unforum

[Ladybird]

[Possible Trailhead] Recruitment Drive

[kira1000]

I would be VERY careful with this site, a friend of mine did a check of the page source and found that it checks your social media profiles and gets your IP address. I suggest hanging back rather then jumping in and signing up to who-knows-what.

[Ladybird]

God, that's creepy. I guess it doesn't matter too much given that I used a fake name. Still scary, though.

I'm actually now genuinely creeped out because, LIS, normally, for most things, when my IP address gets located by a website (say, Google,) it resolves to the next town over, not the town I actually live in. In this case, however, the site knew the exact town I live in, which scares me more than a little.

They're more accurate than Google? Maybe there's some expensive program out there that's more accurate when checking IP addresses. That would explain it.

What worries me is that they, in theory, might have gotten the information some other way. It can't be through my social networking profiles, because those all a) use a fake name, and b) don't list my small hometown as my town, but a bigger city nearby.

Of course, it's possible that the whole thing is my friends fucking with me and each other. But the friends that have been circulating this link are INTERNET friends and, beyond my IP address, shouldn't know where I live. Like, literally - I don't give out personal information on the internet. There's ONE person who, years ago, I gave my address, but nobody's heard from him in years. The only other person I haven't met who knows my address is the guy I'm taking a correspondence course from.

Could you please explain a little bit about how the site "checks social media?"

[kira1000]

can not tell you all that much, all I can assume (not too good at reading scripts I admit) is that it takes the name you give and searches for it on social media sites and uses the info from said site to gather where you live (if you list your real location on FB or Twitter it could find it and use that as your location).

[Crescent]

accessing public info

[Ladybird]

Re: accessing public info

[Ladybird]

Okay, I talked to my friend, and he found this link on 4chan, so yeah... very suspicious, and not in the fun "oh I wanna play this" kind of way.

It vaguely reminds me of an earlier thing he told me about, from (I think) 2012. It was called Cult of Echidna, and they had an email address you were supposed to email in order to be recruited.

It looked promising (there was all this stuff about "giving birth to monsters," so I thought it might be Greek mythology-based, which is refreshing when compared to slendy-stuff).

I sent the email from my regular email address and they wrote bad admonishing me for using my real name, and demanding I register a new email address to contact them. I did that (though I thought it was weird). Then, they asked my gender, and I said I was female.

After that, I was paired with someone calling herself Medusa who explained that the first test for girls joining their group was called "honest hearts," and that they needed a picture of me topless in order to examine my "heart chakra."

I sardonically asked them whether guys had to undergo this (or perhaps if guys had to have their "root chakra" examined - makes sense, right?), but they explained that guys have to "prove their loyalty in other ways" and that "girls are trusted quickly when they undergo this test - they have it easy. guys have to work hard for it."

I just stopped responding after that, and needless to say, didn't send them anything. Whatever it was, it wasn't good, and it probably wasn't an ARG. If it was an ARG, the PMs were complete morons. I kept an eye for threads about it on 4chan, but there were none aside from people asking "Is this still going on? Can I get involved?"

My best guess at the time was that it was some pervert trying to get topless pics. Either that or some kind of trolling plan for /x/, to gather the pics and then post them, saying "Aren't /x/enophiles dumb to fall for this?"

My third guess was that it was a very real, and very messed up, "occult" organization, probably as close to an actual cult that you can get on the internet, given that they were sexually exploiting people from the get-go.