For a brief period I considered becoming a private detective. A friend of mine knew I was looking to practice and sent me a photo on Wikipedia that was faked. It claimed to be of private military contractors in an outfit called GK Sierra in one country, but they were actually US soldiers in a different country.
I spent a while digging into this company and a couple of related companies. They had edited themselves into Wikipedia articles in small ways over the years, and gotten themselves included in click bait lists of military contractors. They made a half-assed effort to cover this up by
changing their Wikipedia user name, but that just creates a different record that was still searchable. There was a Wikipedia article mentioning a rumor they worked for Mossad, but I suspected they were also the source for that rumor. They claimed they worked for the CIA, and they had a real contracting number with the DoD. But I didn't find any evidence these contracts were real, and when I sent a FOIA to the CIA they said the information either didn't exist or was classified.
The weirdest thing I noticed was that it had bled into the culture to some extent. People who wanted to give themselves an edgy camo aesthetic would find these click bait articles and vandalized Wikipedia pages and not realize it was a sham - or realized and were doing it ironically, how is one to tell. I saw an admin of some forum who took it as a handle. I saw someone present a military-themed outfit in GTA named after it.
Eventually I got to the point where I was gathering more and more evidence and none of it was making any sense, and I realized I was never going to make real headway without finding a way to interview these people. I could see pieces of what they were doing, but as far as why they were doing it, that information just didn't seem to be written down on the Internet. The prospect of flying across the country to try and track down someone who was doing things I couldn't understand wasn't appealing, so I just let it go.
As a disclaimer, I'm working off of memory here, some of the details may be wrong.
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Looking back at their deleted Wikipedia page on the Wayback machine, it's all so outlandish that I have to imagine it was an elaborate prank. It's a lot more paperwork than most pranks involve, but I just can't imagine that whoever put this together intended anyone to believe it. Maybe they wanted to see if they could do enough legend building that the Wikipedia mods would have some doubt and keep up the page for a ridiculous hoax? If I was practicing a skill, maybe they were too? Impossible to say.
I spent a while digging into this company and a couple of related companies. They had edited themselves into Wikipedia articles in small ways over the years, and gotten themselves included in click bait lists of military contractors. They made a half-assed effort to cover this up by changing their Wikipedia user name, but that just creates a different record that was still searchable. There was a Wikipedia article mentioning a rumor they worked for Mossad, but I suspected they were also the source for that rumor. They claimed they worked for the CIA, and they had a real contracting number with the DoD. But I didn't find any evidence these contracts were real, and when I sent a FOIA to the CIA they said the information either didn't exist or was classified.
The weirdest thing I noticed was that it had bled into the culture to some extent. People who wanted to give themselves an edgy camo aesthetic would find these click bait articles and vandalized Wikipedia pages and not realize it was a sham - or realized and were doing it ironically, how is one to tell. I saw an admin of some forum who took it as a handle. I saw someone present a military-themed outfit in GTA named after it.
Eventually I got to the point where I was gathering more and more evidence and none of it was making any sense, and I realized I was never going to make real headway without finding a way to interview these people. I could see pieces of what they were doing, but as far as why they were doing it, that information just didn't seem to be written down on the Internet. The prospect of flying across the country to try and track down someone who was doing things I couldn't understand wasn't appealing, so I just let it go.
As a disclaimer, I'm working off of memory here, some of the details may be wrong.
---
Looking back at their deleted Wikipedia page on the Wayback machine, it's all so outlandish that I have to imagine it was an elaborate prank. It's a lot more paperwork than most pranks involve, but I just can't imagine that whoever put this together intended anyone to believe it. Maybe they wanted to see if they could do enough legend building that the Wikipedia mods would have some doubt and keep up the page for a ridiculous hoax? If I was practicing a skill, maybe they were too? Impossible to say.