Vandals use Facebook to trash party-goers property in France

Young French people who use social networking sites, notably Facebook, to invite friends to a party or celebration are falling prey to unknown gangs of vandals and other troublemakers who turn up uninvited and trash the property concerned.

This relatively new Internet-inspired phenomena, called ‘Operation Pelican,’ is beginning to make waves in France. These schemes can wreck an apartment or house in no more than a few minutes, after which the perpetrators vanish into the night, although some of them are caught afterward. It all typically begins with a young person, a school or university student, wanting to organise a birthday party or an end-of-term/exam party with friends. Many of them use their Facebook accounts to organise them, complete with address and other details, as if they were talking over the phone. But they are not on the phone. They are on the Internet. Those arrangements are being picked up by members of these bands of vandals, who then circulate it amongst themselves and organise an ‘Operation.’ On the designated date, the false friends invade the property concerned. They film their activities and then put them up on Facebook or YouTube. There can be as many as 80 of them, as recently happened to one very surprised lady in Boulogne. Sofia had organised a party on Facebook, and was somehow warned that the operation was being planned so the police were informed. This gang consisted of party-wreckers from her school, who were filmed as they arrived and were intercepted by the police. As she said afterward “Facebook is more practical than the phone for organising parties. I used to find it funny when I saw the videos, with a table being broken or a light fitting being ripped out. I didn’t realise it was so serious.” She was lucky. In another attack, an adolescent had his party invaded by 15 gatecrashers. “ I didn’t want to let them in but I couldn’t do anything about it” he said. The result was a binge-drinking and marijuana-smoking session which ended in money and objects being stolen and furniture being destroyed before exasperated neighbours telephoned the police to complain about the noise. The irony is that the object of the official complaint, in legal terms, is the adolescent concerned. The vandals are well-organised and target those who have a lot of friends in order to have the highest chance of finding potential victims.. Having a lot of friends on their Facebook account is important for many young people, and the more friends they have, the more prestige they get. One recent comment in a young person’s chat room read “If you don’t have at least 300 friends, you’re nothing.” In a recent incident, a quiet evening between friends that was planned to be held in a public square in Tours was invaded by over 300 vandals. The evening ended with riots and running battles between police and the vandals which lasted for hours. Twitter is also said to be a source of addresses for the vandals, although Twitter is far from being the phenomenon in France that it is in, say, the United States. Authorities are considering ways of informing young people about the dangers of putting up personal information such as addresses and phone numbers on the Internet.