John Mark Dougan, also known as BadVolf, is a former US Marine, and American police officer who became a pro-Russian hacker, conspiracy theorist and orchestrator of mass online disinformation campaigns.[1] Living in Russia since 2017, Dougan has repeatedly built up networks of disinformation websites attempting to influence western elections, and perceptions of western politicians however his schemes have repeatedly been exposed, and the fake websites he created connected to him, causing international condemnation of Russia.[2][3][4][5]
Dougan had a turbulent childhood in the United States, struggling at home and in school, bullied because of his Tourette’s syndrome. Encouraged by his stepfather, he began learning computer code at the age of 8, claiming that by the time he was 16 he knew a dozen different computer programming languages.[1] Dougan served in the US Marines from May 1996 to July 1998. Dougan's short service and lowly rank achieved were “indicative of the fact that the character of his service was incongruent with the Marine Corps’ expectations and standards,” service spokesperson Yvonne Carlock stated.[2]
After leaving the Marines, Dougan worked as a horse trader and then founded a database design company before becoming a police officer, serving as deputy sheriff in Palm Beach County, Florida.[6] Dougan worked at the sheriff’s office in Palm Beach from 2005 to 2008, in this time he faced 11 internal affairs investigations, and a jury awarded a fellow Palm Beach sheriff’s deputy a $275,000 settlement after it found that Dougan had pepper-sprayed and arrested the officer without cause. [2] Dougan was permanently dismissed from the police force in 2009 after sexual harassment allegations were made against Dougan from within the police force. Dougan would go on to claim he had been dismissed due to his 'whistleblowing'.[7]
Following his dismissal from the police, Dougan began a personal vendetta against the Sheriff's Department and the FBI, luring West Palm Beach Sheriff Ric Bradshaw into a trap, Dougan using a voice changer to pretend to be a woman, with Bradshaw admitting that he did not always follow the law.[8] Dougan also created a website called PBSOTalks, where he and others anonymously posted complaints and sensitive information about local officials in Florida. In 2016, after Dougan posted confidential data about thousands of police officers, federal agents and judges on the PBSOTalk site, the FBI and local police searched his home.[2]
Russia
In 2017, Dougan was indicted in the USA on 21 state charges of extortion and wiretapping.[9] By then, having disguised himself as a woman, Dougan had already fled, via Canada to Russia, where he had visited several times before apparently to visit women he had met online. [2][9] Dougan was already under surveillance by US authorities at the time of his reported first visit to Russia, in 2013, where he is reported as having met with Pavel Borodin, a confidant of Vladimir Putin.[9] After his visit to Russia, Dougan began to go by the alias BadVolf (БадВолф), a cover identity as a Russian hacker under which he published illegally tapped telephone calls and other sensitive data on the internet. Claiming persecution in the USA, Dougan was awarded political asylum in Russia in 2017.[2]
Since living in Russia, Dougan has made a number of sensationalist claims, commonly without any supporting evidence, including telling media in 2019 that he had compromising material (including sex tapes of famous people) that he claimed came from Jeffrey Epstein, who was arrested by the Palm Beach Police in 2006.[10][11] He claims to have been behind the cyberattack on the Democratic National Committee in July 2016, which resulted in numerous internal emails from the Democrats being published on WikiLeaks, although external sources have not verified this claim.[12][7]
In Russia, Dougan is said to have worked with the military intelligence agency GRU and propagandist Aleksandr Dugin, attempting to influence elections in Europe and the United States.[2] He was reportedly involved in the distribution of deepfakes and AI-generated videos to damage Kamala Harris in the 2024 United States presidential election.[13][2] In 2024, Dougan was directly connected to over 150 websites which spread pro-Kremlin propaganda, conspiracy theories and disinformation, with the websites disguised as local news and often containing AI-generated content.[4][9] In 2024 Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat exposed Dougan for having created a fake news website to make baseless claims of sexual impropriety against pro-Russian British journalist Graham Phillips, with Higgins speculating this was likely a personal vendetta from Dougan.[14] In 2025 Dougan created over 100 German-language AI-generated websites to try to influence the 2025 German federal election, and was again exposed for doing so.[3] Dougan was also linked with attempts to influence the 2025 Moldovan parliamentary election by orchestrating a disinformation campaign across social media, including circulating false claims such as pro-European Moldovan President Maia Sandu taking bribes, and (Sandu) having spent money to acquire sperm from Hollywood celebrities. When Dougan was confronted with allegations of his involvement in yet another disinformation campaign, he stated: “I have no idea what you’re talking about. Moldova? Where is that? I thought it was a fictitious country in one of those romance Hallmark movies…” [5]
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