This article was produced in collaboration with Court Watch, an independent outlet that unearths overlooked court records. Subscribe to them here.

The FBI has accused a Texas man, James Wesley Burger, of planning an Islamic State-style terrorist attack on a Christian music festival and talking about it on Roblox. The feds caught Burger after another Roblox user overheard his conversations about martyrdom and murder and tipped them off. The feds said that when they searched Burger’s phone they found a list of searches that included “ginger isis member” and “are suicide attacks haram in islam.” 

According to charging documents, a Roblox player contacted federal authorities after seeing another player called “Crazz3pain” talking about killing people. Screenshots from the server and included in the charging documents show Roblox avatars with beards dressed in Keffiyehs talking about dealing a “greivoius [sic] wound upon followers of the cross.”

“The witness observed the user of Crazz3pain state they were willing, as reported by the Witness, to ‘kill Shia Musilms at their mosque,” court records said. “Crazz3pain and another Roblox user[…]continued to make violent statements so the witness left the game.”

The witness stayed off of Roblox for two days and when they returned they saw Crazz3pain say something else that worried them, according to the court filing. “The Witness observed Crazz3pain tell Roblox User 1 to check their message on Discord,” the charging document said. “Roblox User 1 replied on Roblox to Crazz3pain, they should delete the photograph of firearms within the unknown Discord chat, ‘in case it was flagged as suspicious…the firearms should be kept hidden.”

According to the witness, Crazz3pain kept talking about their desire to commit “martyrdom” at a Christian event and that he wanted to “bring humiliation to worshippers of the cross.” The Witness allegedly asked Crazz3pain if the attack would happen at a church service and Crazz3pain told them it would happen at a concert. 

Someone asked Crazz3pain when it would happen. “‘It will be months…Shawwal…April,’” Crazz3pain said. Shawwal is the month after Ramadan in the Islamic calendar. The conversations the witness shared with the FBI happened on January 21 and 23, 2025.

Roblox gave authorities Crazz3pain’s email address, name, physical address, and IP address and it all pointed back to James Wesley Burger. The FBI searched Burger’s home on February 28 and discovered that someone in his family had put on a keylogger on the laptop he used to play Roblox and that they’d captured a lot of what he’d been typing while playing the game. They turned over the records to the feds.

“The safety of our community is among our highest priorities. In this case, we moved swiftly to assist law enforcement’s investigation before any real-world harm could occur and investigated and took action in accordance with our policies. We have a robust set of proactive and preventative safety measures designed to help swiftly detect and remove content that violates our policies," a spokesperson for Roblox told 404 Media. "Our Community Standards explicitly prohibit any content or behavior that depicts, supports, glorifies, or promotes terrorist or extremist organizations in any way. We have dedicated teams focused on proactively identifying and swiftly removing such content, as well as supporting requests from and providing assistance to law enforcement. We also work closely with other platforms and in close collaboration with safety organizations to keep content that violates our policies off our platform, and will continue to diligently enforce our policies.”

Burger’s plan to kill Christians was allegedly captured by the keylogger. “I’ve come to conclude it will befall the 12 of Shawwal aa/And it will be a music festival /Attracting bounties of Christians s/In’shaa’allah we will attain martyrdom /And deal a grevious [sic] wound upon the followers of the Cross /Pray for me and enjoin yourself to martyrdom,” he allegedly typed in Roblox, according to court records.

The FBI then interviewed Burger in his living room and he admitted he used the Crazz3pain account to play Roblox. The feds asked him about his alleged plan to kill Christians at a concert. Burger said it was, at the time, “mostly a heightened emotional response,” according to the court records. 

Burger also said that the details “became exaggerated” but that the goal “hasn’t shifted a bit,” according to the court records. He said he wanted to “[G]et the hell out of the U.S.” And if he can’t, “then, martyrdom or bust.”

He said that his intention with the attack “is something that is meant to or will cause terror,” according to the charging document. When the FBI agent asked if he was a terrorist, Burger said, “I mean, yeah, yeah. By, by the sense and … by my very own definition, yes, I guess, you know, I would be a terrorist.” 

When authorities searched his iPhone, they discovered two notes on the phone that described how to avoid leaving behind DNA and fingerprints at a crime scene. A third note appeared to be a note explaining the attack, meant to be read after it occured.

The list of previous searches on his iPhone included “Which month is april in islam,” “Festivals happening near me,” “are suicide attacks haram in islam,” “ginger isis member,” “lone wolf terrorists isis,” and “can tou kill a woman who foesnt[sic] wear hijab.”

Burger has been charged with making violent threats online and may spend time in a federal prison if convicted. This is not the first time something like this has happened on Roblox. The popular children’s game has been a popular spot for extremist behavior, including Nazis and religious terrorists, for years now. Last year, the DOJ accused a Syrian man living in Albanian of using Roblox to coordinate a group of American teenagers to disrupt public city council Zoom meetings.

iNaturalist is a website that crowdsources pictures of plants and animals to help identify species. Its tagline is “A Community for Naturalists.”

iNaturalist is administered by its own small charity, but the work is done by a huge number of volunteer contributors — a bit like Wikipedia.

Sometimes a charity where volunteers do all the work forgets who does all the work and that these are volunteers, not minions. If someone waves a bit of money at them.

Every year, Google tries to launder its reputation by sending a bit of blood money to charities to greenwash its AI. This year’s round included $1.5 million to iNaturalist, who excitedly announced this on Twitter (and nowhere else). [Google; Twitter]

The volunteers — the ones who do all the work — were less than delighted. [iNat forum]

Two days later, iNaturalist explained the grant: [blog post]

By using generative AI (GenAI), we hope to synthesize information about how to distinguish different species and accurately convey that to iNaturalist users.

iNaturalist plans to use a Google chatbot to make up some hallucinations about data that had been uploaded by the volunteers. So how was this AI slop going to be fact-checked?

We will incorporate a feedback process for the AI-generated identification tips so that we can maintain high standards of accuracy.

That is, the volunteers would work for free to improve Google’s bot. This plan didn’t go down so well.

It turns out people do free work for knowledge because they hold principles and stuff. Many deleted their accounts — which also deletes their observations from iNaturalist — because they didn’t volunteer to feed a lying slop machine that’s an environmental disaster. And they no longer wanted anything to do with a charity so lost it didn’t see why this was not a good idea. [Scientific American]

iNaturalist has tried very hard to backpedal without backpedaling. Executive director Scott Loarie posted on the forum: [iNat forum]

I can assure you that I and the entire iNat team hates the AI slop that’s taking over the internet as much as you do.

… there’s no way we’re going to unleash AI generated slop onto the site.

Those are nice words, but AI-generated slop is still explicitly the plan. iNaturalist’s grant deliverable is “to have an initial demo available for select user testing by the end of 2025.”

You can tell what happened — Google promised iNaturalist free money if they would just do something, anything, that had some generative AI in it. iNaturalist forgot why people contribute at all, and took the cash.

The iNaturalist charity is currently “working on a response that should answer most of the major questions people have and provide more clarity.” [Twitter]

They’re sure the people who do the work for free hate this whole plan only because there’s not enough “clarity” — and not because it’s a terrible idea.

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