Dan Wootton and Martin Branning – The Proof

GB News star Dan Wootton twice used an identical password as the catfishing pseudonyms ‘Martin Branning’ and ‘Maria Joseph’ to subscribe to a movie-sharing website, Byline Times can reveal.

The presenter used the password along with the email addresses for his private web domain danwootton.com and also his official News of the World account. They were leaked and published on a publicly-available data breach directory in October 2018.

Alongside Wootton’s two email addresses revealed in a dump of log-in details for 743,280 users of the defunct film-indexing service ‘MyDVD.overhere.com’ were the email addresses Byline Times revealed ‘Branning’ and ‘Joseph’ had used to trick and bribe scores of men into sharing compromising sexual material over at least a 10-year period.

All four of the accounts used the same unusual eight-character password. To protect Wootton’s privacy, this newspaper is not publishing the password – which his new representatives today appeared to confirm was indeed used by the journalist.

Further analysis of the databases, which are openly available online, shows Wootton also used the same password for his LinkedIn and MySpace profiles alongside music and fitness-app sites between October 2016 and October 2018.

Byline Times commissioned analysis of the data by an eminent PhD specialist in mathematical prediction modelling. The expert said the chances of Wootton’s password randomly duplicating those of Branning and Joseph were “vanishingly small”.

He explained: “Assuming that a user can choose any eight-letter password using the 26 lower case, 26 upper case and 0-9, then approximately 218 trillion passwords could be formed. All this is assuming people choose passwords at random which is certainly not true. This could make the probability of the three same passwords much higher, however the probability would still be many millions to one.”*