Last week we broke news of an apparent link between Boris Johnson’s friend Jennifer Arcuri, her controversial Hacker House enterprise, and Lancashire-based convicted criminal and Hampstead hoax pusher Wesley Hall.
While the evidence we presented suggested that Wesley might have been employed as Hacker House’s “Digital Marketing Manager”, it was not conclusive—and commenter “Fake Name 101” pointed out that Wesley might very well have attached himself to Hacker House without Arcuri’s knowledge or consent. The Wesley/Hacker House link was also mentioned on Barthsnotes, where commenter “Annie B Server” reiterated Fake Name 101’s arguments against the claim.
Realising that we might very well have jumped the gun, and not wishing to spread unverified information, we took another look. Here’s what we’ve learned so far.
LinkedIn articles
On 17 June 2016, Wesley Hall posted an article on his LinkedIn page [What?! Wesley has a LinkedIn page? Tie my beak and call me Baldy!—Ed.] in which he claimed that Jennifer Arcuri and Lauri Love, “founders of an innovative new start-up – Hacker House“, had invited him to attend the International Business Festival 2016 in Liverpool.
The rambling article reads like a promo piece for Arcuri, Love, and Hacker House, and Wesley sounds overwhelmed with excitement at having been asked to play with the cool kids. He mentions wanting to “show solidarity” with the company and its aims, but mentions nothing about his own employment status, there or elsewhere.
He does talk about his friendship with Love:
I’ve known Lauri for some time now and wanted to show solidarity with the company as sadly, he’s currently facing extradition to the US for allegedly hacking the FBI/NASA/Federal Reserve/Department Of Energy, participating in the 2013 #OpLastResort protests in support of Aaron Swartz. I genuinely believe that we need to keep this young man here in the UK and utilise his skills to help shape ethical policy here for our future generations. He doesn’t deserve to face a death sentence; torture or life imprisonment for allegedly showing that government system administrators are incompetent.
The above photo of Wesley Hall and Lauri Love, taken two months before the LinkedIn article, appears to bear out Wesley’s claim that he knew Love.
Wesley published several more LinkedIn articles about Hacker House.
By 18 July 2016, in an article titled “Cyber Security Importance & Avoiding Data Breaches“, he had begun referring to himself as
Wesley Hall
@1WithThePlanet @HackerHouseUK
Digital Marketing Manager
Hacker House
He would repeat this in two subsequent articles:
- “Do you know what your child is doing online this summer?” (20 July 2016);
- “Nearly six million fraud and cyber crimes last year, ONS says” (23 July 2016)
In further LinkedIn articles, published between July and November 2016, he would drop the “Digital Managing Marketer” title, but would continue to refer to Hacker House in the first person plural: “For more information or for a cyber security consultancy from Hacker House, please get in touch with us via info@myhackerhouse.com”.
“Learn practical ethical hacking skills for FREE!”, dated 18 January 2017 would be Wesley’s last LinkedIn article on the topic of Hacker House.
The Twitter connection
While he stopped promoting Hacker House on LinkedIn, from February 2017 on Wesley maintained friendly Twitter relations with the company’s principals, Jennifer Arcuri (@jennifer_arcuri) and her husband, Matthew Hickey (@hackerfantastic).
They began tweeting one another in April 2016—shortly before the first LinkedIn articles began to appear—and have continued since then.
The earliest tweet came from Hickey…
…and was both “liked” and retweeted by Arcuri’s Innotech Network, Arcuri herself, the Hacker House corporate Twitter account, and Wesley.
Wesley, Hickey, and Arcuri have engaged in numerous Twitter conversations since then. Interestingly, Wesley seems to converse more regularly with Hickey than with Arcuri, but Arcuri has posted pictures of Wesley to her Instagram account:
It appears likely that Arcuri and Hickey were aware of Wesley’s claims that he worked for Hacker House. In this tweet, Wesley shared his LinkedIn article, “NHS patients being put ‘at risk’ because of cyber security flaws”:
As with his other Hacker House-related LinkedIn articles, Wesley referred to Hacker House in the first-person plural. The article concluded:
For more information or for a cyber security consultancy from Hacker House, please get in touch with us via info@myhackerhouse.com
Among those who “liked” and retweeted the tweet: @MyHackerHouse and @HackerFantastic.
It’s unlikely that Hickey would have appreciated any attempt by Wesley to falsely insert himself into the company.
More recently, Wesley leapt to Arcuri’s defence when her relationship with Boris Johnson hit the media. He adopted a buckshot approach, tweeting the same message to a variety of people:
(There were more along these lines, but you get the idea.)
How Wesley would be privy to who made the grant application on behalf of Hacker House is anybody’s guess.
However, it is seeming more and more likely that Wesley was, in fact, employed by Hacker House, at least for a few months in 2016–2017. Whether Hacker House and its principals were aware of, or cared about, his chequered past, is far less clear.
HOAXTEAD RESEARCH 
“However, it is seeming more and more likely that Wesley was, in fact, employed by Hacker House, at least for a few months in 2016–2017.”
Does it? What is evidenced here is that he was hanging off the back of the bus, as usual. The opinion that each and every one of those involved in the Hacker House project and the project itself is dodgy, is something you could defend in court – the rest is entirely questionable.
Conversations on twitter? Right up there with replies to letters from Santa Claus it’s become the domain of choice for attention-seekers (commercial and otherwise) and the credulous and the odd, but otherwise serves very-little by way of serious purpose. Selfies? Simply a part of the playground culture that keeps the proles of today in their place. Name any politician that walks among the unwashed and you’ll find many selfies of them with people they simply don’t know. Dots? Join? The?
Reasonably; Wesley saw a bandwagon loaded with bigger fleas and tried to jump on. – Is that picture even real? Why are Wesley’s fleshtones so very different from the other people in the picture? And why does his left side fall away so oddly behind the other chap?
This ‘hanging on’ happens with criminal gangs too. How many ageing wannabe-crooks in London will claim to have once-been part of the Kray gang, when in reality they might once have run to the shops to buy Ronnie a packet of fags? And the rest of their career as a criminal overlord was spent fiddling tax discs, flogging duty-free ciggies on the street corner, resetting shoplifted goods and the odd stolen woodchipper?
So, Wesley maybe-knew one of ‘the gang’? Maybe. Isn’t it the case that gangs keep idiots close in case they become useful?
Interestingly one or two of those ‘tweets’ say ” …@myhackerouse. NOT @Jennifer_Arcuri. ”
And that was rather the point made against the last post.
What was posed as Wesley’s email address wasn’t actually an email address at all. And while there is no doubt where the myhackerhouse domain is pointed, there is no evidence of who owns it or where the associated email actually goes – they could be two different places.
Indeed, the point has also been made that just because someone posts something somewhere with an email address – unless that address is actually verified by sending a message to it, and requiring a response, there is no evidence of it existing at all.
For instance, If I send an email to sabine.macneil@hoaxteadresearch.com (the email address I used to post here) the board’s software does not reject it! – Your email software may baulk, or if the domain exists the automated ‘postmaster’ might send a rejection response. Or it might just disappear into the ether.
Without a reply, you have nothing.
To be clear here, I am no fan of Boris, quite the reverse. Arcuri? Just another ridiculous character on the merry-go-round of so-called Influencers. I believe that elsewhere, attention was drawn to the ‘hormonal’ nature of her presentation in the first video you linked to EC?
Grants, funding and business support in this country most-often seems to go to scammers and empty barrels. The truth is that most burgeoning businesses (those that are likely to survive in the long-term) are dull workaday things underpinned by grey figures that simply stack up. They’re not something you can set a brass band to; thus of no interest to self-serving political types.
This was a circus. And there perhaps was Wesley, a small-time lowlife shyster, at the edge of the field, having snuck-in to flog painted balloons on a stick.
In a completely different and unrelated place, I saw a very credible author warn against ‘throwing the kitchen sink’ at Boris. A warning well-placed.
Its been pointed out before, but if you discredit even a worthy target with dubious claims there is a possibility of those things being debunked. And as they fall so might legitimate matters of concern. In fact, there is a school of thought that suggests that might be the very purpose of many a hoax; to cloud serious issues and cause them to collapse.
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Difficult to tell about the pic- could be faked or could be the Weasal popping into a snap at the last minute.
Of course these days it’s so much easier to inveigle yourself into the life of a “celebrity” via the internet and with bloody camera phones it devalues the whole point of having your snap taken with a famous face.
The only tiny flaw, if that’s what I can call it, is that Arcui was an unknown until recently and Weasel is not clever enough to foresee that she would become so very famous. At the time of this hackerhouse set-up she was very small time. The grant was pretty small as far as business goes and I reckon she set out to find enough lay-abouts ( I mean that kindly) to attend something somewhere (what on Earth does she or they do?..so difficult to work it out) and pretend there was a business with enough key words to bedazzle people while she pocketed most of the loot.
Wesley certainly fits that bill as a dill who would think he’s getting involved with an amazing new enterprise while she may have thought he’s got such a rough head and disheveled look that if she let him sit in a corner somewhere people may mistake him for a genius hacker rather than a low-life crim.
After all Weasly seems to believe he’s an enterprising genius (ref: see squatting on 100s acres of Spanish land and growing the UK’s entire Marijuana consumption) but he’s just another sad chancer. Could just be defending her now to give the impression he’s a close pal while as you infer, he had sod all to do with the set-up.
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Jaw.Drops.Floor.
EC is turning out to be, just like Anna Raccoon, one of Fleet’s Street’s better investigative journalists they never had. More fool them.
Whatever Weasel’s involvement, which sounds like it may be as EC pans it out, he has leaped to Mizz Arcuri’s defense which would indicate there is no ill-feeling between them. He’s rather desperate attempt to claim Boris had no involvement with the grant is quite silly but I reckon that’s more about maintaining his role as Manchester’s Pound Shop Citizen Smith whereby he could not possibly appear to be cohabiting with an Eton Tory.
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