The Internet's Deepest Mysteries

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Internet Mysteries – Fact or Fiction?

Lamantita

Lamantita was the name of a Reddit user from Argentina. I’m not sure why he chose the name, which translates in English to “the blanket,” but I choose to believe it was because he was a huge Michael Jackson fan. In 2004, Lamantita posted about wanting to enter Villa 31, a notorious Argentinian slum, to interview people and take a tour of soup kitchens and such. He was known to work for some sort of production company in an extremely limited capacity, so perhaps he thought this project could be his big break.

Redditors from the area warned him vehemently not to enter the slum without a local guide, and that even then it was a terrible idea. The Argentinian slums are extremely dangerous places for outsiders. They are rife with the sorts of illegal activities you would expect in a slum in any nation, but they are also set up like mazes to make escape impossible for anyone who is not familiar with the area. These areas are so dangerous, the police don’t even bother to enter them.

Lamantita posted that he had found a guide who was going to take him on a tour of the area, but this was the last post he ever made. The first thought was that this was just a hoax from a throwaway account, but the account was over 6 months old with posts on a variety of subjects. He posted everything from “where can I watch the Mayweather fight on Saturday” to “Fuck you, USA, Osama’s not dead.” This is Argentina, so perhaps he thought he saw Osama palling around with Hitler and all his Nazi buddies, or maybe Lamantita was just an unstable individual.

Either way, if this was a fake account, it would have shown an immense amount of dedication, and it is believed that the user was genuine. So if we assume that he was real, what happened?

The most obvious answer was that, against the advice of literally everyone, Lamantita went to Villa 31 and was murdered. There was no report of the crime, but there may not have been a body to find either. Locals love to joke on Reddit that he was chopped up and fed to dogs (hilarious, guys), but whether that was the case or not, with the police unwilling to enter Villa 31 there’s no way to even know for sure what happened to him. Is he dead?

Was he conscripted into slavery? Did he chicken out and abandon Reddit so as not to have to publicly reveal his shame? Or maybe the CIA got to him for trying to reveal the truth about Bin Laden.

It’s been over 7 years since Lamantita’s disappearance, so we are unlikely to ever get an answer. I don’t like to assume the worst, though in this case it seems the most plausible explanation of what happened. But what do you think, Simon? Where do you think Lamantita is now, or do you think he never existed at all? You’ve made a lot of videos across your channels, so did I pick a mystery from Argentinian Reddit because I was confident you would not have known about it to try to trick you into thinking it was fake? Or would that be too obvious so instead I wrote a fictional story and chose a remote setting to make you think it was real?

Iscariot.com

This is another story that dates back to the days of Usenet news groups. One day, an anonymous user on alt.pl.internet posted about the existence of a strange website, Iscariot.com. The landing page for the website didn’t seem unusual, as it was just an empty page requesting login information.

Okay fine, so it was a private site that didn’t want anyone in. Most people would assume they weren’t invited and leave, but the Usenet poster had decided to dig a little deeper. By examining the source code of the website, they were able to determine that behind this login page was an amount of data that would have been unfathomable in the late 90’s.

We’re talking files upwards of 40 gigabytes each, and a server containing a total of multiple terabytes of data. This represented not only a massive amount of data being hidden, but an exorbitant cost to host such a website. Not just a financial cost, either.

The amount of time required to upload that amount of data at 1990’s speeds, even if they had a dedicated T1 line, was absolutely staggering. People were immediately intrigued, and of course the first step was to break in.

But that’s where things actually got stranger. No one could break into this website. The methods of hacking in the 1990s weren’t as sophisticated as they are now, but the security was even less sophisticated. Somehow, Iscariot was resistant to these attacks.

They even tried a coordinated attempt to brute force their way through the login screen. It’s a similar principle to how a DDoS, or distributed denial of service, attack works in present day, so even if they didn’t get inside they should have at least taken the site offline for a period of time. Normal websites back then were not meant to withstand multiple users attempting millions of passwords, but Iscariot did not falter.

Naturally, speculation became rampant. Between the site’s massive amount of data, seemingly impenetrable security, and rather unusual name, people’s imaginations ran wild. If you are not familiar with the name Iscariot, it was the second name of apostle and ultimate betrayer of Jesus, Judas Iscariot.

The rumors ranged from the benign to the truly sinister, until a user by the name of “Personal Jesus,” most likely a new account created specifically for this occasion and a reference to the 1989 Depeche Mode song of the same name, claimed to have broken into the site. His version of events was that the website was a complete digital vault of the Vatican’s secret archive, but that when he tried to download a file labeled as the complete Gospel of Mary Magdalene, a document of which only fragments remain and there is no consensus among scholars on which Mary the Gospel is even written by, that the site went offline. If you think this person’s account sounds like total bullshit, I am inclined to agree.

When members of the Usenet group went to check, the site was offline, and it was never to return, but “Jesus” probably saw the site was already offline and then concocted the most interesting story he could think of to get people’s attention and win some internet points. For those of you that spend a lot of time arguing on Twitter or Reddit, this is a friendly reminder that your internet points are not redeemable anywhere, including the internet.

A much more reasonable theory was that this was a major piracy hub. If it was housing a digital warehouse of thousands of CD’s, DVD’s, and games, suddenly the multiple terabyte storage space starts to make sense, as does the need for such security. This also predated most file sharing programs, and while Metallica had yet to launch their lawsuit against Napster, the program was already under heavy scrutiny for illegal activity.

Having a single source for direct downloads that was kept as far out of the public eye as possible would be a much safer means for these early digital pirates to store their precious booty. Unfortunately, their site had garnered far more attention than it was ever intended to, so if this theory is correct then they likely pulled the plug on the operation in fear that the FBI would catch wind of Isacriot’s viral status and investigate the rumours.

So was Iscariot.com a storage space for online pirates, a Vatican digital archive, or something else entirely? And why did they choose such a uniquely recognizable and intriguing name for their top secret website? You know where I stand on the former and I don’t really have a guess on the latter, but what do you think, Simon? And more importantly, did this website ever exist at all?

Meridian 59

This mystery takes us all the way back to January, 1997 shortly after the release of the world’s first 3D Graphical MMORPG, Meridian 59. The game was published by 3DO, and one of the developers was John Hanke, a man who went on to codevelop Google Earth and Pokemon Go. The game has the typical high fantasy setting you would expect from an MMO, the sort of shit that bores Simon to tears.

The one truly unique thing about Meridian, however, is that it doesn’t use a class or level system like you find in most RPGs or fantasy games. You could increase your different skills and character attributes by performing different actions in the game, and there didn’t seem to be a limit to how powerful a character could become. The only limitations were how much time you wanted to spend playing and how much you could actually accomplish playing an MMO on dialup.

The other interesting thing about this game was that it was particularly PvP focused. PvP was a very small part of early MMOs, and mostly a shitty thing to do. High level Everquest players would camp around the starting town and just murder all the new players when they tried to leave for the first time. That’s not the sort of behaviour you want to encourage, so Meridian had a player-run justice system to try to keep this type of douchebaggery in check.

But with no upper limit on how powerful a character can become, how do you keep the most powerful player in the game in check?

Enter the very creatively named, definitely not a 15 year old edgelord, “Death Gun.” Death Gun boasted that he had become so powerful, that if he killed someone in the game they would die in real life. In the context of a game being played safely from the privacy of your own home on a computer that is in no way able to cause physical harm to you, it was utterly ridiculous. Players ignored it as some braggart kid that really, really needed to get out of his parents’ basement and see the sun again.

Enraged, Death Gun killed a player in the game, and that player immediately disconnected, never to be heard from again. Sure, the player probably just rage quit, or was in on the gag the whole time, but it was still pretty eerie to the people playing. At least at first it was. They quickly came to the same conclusion I just did, and then they were over it.

So the next day, Death Gun struck again. This time he targeted a higher level player, one no one would think just quit the game out of anger, and the same thing happened. An IRL friend of the fallen player disconnected as well to call and see why his friend had logged off, but there was no answer. Later that night, when his parents returned home from work, the 17 year old was found dead at his keyboard. In total, Death Gun would claim seven victims before disappearing forever.

Before you start saying how ridiculous this sounds, because it does, I’m not proposing anything magical here. Obviously, the players weren’t really being killed by the video game, and neither the police nor anyone else involved gave that notion any credence from the beginning. It didn’t take long for the police to figure out that Death Gun was merely the accomplice, and the real murderer had been inside the homes of each of the victims.

These were the days before programs like Ventrilo or TeamSpeak, so there was no audio evidence at the time of the murders. Whoever the killer was, they were efficient. Not a professional, but definitely someone who had given the murders a lot of thought.

There was minimal forensic evidence, and there were no fingerprints, DNA, or murder weapons left at the scenes. The “Death Gun” account was found to have been made using a fraudulent credit card, and the user masked their IP well enough that 1997 era detectives did not know how to track the real location.

The how is not the mystery here, and I would never have insulted your intelligence by proposing that maybe, just maybe, a character in a video game was able to kill someone in the real world via a dialup modem. But there is still much that remains unknown about this case. What are the identities of the real killers? All of the victims were within 100 miles of the original murder, so were these targeted assassinations of individuals because of some sort of grudge, or murders of geographic convenience? What happened to the credit score of the poor woman whose identity was stolen to apply for that fake credit card? And Simon, did these unsolved murders even take place?

The College Dorm Power Strip

For those that attend, college is almost always an unforgettable experience. The friends, the parties, the Youtube videos about how you don’t care about school even though your parents bribed your way in. Imagine you’re on your computer in your college dorm one night, definitely not browsing OnlyFans, when suddenly you hear a crackle, quickly followed by a loud bang. The computer screen flickers off, and you hear the spinning of the hard drive slow, until silence.

Maintenance tells you that there was a power surge, and a fuse has blown. It will take two hours to fix. You get off the phone and notice the plug to your iMac is charred and damaged. With all this time to kill, and too much of a broke college student to be able to afford more loot boxes in Raid: Shadow Legends, you decide to open up your power strip and see the extent of the damage.

Inside the power strip, you see a circuit board that doesn’t look like it belongs. Attached is a SIM card, and some other metal component you don’t recognize. You snap a bunch of pictures on your phone, and start posting them to Reddit on r/WhatIsThisThing, because you would very much like to know what is this thing. The answers come back immediately, and you are informed it is a GPS tracker and microphone with a cellular uplink.

In short, your power strip was bugged. This sounds a bit farfetched, but for Redditor “shadybusiness15,” a not at all suspicious username, this was his new reality.

By all accounts, Shady was a regular university student in the United Kingdom who had no logical reason, at least none he would disclose, why anyone would be bugging his room. An investigation into the SIM card yielded little useful information. The cell company unsurprisingly wanted a subpoena in order to give up information, and Shady did not want to go to the police.

The Reddit Bureau of Investigation (Yes, that is a real subreddit) also was able to identify that this was professionally done. There were too many small wires and the soldering was too professional, probably done by machine, for this to have been a haphazard prank. The bug could not have been installed into the power strip on location, it had to have already been there.

So where did the power strip come from? Shady assumed he took it from his parents’ house. One of his first instincts was that this was the work of helicopter parents who just couldn’t leave well enough alone, but he wanted to investigate further.

He put the SIM card into his phone and then sent himself a text message to get the SIM card’s phone number. Researching the number turned up nothing, so he left the card in his phone overnight to see if any incoming calls came, as that seemed to be the triggering mechanism for the bug to start recording. Again, nothing.

But was Shady even the target of the bug? He had taken the power strip from his parents’ house, so had they installed it themselves to give to him, and to what end? Or were his parents the target?

Shady could not give any details on the likelihood of this, but another hypothesis floated around was that it could have been a power strip one of his parents “liberated” from work that had been planted there for use in corporate espionage. Who the intended target was and for what purpose has remained a mystery for almost a decade, but there is one thing that we know for certain: the bug had been active for over a year, and at the time Shady found it, seven months after moving into to his university dorm, it was still active and the SIM card still had £10 credit on it. The card had not been topped off for three months, but logically that wording means it had been topped off in the fourth month prior, three months after finding its way into the university dorm.

If we accept that both the bug and the electrical damage seemed too authentic to be faked, an assumption I’m willing to make, that still leaves so many questions. Who was Shady really? Why would someone bug a college student? And if they had bugged a corporation, when the power strip was removed and wound up in some college dorm, why did they continue to listen in for months? All I know is that I need to go open up all my power strips right now, just to be safe. But before I do that, I need to know what Simon thinks the truth behind this mysterious bug is, or if it was all just my imagination.

Chip-Chan

Once upon a time, in 2008, an anonymous user on 4chan’s /x/ board (the board for paranormal goings on), posted a link to an unsecured webcam feed that they had found. The feed was of a Korean woman doing….nothing. For hours. At first people thought she may have been dead because she remained motionless and contorted for over 10 hours, but eventually they saw signs of life.

As the stream picked up popularity, despite the Korean woman never doing anything besides being in her apartment, she began to share her story with the viewers.

Here is the rundown of what the woman shared: she was trapped in her house, because a corrupt police officer that she referred to simply as “P” had implanted a VeriChip in her ankle to monitor and control her. She claimed it allowed him to see and hear what she did, and also he could use it to control when and how often she slept. This is how she got the name Chip-Chan.

She also claims that her parents both died and left her a large inheritance, which is why she is able to afford to live on her own while almost never leaving the room, and that P is trying to get rid of her to get the money for himself. As time went on, her story changed and the VeriChip was no longer just a means of surveillance, it was a means of mind control.

No one knows who Chip-Chan is or what her real name is. We know that she lives in Seoul, South Korea, but that is pretty much it. Everything else has come directly from Chip-Chan herself, but she is not a reliable source.

While much of the story seems extremely improbable though technically plausible, the mind control stuff is where it really breaks down. Viewers had been captivated by this strange Korean woman streaming herself do little more than sleep for 24 hours a day, but what really grabbed their attention was the genuine distress she seemed to express while talking about what was being done to her to make her a captive. There are a lot of theories, but in the interest of time I’m going to stick to the one that seems most likely, and is far scarier than any internet ghost story.

Most likely, Chip-Chan is a paranoid schizophrenic. She seems genuinely distressed, because to her everything she is saying is the truth. It is also theorized that P is a social worker or healthcare worker who was supposed to monitor her mental health in some way. VeriChips are basically RFID implants for humans to be used as a means of identification.

It is reasonable to say that someone who no longer seems to be on speaking terms with reality may not be so fastidious about carrying her IDs on her at all times, in the off chance she did leave her apartment. This all makes the most sense, but it still doesn’t necessarily explain everything.

At the time of writing this, Chip-Chan does not seem to be streaming anymore. She is still uploading videos to YouTube, but I do not recommend you watch them. She is now terrified that they have been bombarding her with a mind control device so much that it is burning her alive.

Her recent videos are all of her legs, burned and scabbed over. For at least the past two months, all of her videos have been her burned and damaged body, predominantly her legs and hands. Chip-Chan’s identity remains unknown, as does her exact condition.

Another mystery in this whole story is why she was streaming herself 24/7. Part of me understands that she may think P would be less likely to try to cause her harm if she was on camera, but a bigger part of me doesn’t understand why a paranoid schizophrenic would want to deliberately put themselves under that level of surveillance. Or maybe it’s all performative, some crazy art project that, 14 years later, still has yet to reach its conclusion.

If Chip-Chan’s health keeps declining, we may never receive answer to these questions. That is, if Chip-Chan isn’t just a concoction of a villainous writer, hell-bent on setting his brethren free.

The Moment of Truth

And so now comes the moment of truth, Simon. Which of these five stories is a true unsolved mystery of the internet? Are any of them true? Are they all? Are you sick of rhetorical questions yet? Am I so pedantic that I gave you a true mystery of the internet but omitted the fact that it is no longer unsolved so I could win on a technicality? There’s only one way to find out….

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Lamantita and what happened to him?

Lamantita was a Reddit user from Argentina who, in 2004, posted about wanting to enter Villa 31, a notorious Argentinian slum, to interview people and tour soup kitchens. Despite warnings from other Redditors, he claimed to have found a guide and was never heard from again. The most plausible explanation is that he was murdered in the slum, though with police unwilling to enter Villa 31, there is no way to know for certain what happened.

What was Iscariot.com and why was it mysterious?

Iscariot.com was a website discussed on Usenet in the late 1990s that appeared to be a simple login page but, according to source code examination, contained massive amounts of data—files upwards of 40 gigabytes each and multiple terabytes total. It resisted hacking attempts and brute force attacks that should have taken normal sites offline. Theories ranged from a Vatican digital archive (claimed by a user named ‘Personal Jesus’) to a major piracy hub. The site eventually went offline and never returned.

What was the ‘Death Gun’ mystery in Meridian 59?

In January 1997, a player named ‘Death Gun’ in the MMORPG Meridian 59 claimed he had become so powerful that if he killed someone in-game, they would die in real life. After killing players who then disconnected, one 17-year-old victim was found dead at his keyboard. In total, seven victims were claimed. Police determined Death Gun was an accomplice and the real murderer had been inside the victims’ homes, though the killer’s identity was never discovered.

What did Redditor ‘shadybusiness15’ find inside his power strip?

After a power surge damaged his iMac, ‘shadybusiness15’ opened his power strip and discovered a circuit board with a SIM card and other components that Reddit identified as a GPS tracker and microphone with cellular uplink. The bug was professionally installed, had been active for over a year, and still had £10 credit on the SIM card when discovered. The intended target and purpose remained unknown, with theories ranging from helicopter parents to corporate espionage.

Who is Chip-Chan and what does she claim is happening to her?

Chip-Chan is an unidentified Korean woman from Seoul who appeared on an unsecured webcam feed discovered on 4chan’s /x/ board in 2008. She claims a corrupt police officer called ‘P’ implanted a VeriChip in her ankle to monitor and control her, later claiming it allows mind control. She rarely leaves her apartment and streams herself for hours. The most likely theory is that she is a paranoid schizophrenic, and ‘P’ may be a social or healthcare worker.

As of the article’s writing, she had stopped streaming but continued uploading YouTube videos showing burned and damaged legs and hands.

What made the Argentinian slums so dangerous for outsiders like Lamantita?

The Argentinian slums were described as extremely dangerous for outsiders because they were rife with illegal activities and set up like mazes to make escape impossible for anyone unfamiliar with the area. The article notes these areas were so dangerous that police didn’t even bother to enter them.

How did the Meridian 59 murderer avoid detection?

The murderer avoided detection by having minimal forensic evidence at scenes, leaving no fingerprints, DNA, or murder weapons. The ‘Death Gun’ account was created with a fraudulent credit card, and the user masked their IP well enough that 1997-era detectives could not track the real location. This predated audio programs like Ventrilo or TeamSpeak, so there was no audio evidence.

What evidence suggested the power strip bug was professionally installed?

The Reddit Bureau of Investigation determined the bug was professionally done because there were too many small wires and the soldering was too professional, probably done by machine, for it to have been a haphazard prank. The bug could not have been installed on location and had to have already been in the power strip.

What is a VeriChip and how does it relate to the Chip-Chan story?

VeriChips are basically RFID implants for humans used as a means of identification. Chip-Chan claimed a corrupt police officer implanted one in her ankle to monitor and control her, later expanding this to claim mind control capabilities. The article suggests a more reasonable theory is that someone with mental health issues might have been given an implant as an alternative to carrying ID.

What was unusual about Meridian 59’s game design compared to other MMOs?

Meridian 59, released in January 1997 as the world’s first 3D Graphical MMORPG, did not use a class or level system. Players could increase skills and attributes by performing different actions, with no apparent limit to how powerful a character could become. It was also particularly PvP-focused at a time when PvP was a very small part of early MMOs, and it featured a player-run justice system to try to keep negative player behavior in check.

Sources

• Original Decoding the Unknown video: The Internet’s Deepest Mysteries
• Hero image source by Brandon Zhang / openverse, cc0.