Medical hoaxes website escapes prosecution by hiding in the Bahamas
Bádateľ spread alarmist news during pandemic.
The Health Ministry's criminal complaint against the disinformation website Bádateľ (lit. Researcher) spreading medical hoaxes will not lead to an indictment of anyone. After almost three years, investigators have not obtained enough evidence for the case.
The Regional Police Directorate in Prešov, eastern Slovakia, confirmed for the Sme daily that the criminal prosecution was suspended because "facts that would allow for charging a specific person for the crime in question were not possible to find".
When even seeking legal assistance from the Commonwealth of the Bahamas, where companies linked to hosting the disinformation website are based, did not help, the case was dropped. The Bahamian authorities did not provide their Slovak counterparts with any useful information that would further the investigation of the crime of spreading an alarmist message.
Top league among conspirators
The case started in summer 2020 when then health minister announced the filing of a criminal complaint against an unknown perpetrator.
"The Bádateľ website has been spreading medical nonsense and hoaxes for a long time, for example it was often vaccination and cancer treatment disinformation. Using clickbait headlines, the website shocks people at first, and then makes money by offering them nutritional supplements and various products," former minister Marek Krajčí (Slovensko) explained the problematic practices of the website.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, Bádateľ would spread alarmist messages, its articles encouraging civil disobedience, thwarting anti-pandemic measures, and refusing vaccination.
Out of more than 300 disinformation websites featured on the public list of problematic websites created by the Konšpirátori.sk monitoring project, it is among the top 10 with a score of 9.6 out of 10.
Endless wait
Progress in the case was made in January 2021, when the Health Ministry announced that the District Police Directorate in Prešov had initiated criminal prosecution in the matter.
However, even a year later the investigators did not charged anyone. In January 2022, the police mentioned for the first time that the Commonwealth of the Bahamas was requesting legal assistance. The reason was made public a year later in January 2023, when the police informed that interrogations had already taken place in the matter.
It turned out that Bádateľ runs the web with the help of foreign companies. The investigators interrogated a representative of a German company that hosted the web's domain in its data centre. The police did not specify to what extent the interrogation was helpful.
The situation was more complicated on the part of the Bahamas; even after more than a year, the police were still waiting for cooperation. It was not clear when or if the Slovak police would receive the required legal assistance; in the end it finally happened in 2023.
The Regional Police Directorate in Prešov confirmed for daily Sme that the Bahamas provided cooperation to the police, but it was to no avail. The information provided was of no value to the police and the investigators did not get anywhere. In the end, therefore, the criminal prosecution was discontinued in May 2023.
Tracks led to Prešov
Bádateľ operates primarily on the .net domain, but the Slovak .sk domain works in parallel and automatically redirects visitors to the primary domain. That is why the investigators interrogated one of the Slovak hosting companies, which led them to a Prešov-based company behind the Slovak domain.
However, during the interrogation, its representative said that "the domain was made available to various contributors" and does not know who exactly wrote and published the problematic articles in question on Bádateľ.
The police have not made the identity of the person who operates Bádateľ public. However, in the past the expert website Infosecurity.sk claimed that when Marek Krajčí's criminal complaint was filed, a certain Vladimír Uhlár from Prešov was behind the website. Although not its founder, he took over the site from the previous owner.
Fooling Facebook
Although Bádateľ spreads a lot of dangerous medical disinformation, and major social media paid increased attention to medical hoaxes during the pandemic, the conspiracy website still operates on Facebook, with more than 60,000 followers.
The main reason is that Bádateľ was able to adapt to how Meta's platform works. Almost completely it has stopped sharing links to its deleterious articles and instead posts controversial opinions including commenting on politics and other content, mainly in the form of text and images.
The Facebook page thus continued to fulfill the function of a promotional channel, but with a significantly lower risk of Meta punishing or completely deleting the page for spreading medical hoaxes.
Another trick was a temporary shutdown of the Facebook page by the administrator themselves. Therefore, sometimes the page is unavailable for some time. By doing so, more serious penalties can be avoided as it is known that Meta moderators do not check the reported content if it is no longer available. This can be achieved either by deleting specific posts, but also by turning off the page voluntarily for a period of time.
Coincidentally, the Bádateľ Facebook page is unavailable as of the time of writing. It is likely that it was made "invisible" indefinitely by the site administrator. The daily Sme asked Meta for information about the status of the page, but did not receive Meta's opinion in the time allotted.
The Health Ministry published the headlines of selected Bádateľ articles, which were listed in the criminal complaint:
- If you knew how organs are harvested, you would never agree to be a donor
- Study proves Covid-19 vaccine to never work
- Vaccination industry in panic, study reveals flu shot to be scam
- Can 5G networks block blood oxygenation, increasing Covid-19 mortality?
- Vaccines to collect biometric data: Big Brother joins Big Pharma
- What can a parent do if they do not agree with wearing respirators in classes
The Eastern Frontier Initiative
This article was written in the framework of The Eastern Frontier Initiative (TEFI) project. TEFI is a collaboration of independent publishers from Central and Eastern Europe, to foster common thinking and cooperation on European security issues in the region. The project aims to promote knowledge sharing in the European press and contribute to a more resilient European democracy.
Members of the consortium are 444 (Hungary), Gazeta Wyborcza (Poland), SME (Slovakia), PressOne (Romania), and Bellingcat (The Netherlands).The TEFI project is co-financed by the European Union.
Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.
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