Nothing gets the Reddit community excited more than a good old-fashioned witch hunt, and the members of the social sharing site recently managed to get it right for once, leading to the arrest and conviction of a vandal who had been defacing multiple US national parks with graffiti.

According to The Guardian, 23-year-old Casey Nocket has received two years probation and 200 hours of community service for vandalizing rock formations in various national parks around the US, including Death Valley and Yosemite in California, as well as Zion in Utah. Nocket has also been banned from all national parks and federally regulated land, which accounts for roughly 20 percent of the entire country.

Images of Nocket’s graffiti had been circulating on the internet through social media and various camping and hiking forums before finally landing on Reddit, where a number of users worked to discover who was behind the vandalism. Then in October 2014, one redditor on the /r/Yosemite subreddit shared images of the graffiti that Nocket had posted on her own Instagram account, where she admitted in one post, “I know, I’m a bad person.”

Steve Yu, an investigator for the National Park Service, responded to the Reddit thread asking for more information from the user who discovered Nocket’s social media accounts, and the case against her took off from there.

While Reddit’s investigating prowess actually paid off this time, the community does not have the best track record when it comes to internet detective work. The most infamous example occurred after the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013, when a number of redditors incorrectly concluded that they had discovered the real culprits after scrolling through a number of crowdsourced images from the event. This led to the unjustified harassment of several innocent people who had been present at the bombing.

“In this age of instant reporting, tweets and blogs, there’s a temptation to latch on to any bit of information, sometimes to jump to conclusions,” President Obama said at the time. “But when a tragedy like this happens, with public safety at risk and the stakes so high, it’s important we do this right.”

Reddit’s amateur investigation of the Boston Marathon bombing has since become the go-to example of why redditors should generally leave the detective work up to the professionals.

Photo by hans s