10.
Subway Cipher
Your mum probably told you not to take gifts
from strangers when you were a kid.
But apparently reddit user Delverofsecrets
never got that particular message.
The redditor made a post on July 11th 2012
claiming that a homeless-looking man had given
him $50 with markings on it, as well as this
strangely coded piece of paper.
Fellow redditors soon found that it was a
Bifid Cipher, which is essentially a message
coded into a square.
It said “There's plenty more money to make.
Figure this out and prepare to meet: July
19, fifty sixth and sixth hot dog stand outside
rue57 cafe, ask for Mister Input”.
Soon after, Delverofsecrets received all kinds
of messages - some cryptic, some even personally
threatening him and his family.
Predictably, theories about what was going
on flooded the website - including some speculating
that it originated from a Department of Defense
employee or that the whole thing was an elaborate
marketing ploy for the Dark Knight Rises.
Eventually redditors met up in New York on
the agreed date but nothing really ever came
from it, except marketing allegations and
months of possibly wasted time.
9.
Post-it note mystery
Everyone forgets things sometimes.
Hell, you might have even forgotten to click
that subscribe button.
But sometimes there’s a little more to a
simple memory lapse than meets the eye.
Redditor Rbradbury1920 found that out for
himself in May 2015, when he started noticing
post-it notes appearing in his apartment.
They were pretty harmless things like reminders
to get groceries or save some documents, but
he had no recollection of writing them.
A few days in, he saw one that said “Our
landlord isn't letting me talk to you, but
it's important we do”.
That’s kind of creepy, and made him think
his Landlord was doing something pretty shady.
So Rbradbury1920 installed a webcam to see
just what the hell was going on, but upon
checking he found all of the footage deleted.
Understandably freaked out, he took to the
r/Legaladvice subreddit to ask if he had any
recourse.
But instead of advice on suing, a comment
from a user named Kakkerlak suggested that
he might be suffering from memory issues brought
on by Carbon Monoxide poisoning.
That assessment wasn’t just correct, it
prevented death.
The original poster took the advice and bought
a detector, only to learn that his apartment
had 100 parts per million of the deadly gas,
11 times the safe maximum.
8.
Strongsville Jane Doe
Back in February 1975, three kids in Strongsville,
Ohio found the body of an unidentified woman
who was missing a jaw and had been shot in
the head.
It went down as a cold case for over 40 years
until a redditor by the name of Callmeice
stumbled upon the Jane Doe’s cemetery records.
Callmeice enlisted the help of the Unsolved
Mysteries subreddit and the websleuths website
to get to the bottom of the case.
After obtaining autopsy data and pictures
of the bones, a forensic artist recreated
the face.
That artist recognized it as a possible match
for Linda Pagano, a woman who went missing
in 1974 after an argument with her stepfather,
Byron Claflin.
A lot of people suspected Claflin murdered
her but there was no real evidence to prove
it by the time he died in 1990, so this represented
a major break in the case.
Pagano’s brother Michael even called her
an “angel from heaven” for what she did.
As of August 2017, police believe they had
a tentative match, but extensive DNA testing
has yet to be completed so it’s not definitive.
7.
Reddit’s Stonehenge
Most things on Reddit are posted for that
sweet, sweet meaningless karma.
So it’s intriguing when something goes on
completely under the radar, especially when
it’s a bizarre code that to this day has
all-but gone uncracked.
That was the case in 2011 when a user by the
name of A858DE45F56D9BC9 started posting seemingly
random strings of numbers and letters to a
subreddit of the same name.
Eventually users created a subreddit to crack
the code, and some managed to decipher messages
like “Happy New Year 2001”, an ASCII Stonehenge,
and what appeared to be coordinates in North
Korea.
Speculation went wild of course, with everything
from social experiments to aliens to the internet
becoming sentient.
The subreddit would frequently close and reopen,
but one time the fun stopped when it just
posted the message “The A858 Project Has
Concluded.
You may unsubscribe.”
Even now, no one ever figured out the majority
of the code - so if you feel like wasting
months of your life, be my guest.
6.
Hit and Run
Expertise is crucial when it comes to solving
crimes.
Just knowing something obscure that other
people missed might be the difference between
putting a criminal behind bars or letting
them escape the law.
So it helps to have the people of the internet,
who are armed with pretty much every expertise
in the world.
In this case, it was the smallest possible
details of old cars.
Reddit user Meatheaded found this headlight
fragment after a witnessing a hit and run.
So he took to the Whatisthisthing subreddit
to find out, well, what the thing was.
Incredibly, they managed to figure out that
the fragment came exactly from a grey 1991
Cadillac Broughams just based on the image.
Using that lead, Meatheaded got in touch with
the police auto theft unit, where they were
actually able to pin a car of that description
to the scene and trace it back to a theft
conviction.
5.
Grateful Doe
The police only have so many resources.
So it makes sense that when a case goes cold,
they move on.
But luckily we have the internet, whose obsession
with even the smallest tidbits can crack even
seemingly hopeless investigations wide open.
That was the case for the Grateful Doe, an
anonymous car crash victim found in 1995 and
named after the ticket stub for a Grateful
Dead concert found in his pocket.
Reddit’s cold-case enthusiasts took an intense
interest in the case.
Using evidence from the time along with reconstructions
of the mystery man’s face, Redditors spread
the word online and managed to reach the attention
of some people who recognized it.
That lead came up with the name of Jason Callahan,
a 19-year-old from Virginia who went missing
in 1995 but was never reported, since he recently
left to follow the Grateful Dead on tour.
11 months after that identification, DNA testing
showed that it was indeed Callahan.
While a tragic loss, it went to show just
what Reddit is capable of when it uses its
powers for good.
4.
‘Box of Crazy’
People have thrown out some weird things over
the years.
Trash men have reported finding brand new
clothes, taxidermy animals and even a shiny
Charizard, which if you didn’t know, is
worth as much as $50,000.
But the so-called ‘box of crazy’ blows
all of them away.
One redditor by the name of TramstopDan claimed
to find this rather bizarre box in some bins
near him, posting pictures to the whatsinthisthing
subreddit, as well as4chan’s /x/ board.
It contained some pretty damn strange contents,
like maps, designs, detailed descriptions
and sketches of aliens and, uh, a train with
a puma for a face.
Some redditors got a little bit obsessed with
the contents, even starting their own subreddit
to theorize and figure out what the hell was
going on.
It’s thought the materials belonged to someone
called Daniel Christiansen, a Danish immigrant
who’s now believed deceased.
Based on the sketches, Christiansen became
obsessed with the idea that the stories of
the bible depicted ancient encounters with
extraterrestrials.
Sounds more like one for Mulder and Scully
than Reddit and 4Chan if you ask me.
3.
Surveillance Device
Have you ever felt like someone’s keeping
tabs on you?
It’s probably paranoia, right?
Well, maybe not.
If this case is anything to go by, your house
just might be bugged.
Redditor Shadybusiness15 posted on the Reddit
Bureau of Investigation saying that he “violently
blew a fuse” and found this device in his
extension cord.
Reddit got to work and discovered that the
tech was a Global Positioning System tracker
with microphone and a cellular uplink, hence
the SIM card.
That means it was most likely a covert surveillance
device.
Some redditors suggested it was the government,
and others that it was the poster’s parents
because of the consumer-level parts.
Shadybusiness15 later posted an update after
the original post blew up, explaining that
he put the the SIM card in a phone to see
what might happen.
And that was the last we heard.
Who knows, it could be happening to anyone,
though I don’t suggest you go unscrewing
all your electronics in search of microphones.
2.
Boston Bombing
There’s a lot to be said for the power of
sleuths on the internet.
Where the police and the justice system fails,
Redditors succeed… or they don’t.
In fact, sometimes they fail badly enough
to make national headlines.
Back in 2012, a bomb was detonated near the
finish line of the Boston Marathon - the blast
3 and injuring 280, going down as a modern
American tragedy.
Reddit took a particular interest in the attack,
so as with other cases, users scoured the
evidence en masse to try and find something
the authorities missed - and they thought
they had it with Sunil Tripathi, a 22-year-old
student who went missing a month before the
bombing.
Users made detailed posts analyzing footage
feeds to find small hints suggesting the involvements
of Tripathi along with several others, which
some news outlets mistakenly picked up.
That caused the student’s family to suffer
a torrent of online abuse for their son’s
supposed involvement, even as far as death
threats.
But soon after the bombing, the authorities
apprehended what turned out to be real culprits
- leading to an apology from Reddit and a
public discussion over the ethics of crowdsourced
crime fighting.
1.
Frame 394
You might have heard of the Walter Scott shooting
in 2015.
The case became an infamous civil rights rallying
call over police brutality that got Michael
Slager, the police officer involved, fired
and eventually imprisoned after pleading guilty
in 2017.
After stopping Scott for a broken tail light,
Slager shot him multiple times from behind,
supposedly in fear of his life.
That enraged civil rights activists and fueled
the Black Lives Matter movement, especially
after video of the act that appeared to conflict
with police statement was posted online.
In the furor immediately after the shooting,
Redditor and cinematographer Daniel Voshart
stabilized the shaky footage to better analyze
what was going on.
The process even had a documentary made about
it in 2016.
In that documentary, Voshart hit a moral quandary
when deeper analysis of the finer details
started to show a more difficult picture than
he originally saw.
Voshart’s journey was affecting enough to
have an Oscar-shortlisted documentary made
about it, which is absolutely worth watching.
