and that this was one of the reasons for the raid.

Along with introducing these new elements to his story, he has also conceded that he had invented a hacker persona called "BadVolf" (which he openly concedes now but had insisted was a Russian hacker in the past in order to give himself cover for posting the documents to his site, even giving interviews to sites other than DataBreaches via his alter-ego at that time).

If you check his claims out by looking at the forum on pbsotalk.org and searched for "DCLeaks", you will discover that there are a few posts apparently made starting from April 19th 2016 where he cites "DCLeaks".

If you check on the original site's history (before it was taken down following the raid) you will find that PBSOtalk.com was a site Dougan had set up years prior to 2016. We can also see that back on March 14, 2016, he was apparently raided by the FBI due to content he posted on the site (around the time the BadVolf persona first emerged). You may even find a story about BadVolf revealing an apparent connection to DCLeaks as early as September 2016.

To many, this may seem compelling but for this article's author, who has had BadVolf on their radar for over a year, not only has Dougan's recent return to the spotlight served to be somewhat unconvincing (although, admittedly entertaining), it's actually helped provide useful evidence to demonstrate a deception consistent over a period of 2 years, in turn, making sense of the incident referenced at the end of the previous paragraph.

So, what are we dealing with here?

CrowdSource The Truth, Sarah Westall, Born In The Wilderness and Others Interview Dougan

About a week after the erasure of INV1105's blog, Dougan started to feature in a number of interviews on various YouTube channels.

(All dates cited are in 2018)

The clip from Last Born In The Wilderness in the list above is from podcast #124.

They also interviewed Dougan 6 months earlier, for their podcast #94, however, the previous podcast was primarily about his history at PBSO and the PBSOTalk site.

Dougan, at least, has confirmed that the claims to have met with Seth Rich and to have controlled DCLeaks were, indeed, coming from him.

So, the big question is, of course, can we confirm or refute the claims being made?

Dougan's Claims On Seth Rich Dougan claims that Seth Rich contacted him in February 2016 and that leaks not posted to DCLeaks were passed on to WikiLeaks. These are key dates in relation to phishing/leaks/etc from 2016: March 10-11: Attempts to phish former Clinton campaign staff.

March 19: Podesta's emails acquired.

April 28-29: DNC discovers unauthorized access to resources.

May 19-25: The DNC's emails were acquired. The DNC Leaks and Podesta Leaks published by WikiLeaks were from batches that were acquired after Dougan alleges Seth had first contacted him. Certainly, it's possible that Dougan could have met Seth but there's plenty of room for doubt and skepticism seeing as though Dougan has already tied himself to a questionable hacker persona who was involved in an incident in which they appear to have been lying about DCLeaks in a way that would have tied DCLeaks to someone identifying themselves as a Russian hacker. For context, it's also important to know that, last year, there was an effort to propagate a claim that Seth could have been in trouble with Russians (and that this may have been related to his murder). Jack Burkman, who had set up an organization to investigate, was even sent what appears to have been a false lead suggesting this and there's a chance Guccifer 2.0 may have been suggesting this in a conversation with Robbin Young in August 2016. If Dougan is lying about both Seth and DCLeaks he will be lying about two loose ends regarding RussiaGate attributions that some individuals in the USIC (and cyber-security industry) would like to see tied up in accordance with the narratives they've perpetuated. If he's lying about either, it will also make it likely that he's lying about both. Keeping that in mind, we'll now take a look at his most recent claims regarding DCLeaks and also consider the evidence that shows someone is either lying or they're a time-traveller.