Love Letters

Two pranks that had massive impacts beyond what anyone could have expected. That makes them the perfect additions to the Cabinet.

Order the official Cabinet of Curiosities book by clicking here today, and get ready to enjoy some curious reading!

Join our Patreon for ad-free episodes!: https://www.patreon.com/grimandmild

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Aaron Manke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history
is an open book, all of these amazing tales are
right there on display, just waiting for us to explore.
Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities. On May fourth of

(00:37):
the year two thousand, a lone worker at the Pentagon
sat bored at their computer desk, sifting through routine emails.
They were surprised when they saw one with a subject
line that read I Love you in all caps with
no spaces. Their heart skipped a beat as they consider
that maybe they had a secret admirer. They clicked the email,

(00:57):
which was blank, but it had an attachment with the
same name, a love letter. Perhaps the worker clicked on it.
This was no secret admirer, though, but a trojan virus,
one of the first of its kind. Within a day,
it had infected ten percent of all computers on the planet,
deleting millions of files. A little while earlier across the world,

(01:19):
in the Philippines, computer college student O'Nell de Guzman was
staring at his thesis proposal in shock.

Speaker 1 (01:26):
There were red marks all over it. His professor had
completely rejected it. Entitled Email Password Sender Trojan, it was
a proposal for a computer virus that would steal a
user's dial up credentials so that the sender could access
the Internet freely. At this point in history, in the
year two thousand, only about twenty five percent of the

(01:47):
world's population was actually online. In more developed Western countries,
users paid for internet access as much as they do today,
with a flat monthly fee, but in developing nations like
the Philippines, users had to pay hourly rates. O'Nell and
his fellow students imagined a future where everyone could gain
access to the Internet for free. They believed that it

(02:09):
was a human right, and he thought his virus was
a good way to make sure that that happened. But
his professor disagreed, writing this is illegal on the paper
and saying that the college wasn't in the business of
training burglars. For someone like Ohnell, this was just encouragement.
Though the older, stuffier generation was willing to follow the
rules and remain under the heel of the more developed nations,

(02:32):
this younger generation was willing to take matters into their
own hands, and so O'Nell went ahead and he coded
the virus anyway. The trojan would also present itself as
a love letter from a secret admirer, praying on the
human desire for love and attention. O'Nell also made it
so that it would exploit a weakness in Microsoft Outlook.

(02:52):
This was the email software that the vast majority of
the world used at the time. The weakness was that
the software didn't show what kind of a file an
attachment was, so users wouldn't notice that the file wasn't
a dot TXT or word document file, which is what
you'd expect a love letter to be, but a dot
VBS file, which is an executable program file, a program

(03:15):
such as a virus. O'Nell uploaded the program, which came
to be known as I Love You, and used it
to steal the Internet provider login credentials from wealthier users.
It's unclear if he realized that the program would also
delete all their files in the process, but what does
seem to have been intentional was that the virus would
then send itself to all of the contacts in the

(03:38):
user's address book, giving O'Nell even more potential targets. However,
he couldn't have imagined how effective this would be. It
made the virus travel exponentially, racing across the Philippines, Asia, Europe,
and the Americas within days. It showed how networked the
world really already was at that point, and also how
truly desperate for love many Peas people seemed to be.

(04:01):
It didn't matter if the person was rich or poor,
successful or not. All kinds clicked on the attachment. The
virus soon led to email servers going offline in important
government centers such as the British House of Commons, the Pentagon,
and multiple American military bases. This cost billions worldwide in

(04:21):
both lost revenue and expensive additional hours as it professionals
had to come in and try to recover the lost
files while also patching the various computer systems that were
vulnerable to I Love You Naturally. The FBI launched a
manhunt and soon narrowed the source of the bug to
the Philippines, and before long, Filipino law enforcement was banging

(04:43):
on Onell's door. Onell was put on a world stage
as reporters questioned him about the virus. He said he
had no idea the virus would travel so far, but
he wasn't sorry. He believed the Internet should be free.
US law enforcement tried to charge him with fraud, but
that would require him to have broken laws in both
the US and the Philippines, and the Philippines had no

(05:04):
laws against hacking at the time, so O'Nell went free. Curiously,
he did not go on to an elaborate life of crime,
or even a job in cybersecurity. No. When a reporter
tracked him down in twenty twenty, he was working in
a curiously mundane place, a cell phone repair store. It

(05:37):
was September of nineteen forty four in a quiet town
in Illinois, and Aileen Kearney had just crawled into bed.
She had almost fallen asleep when suddenly she smelled a
sickeningly sweet odor wafting in from the open window. At first,
she thought that it was just the flowers outside in
the garden, but the smell kept getting stronger. Eventually Aileen
tried to get up and investigate, but found that she

(06:00):
couldn't her legs were paralyzed. Aileen screamed for her sister, Martha,
who was staying in the other room. When Martha came
running in, Aileen asked if she smelled anything, and Martha
said no, But she was so alarmed by Aileen's sudden
paralysis that she immediately called her husband for help. A
few minutes later, there was frantic knocking on the front door.

(06:22):
Martha opened it and found her husband on the doorstep,
sweating and terrified. He told Martha that he had just
seen a tall man in dark clothing lurking outside Aileen's
bedroom window. He tried to chase the man, but the
man got away. Martha took her husband into Aileen's bedroom
to see what was wrong with her. But now that
the man outside the window was gone, so were Aileen's symptoms.

(06:45):
Her legs were no longer paralyzed, and the sweet odor
she was smelling was gone. Convinced that the strange man
outside the window had been poisoning her, Aileen called the police,
and the next morning, the so called anesthetic prowler was
front news. The strange affair, though, was only beginning. Once
ailing story ran, the police were suddenly inundated with similar reports.

(07:09):
That same night, another woman in town had heard a
plopping noise followed by a strange smell, and her hands
and legs had started tingling. The night before that, a
couple had both been awoken in the middle of the
night by an unusual smell. When they tried to get
out of bed, they found that they were completely paralyzed
and couldn't move for over an hour. A few days later,

(07:29):
a woman came home and found a small white cloth
pressed against her screen door. Without thinking, she sniffed it
and was overwhelmed by an unusual smell, and then she
felt an electric shock run through her body and she
fell to the ground, paralyzed for two hours. The wave
of attacks became a statewide crisis, and the anesthetic Prowler
soon became known by a much more catching name, one

(07:52):
named after the town the events were happening in, the
mad Gasser of Mattoon. The local police examined and ruled
out every possible suspect, escaped mental patients, known pranksters and criminals,
even a high school chemistry teacher. They analyzed the cloth
the woman had found on her screen door, but strangely,
there were no traces of chemicals on it at all.

(08:14):
They even brought in chemical weapons experts from the army,
who were unable to locate any poisonous gas residue at
any of the affected homes, and even though a few
people had claimed to have seen the mad Gasser and
dozens had reported symptoms, no one had actually been hospitalized,
and there was no physical evidence of any chemical attacks

(08:34):
at all. Over the course of two weeks, more than
two dozen gas attacks were reported to local police, and
the panic spiraled out of control. Armed vigilantes roamed the
streets at night looking for the mad Gasser. Women were
afraid to leave their homes without carrying baseball bats for
self defense, and then, just as suddenly as the reports

(08:55):
had begun, they went away. The police received their final
work port of a gaser attack in mid September. Despite
calling in state and federal investigators for assistance, the authorities
never found out who or what was responsible for these
strange incidents. The mad guesser, if he even existed at all,
was never caught. I hope you enjoyed today's guided tour

(09:22):
through the Cabinet of Curiosities. This show was created by
me Aaron Mankey in partnership with iHeart Podcasts, researched and
written by the Grim and Mild team, and produced by
Jesse Funk. Learn more about the show and the people
who make it over at Grimandmild dot com slash Curiosities.
You'll also find a link to the official Cabinet of
Curiosity's hardcover book, available in bookstores and online, as well

(09:46):
as ebook and audiobook. And if you're looking for an
ad free option, consider joining our Patreon. It's all the
same stories, but without the interruption for a small monthly fee.
Learn more and sign up over at patreon dot com,
slash grim and Mild, and until next time, Stay curious,

(10:06):
m HM.