'HE WILL NOT STOP': Serial harasser has Kelowna family in crosshairs

'IT'S LIKE A DRUNK IN A BAR FIGHT... THIS GUY TRIES TO DESTROY EVERYBODY. THIS GUY DOES SO MUCH DAMAGE.' CONTENT ADVISORY A BC man with a lengthy history of harassment, defamation, and extortion, has set his sights on a well-known Kelowna orcharding family. Daryl Grant MacAskill began his campaign against the Sandher family early in the spring and has since published dozens of blog posts making a number of unfounded allegations about them. While MacAskill’s poorly written and rather confusing blogs are easy to dismiss as nonsense, his writings have left a trail of destruction behind him, and lead to harassment charges, extortion, and jail time — however none of it has stopped him. Writing under the name Ace Ventura, MacAskill's website Gangsterism Out makes a whole host of entirely unproven allegations about the family behind Sandher Fruit Packers, with conspiracy theories linking the family to Mexican drug cartels and Russian bankers, for example. "It doesn’t feel good," Sandher Fruit Packer president Gurtaj Sandher told iNFOnews.ca in an email when asked how it felt to be MacAskill's latest target. “The malicious accusations from Mr. MacAskill, or 'Ace Ventura' as he prefers, are of course deeply racist and entirely untrue. But his posts are also reckless and put the safety of our family at risk." The Sandhers have already sent him a cease and desist letter, and his response to it speaks volumes. "Unless I receive a Statement of Civil claim you may fuck off. Clear?” MacAskill widely shared this information with the media around BC. When pressed for the goods, he claims to have information from the authorities that he can’t yet share because it will interfere with police investigations. It’s all very cloak and dagger but lacks any substance. 'A THREAT' So who is Daryl Grant MacAskill, aka Ace Ventura? Whoever you imagine would be behind thousands of blog posts and emails, online harassment, cyber bullying and extortion — that isn't him. Vancouver financier Ralph van der Walle sat next to him multiple times in court. MacAskill is 62 years old and described as looking rather dishevelled. But looks can be deceiving. "You have no idea how absolutely seriously a threat this guy is," van der Walle told iNFOnews.ca. It's been almost four years since the investment company executive became aware of MacAskill. "One of our investors phoned up and he said, 'My wife just Googled your personal name, you never believe what's out there,'" he said. What van der Walle found was a highly choreographed website containing an endless amount of information about his company, Canada Easy Investment Store, and its investments. While there was lots of information, most of it simply wasn't true. "(He) makes it look really legit... he links it to all sorts of what he calls scientific research, and then he intersperses this with, 'well, this must be a scam,'" van der Walle said. MacAskill dug deep into van der Walle's corporate history and without a single shred of evidence, told everyone it was a massive scam. "He finds companies that (we) used 20 years ago, but no longer used... and he puts that up there saying, 'Well, what happened to this company? What happened to (that) company?'" Setting up the website Dr. Stoxxman, MacAskill used the terms, "dodgy real estate projects" and "scam real estate projects" along with "securities scams" in his writing. van der Walle said it became a huge issue. "We deal with private investors. People do their research." van der Walle went to see his lawyer. 'PAY ME OFF' Fast forward two years and BC Supreme Court Justice Paul Riley found MacAskill, with malicious intent, defamed van der Walle and his firm. "Having initially cast Mr. van der Walle and his company as fraudsters, subsequently seized upon any particular fact or event that he did not understand, and, without any effort to ascertain the truth, twisted that fact into a basis for advancing further allegations of impropriety," Justice Riley said in a scathing decision issued February 2022. The Justice said that MacAskill had taken a "kernel" of information that might be true and "twisted it" without any effort to investigate or understand it. MacAskill was found to have used the litigation as a means of "pressuring or extorting" van der Walle to pay him to go away. “Mr. MacAskill made baseless allegations of fraud and dishonesty and then demanded money to withdraw them and end the court case,” the Justice said. MacAskill had said for $5,000 he would remove the material. He later used a racist slur referring to van der Walle's lawyer of East Indian origin and upped the figure to $10,000. van der Walle refers to the language as "pure hate speech." The number jumped to $40,000 and at one point MacAskill said he'd better see some money or he'd run up the executive's legal bills to $100,000. "Pay me off," said one email. "We didn't do anything wrong. I'm not going to pay somebody money," van Der Walle said. However, he did say MacAskill told his lawyer others had paid for content to be removed. One of the companies iNFOnews.ca contacted said they ended up paying him off with a cheque for an amount somewhere under $10,000. 2,300 ACCOUNTS On finding that MacAskill defamed van der Walle, Justice Riley ordered him to pay $190,000 in damages, saying he hoped it would deter MacAskill from his “manipulative, harmful, and socially destructive behaviour in the future.” He was also told to remove the blogs and put a permanent restraining order on him preventing him from writing anything about the firm in the future. However, MacAskill breached previous orders and didn't listen this time either. In August 2023 Justice Baljinder Kaur Girn sentenced him to 15 days in jail after finding him guilty of contempt of court. By the end, van der Walle reckons he lost $500,000 in investments. That doesn't include legal and other fees. He hasn't seen a penny of the $190,000 he’s owed. It appears MacAskill didn't learn from his time in prison because six months later he started his campaign against the Sandhers. Just like van der Walle, Sandher doesn't know why he's chosen his family as his latest target, but said he has targeted several South Asian business owners with "hate racism, and lies." In an early court ruling Justice Riley ordered MacAskill to cut the "racist, sexist, and disparaging remarks.” So why has MacAskill picked the Sandhers? It's a question van der Walle can't answer, but he does have some advice: "It's very, very dangerous, what he does. Don't underestimate him." MacAskill has a checkered history and it's maybe of no surprise that MacAskill wasn't put off by his time stint in jail, because he's been there before. According to the Vancouver Province, in 1995 MacAskill and his business partner, Larry Douglas Buss, were convicted of tax fraud and MacAskill was sentenced to six months in jail for his part in the scam whereby they set up fictitious companies and then made false GST claims. They garnered $34,000 from Revenue Canada between 1991 and 1993 before being caught. A few years out of prison and now armed with the Internet, in 2000 MacAskill set up an account with the online investor website stockhouse.com. The company says its members are "smart, affluent investors actively researching stock and looking for new opportunities." MacAskill took a liking to it and in the decade before stockhouse.com took him to court to get him banned from the site, he'd set up 2,300 accounts. Court documents say that in one day alone MacAskill created 184 separate accounts, as a way to circumvent the blocking of his accounts. He used various aliases including "stoxxman", "Jeff Drakes", "Stoxxman_Prejudice" and the name he still uses today, "Ace Ventura." It's not completely clear what MacAskill did with so many accounts but the court documents say he posted defamatory and threatening content, promoted his commercial blogs and posted inaccurate information. "(He) attempted to interfere with the proper working of the Stockhouse website... (and) imposed a large load on the infrastructure of the Stockhouse website including (its) time and resources," a court filing from 2012 says. In MacAskill's response to the suit, he said Stockhouse was censoring him for publishing "truthful facts of public companies." The judge didn't buy it and ordered him to never go near the website again. When reached for comment, business journalist and co-founder of the site's Ticker Trax, Thom Calandra, refused to comment. "Good luck," was all Calandra said in an emailed reply. Now kicked off the site, it appears that MacAskill continued his campaign of harassment in one form or another. In 2016 he was charged with criminally harassing a female Vancouver lawyer. Details of what took place aren't known, and the lawyer didn't respond to our request for comment. The criminal harassment charge was later stayed and instead, the lawyer obtained a restraining order against MacAskill. He was charged again for breaching it, but that was also stayed. A quick look at court records shows MacAskill has had a slew of cases in BC courts, from multiple filings in the small claims court to bankruptcy. 'IT HAS ENCOURAGED OTHERS TO SPREAD SUCH LIES' The Sandhers might have just been easy fodder having had a rough go with authorities and accompanying news coverage of late. In 2023, WorkSafeBC fined the family $40,000 for failing to have a seat belt https://infotel.ca/newsitem/kelowna-orchard-fined-40000-for-not-having-a-seatbelt-on-a-tractor/it97211 on one of their tractors. If the since-deleted Facebook comments were anything to go off, the public's scorn was for the government inspectors, not the farming family. And last month WorkSafeBC dished out another $42,000 https://infotel.ca/inwheels/kelowna-orchard-fined-42k-for-broken-seatbelts-in-work-van/it106003 in fines for not having enough seatbelts on a bus used to transport farm workers. Bizarrely, just recently former Kelowna-Mission BC Conservative Alexandra Wright https://infotel.ca/newsitem/kelowna-mission-candidate-believes-she-was-removed-due-to-conflict-with-fruit-packer/it106142  blamed her removal from the party on a beef she has with the Sandhers who she accuses of polluting her farm. The Sandhers had hosted the BC Conservatives and the party's reason for dropping her were vague, and somewhere along the line she connected the two. Gurtaj Sandher’s social media is also an easy target for the blogger to go after and misrepresent. Pictures show expensive cars and foreign holidays, portraying an image of an international hotshot, not a Southern Interior farmer. More significantly, the Sandher Fruit Packers plant in the Ellison area near Kelowna Airport has a history of environmental infractions https://infotel.ca/newsitem/heres-whats-been-leaching-from-a-kelowna-fruit-packing-plant-for-years/it103220 for discharging wastewater used to wash fruit during the packing process. It's been an ongoing issue since at least 2019 that led to the Ministry of Environment issuing $110,000 worth of fines https://infotel.ca/inwine/fruit-packers-near-kelowna-fined-another-78000/it104343  since 2022. While the infraction is obviously serious enough to levy six figures in fines it's worth noting that it appears to be the lack of a permit that the Ministry is opposed to rather than the discharge itself, and the issue has been very public. Some neighbours have complained about the wastewater, which they say smells like sewage, and an online petition https://infotel.ca/newsitem/opposition-to-pollution-from-kelowna-fruit-packing-plant-growing/it103840  has been set up urging the Ministry not to issue a permit to allow it to continue. MacAskill's blog contains all this information – which was widely reported by iNFOnews.ca and other media outlets – before it veers off into conspiracy theories. For the Sandhers, he's damaging their reputation. "MacAskill has contacted our customers, partners and neighbours to spread his poorly written conspiracy theories and hate," Gurtaj said. "And unfortunately, it has encouraged others to spread such lies." Why intelligent normal people would spread such nonsense is hard to say, but sadly such blogs leave people who really should know better wondering if there's anything in the lies. Gurtaj said the family has been left with no choice but to take legal action. While the Sandhers likely found MacAskill relatively easily, through previous court action, for van der Walle, taking legal action was more difficult — he had to find him, first. van der Walle hired a private investigator with a "substantial fee" who tracked him down online — there is no contact information on his blogs. In a sting operation of sorts, an email was sent to MacAskill saying they liked the blog and wanted to write for it. He took the bait and replied. Now they had his email so they could serve him court documents, although only after going to court to get permission to do so. 'AN ABSOLUTE FORTUNE IN LEGAL FEES JUST TO STOP THIS' van der Walle assumed MacAskill was a sophisticated fraudster, someone who could clearly navigate their way through the worlds of finance and business to cause so much damage. After a court appearance, a private investigator followed him. van der Walle assumed he was a fairly sophisticated scammer, but he didn't head to a swanky downtown Vancouver apartment or upmarket restaurant, he went to Starbucks. After a few hours using the free Wifi on his laptop, he went to the Skytrain station. There, he was seen trying to find change left in the machines before jumping on the Skytrain for a bit and getting off in Burnaby. He disappeared into a tent encampment. "He's homeless," van der Walle said. And he clearly has some severe mental health issues. The address on all his court documentation has been for a mental health drop-in centre in downtown Vancouver. In 2015, MacAskill was arrested for urinating outside a Skytrain station in Burnaby and arrested. Court documents say transit police realized they were dealing with someone with mental health issues and took him to hospital. In a separate court filing from 2008, MacAskill tried to sue the Hudson's Bay Company and others after he was arrested for shoplifting a chocolate milk drink. He relays a peculiar story in the document saying he wasn't allowed to go to the bathroom while being detained so he chose to bang his head against the wall until he was unconscious in the hope the RCMP would arrive. It did work — he woke in a pool of urine with an RCMP officer standing over him. Other court documents refer to MacAskill being a carpenter from time to time, and hanging around in cafes on Commercial Drive in Vancouver. There’s no clear documentation of MacAskill’s mental illness, but van der Walle said a psychologist friend who once met MacAskill said he was clearly delusional and needed treatment. On the other hand, his offer to remove posts for money points to more of a criminal enterprise than a person who genuinely believes what they are writing is true. MacAskill doesn’t appear to have profited greatly from his harassment but van der Walle says he's still incredibly damaging. "It took me thousands of hours and an absolute fortune in legal fees just to stop this," he said. "He went after our buyers, he went after our finance guys, he went after the compliance people... the realtors." MacAskill could send a single person more than a hundred emails in a day. "I have a mutual fund trust out there with hundreds of investors. We have a development company, we have an investment company, (and) this guy was trying to take it all down, single-handedly," he said. van der Walle said he contacted all the internet companies involved and did get things taken down, but they soon popped up again. "It's like a drunk in a bar fight... this guy tries to destroy everybody," he said. "This guy does so much damage... it was almost a full-time job just trying to counter what this guy was doing." For Gurtaj's family, he says they'd rather focus on the challenges facing the fruit industry but won't let the smears go unchallenged. "More than anything, I want our employees and family to feel safe. These days, even ridiculous accusations like these can quickly spread and put people at risk," Gurtaj said. Because MacAskill’s campaigns of harassment are so severe, iNFOnews.ca took the unusual step not to contact him for a response, or to put a byline on this story. van der Walle offers one piece of advice. "If you're not on top of this right away and beat this guy down with the biggest weapons you've got, he can destroy your business and he will," he said. "He will not stop." To contact a reporter for this story, email Ben Bulmer mailto:bbulmer@infonews.ca  or call (250) 309-5230 or email the editor mailto:news@infonews.ca . You can also submit photos, videos or news tips to the newsroom mailto:tips@infonews.ca  and be entered to win a monthly prize draw. 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