Not to mention how he said he was "robbed". The apparent criminal stole from him and put his financial information up on the internet that's somehow not 100% accurate.. but it is... and they stole money by trying to make transactions even though they couldn't and now he has to pay for a lawyer to close and open a bank account and change his information with his autopay bills.
This is all part of the lie that he is likely building to, or at least referring to in order to offer his diehard supporters some plausible deniability when it comes to the leaks.
He's started to emphasize 3 points:
- He didn't catch the leaks for an unspecified amount of time (it's deliberately unspecified)
- Some kind of 'theft' happened that involved unauthorized charges
- The leaks were not leaks; the extent of whatever happened is vague and constantly expanding (meanwhile, we know it was just leaks)
When assembled, these pieces are meant to form a story where Phil's account was compromised
for the entirety of the timeframe exposed in the leaks, and that someone was
stealing from him at intervals of $16.51.
Basically, the narrative is that the leaks were real, but that the problematic charges were as a result of the account being compromised for an extended period of time and Phil somehow being unaware.
I don't know what's stopping him from just saying this. Maybe that he has never told a lie to his audience on this scale before and it crossing that line is giving him pause, or he sees it as too dangerous. Or it may be that he doesn't want to give any more than the vague deniability offered here because he knows that this is a difficult lie to stick to when it comes to details (for one, if that much money was being 'stolen' or that many attempted charges were getting blocked, there's absolutely no way he would not have known sooner). But every time he addresses this story, he throws in just a little more about these three points to imply more heavily that there is some elaborate plot at work.
I only remember one such Discord Server, from back in late 2017 that a fan made and tried to get Phil and the mods to endorse. Phil declined, said he'd never use Discord (lol), and then that particular server was swiftly taken over by former SOK lackeys like Kevan_VG LARPing as DSP fans.
Out of curiosity, and I'm sorry if you already mentioned this at some point, did Phil ever address with the mods using the Discord why he was publicly telling his audience for years that he had never used Discord and that there was no mod Discord? How did all the mods just fall into line with what Phil was saying and not even accidentally contradict him until the Discord leaks?
I'm always curious with stuff like this because when his mods turn up the day after something big like the leaks, does Phil say 'I need people to delete all mention of $16.51, and I'm going to say that all of this drama is because of SnowKarl', or 'Today I'm going to say that my earnings have always been public because the tip goal is visible, but you still have to ban anyone doing basic math in chat'? Because his moderators seem to immediately fall into lockstep on certain things without any apparent communication happening on stream.
