The Darker Side of Neopia by ChromeFox

*** The users and events I mention in this article are all factual. Some of this may seem strange and out-of-the-ordinary, and all of it was. What I’ve told here is just a slice of the cake, but it is Neopets history, and probably one of the most interesting chapters in it. Enjoy. ***

I guess you could say the story began with Sentient. He was probably 16 or 17 at the time he created the very first cheat program for Neopets, Hunter Seeker, which simply played Kacheek Seek (or Badeek Seek as it was called back then) automatically. Since at the time, that was the most popular and profitable game, Hunter Seeker became an instant hit.

Sentient also brought on another first — the first (or at least first successful) Neopets forum, The Sentral. Membership increased as Hunter Seeker became more widespread, and Sentient himself was becoming famous. But as popular as he was among the poor users who relied on his program for neopoints, he was far less popular with the Neopets Staff. At the time, since there had never been a cheat program before, no rules even existed about the use of them. This would be the first time they would emerge.

Sentient’s account was frozen (which was relatively rare back then), and Hunter Seeker was banned. Sentient caved and posted on his web site that he would delete the program if they would just unfreeze him, but Adam refused. Instead, the Neopets Staff got his Geocities site taken dowm. Many of his friends protested this, but nothing would get Sentient’s account unfrozen.

Most of The Sentral’s members left when the Staff went against Hunter Seeker. Slowly, the very first Neopets message board began to go downward and became a hangout for hackers and scammers. It was sort of a prequel to Curt’s Neohacks forum.

Neohacks began as a message board for Neopets scammers and hackers and expanded into a web site. It became and still is today the largest and most popular forum of its kind. Neohacks thrived even after a hacker named Puppetz hacked and destroyed it…It was simply recreated, and went on. Many members of the now-historical Sentral came to it after their forum went down. Neohacks and the Sentral were the two forums that seemed to unite users like Neorobinhood, Puppetz, and Ikilledhitler (or Neil). All of them scammed or hacked, all of them hated the Neopets Staff, and all of them hated Mari_Jhane.

Mari_Jhane is probably the most famous user in the “dark side,” because she is the only one of them to have an article published about her on a popular site. She was 19-years-old at the time she joined Neopets May of 2000. To get rich quickly, she turned to the world of scamming. By June, she had gained over 5 million NP and a shop gallery through scams.

But Mari_Jhane was far from being the most skilled scammer around; her notoriety comes from her connections. No one is certain of how she came to friendship with Adam and Donna, but it happened. This was probably the worst result of the Staff’s favoritism. Numerous users were frozen for trying to tell others about her scamming, as monitors, especially MistressFaerie (who became her friend) and Angelfairy, were told to punish anyone who threatened Mari_Jhane’s reputation. Mari_Jhane had so much control over the monitors that she could speak to someone she didn’t like, and minutes later they would be frozen, as she did several times.

Throughout the more or less year that she spent on Neopets, Mari_Jhane was frozen and unfrozen more than eight times, Alpha tested many games for the Staff including the Battledome, and created an enormous guild called Neoholics Anonymous (which Adam was part of at one point). Her account was frozen for the last time when a hacker named Puppetz tricked her into giving him Staff AIM names and posted them on his web site, Puppetz.net, with due credit. Because Adam hated Puppetz, he froze Mari_Jhane’s account and cut ties with her. She still continues to play Neopets under another account today.

As for her friend, the monitor MistressFaerie, her Neopets experience ended with a feud with the Staff as well. She was accused of not turning in her monitor status reports and fired. After much arguing, they admitted that in fact she had been turning it in, but she was still fired. MistressFaerie later sued. Her account was frozen, and she left Neopets permanently. Many other monitors met a similar fate, so it may have been planned. Maybe it had to do with her friendship with the hacker Puppetz…

Puppetz was 18-years-old at the time he became famous on Neopets. He was a skilled hacker with a web site that detailed all of his AIM chats and run-ins on Neo (it also provided a lot of info for this article). But he was also arrogant and often careless. He hacked the Neohacks forum and also hacked The Straight Neo (or TSN), a very popular Neopets newsletter created by Eurakarte, as well as Eurakarte’s e-mail and Neopets account simply because he refused to make Puppetz a mod on TSN’s message board. Puppetz began his connections with the Staff after he helped Adam find bugs on the site (kind of an unlikely alliance, but Adam had quite a few of them).

But when the Neopets database was hacked, Adam’s blame shifted from Puppetz to Gantic, another hacker from The Sentral who had once hacked Mari_Jhane. Both of them were frozen. Then, Powell sued Puppetz. This caught the 18-year-old off-guard, and out of fear he posted an apology to the Neopets Staff on his web site. Powell dropped the suit.

It was then that Puppetz left Neopets, around the same time that MistressFaerie also went. They had become friends after what had happened, and MistressFaerie was as willing to spill the Staff’s dark secrets as Puppetz was to publish them. But after all that had happened, both Puppetz and MistressFaerie were more in the mood to forget Neopets altogether.

With most of the “dark side” users frozen, gone, or no longer monitors, this period of Neopets history almost drew to a close as 2002 came. One of the best sources of information on this topic was Puppetz’s web site, puppetz.net. One day, with no explanation, the site was gone. Most people assumed that the Staff had succeeded in shutting it down. Puppetz also never came on AIM. It seemed like he understandably wanted to abandon everything. But the site was not shut down, it was hacked, and so was Puppetz (kind of an irony). Neopets’s once most famous hacker had gone down by another hacker named Ad0.

Ad0 was probably 15 when he joined Neopets in early 2001. Even back then he was a hacker, but he actually was interested in Neopets. His “hacking partner” was 12-year-old Ek0. But no hacker with an account can hide from the Neopets Staff…Ad0 and Ek0’s shared account was frozen, and Ad0 almost left Neopets for good.

Then, in December 2002, egged on by people daring him to, Ad0 hacked several famous accounts, including those of Hrobi and V_team among others. The Staff froze the hacked accounts for protection, and later unfroze them. Ad0 also managed to hack into the “neoadmin” site and created screenshots of it. This shocked Neopets users, and his name quickly spread around the chats. After that, Ad0 left Neopets alone for a while…He no longer cares about Neopets or his fame there. He also doesn’t have a real account, making it pointless and impossible to try and track him down.

Ad0’s arrival was sort of proof that the “dark side” isn’t quite over yet. But very few of the original users are still around much…Most are frozen now or are still playing Neopets but behind the scenes. You can hope that the Neopets Staff can now handle these situations better, but it’s hard to say. Maybe the only real survivor of these ordeals is Neohacks, and a few of the users who still remember what happened vividly enough to tell it to others. – ChromeFox