Shamed residents of Canada’s winter sports capital, Vancouver, have taken to social media in a bid to name and shame rioters responsible for an orgy of violence in the aftermath of a recent ice hockey match.

In what has been described as internet “vigilantism” concerned citizens have been going online to identify alleged rioters by posting images, names and addresses of those involved – work which has already seen several vandals sacked from their jobs.

Hosted on websites such as Canuck Riots 2011 and Facebook groups the campaign has been enormously successful at unmasking several miscreants, including the unfortunate Robert Snelgrove who has found himself lurch from offender to victim in the space of two weeks.

Snelgrove told the Vancouver Sun: “I was called a loser, a thief; they were going to go to the police and turn me in. I got dozens and dozens of messages … it was downright hateful. Some people said, like, 'go die', 'go jump off a bridge', and then there's a lot of homophobic comments.”

In a phenomenon known as “crowdsourced justice” with Alexandra Samuel, social media director at Emily Carr University, telling the guardian: “The way that the internet works in creating models that are reproduced, well, it just makes you shudder what it could be used for.

“When you have people saying you could have something that runs in parallel with the justice system then it leads to the question – why would you need a justice system? The shaming and firing – it is medieval.”