Ok, so I the weirdest shit has been happening lately.
I'm one of those people who like the macabre, hence why I'm even on this site in the first place. My YouTube subscription list included many ARGs (Alternate Reality Games) which can be fun, and many creepypasta writers and narrators. This by itself isn't that unusual, but it's what my interests brought me that was. Ever get a random text from numbers you assume are just spam? Here's a word of advice: do not respond to them. I received a strange text from a number with the area code (662), which I looked up and found it was a place in Mississippi. The text was calling me things such as a "customer", and how I would receive "products". This to me sounded like spam, so I replied with a simple stop-harassing-me sort of thing.
Eventually, I was linked to a video on a strange youtube channel. It was called "hiddenytservice" which has since been taken down. They really emphasized the "do not get outside help" thing. I wondered what this meant, so I came to the conclusion that this was some sort of complicated ARG. Doesn't explain how they got my number, but anyone could just press random digits and send out masses of text. We as customers had to do "tasks" in order to stay within some sort of game and avoid elimination. It turns out they had acquired 100 customers to play this game. Some people were put in groups, but I was unfortunate enough to be alone. The first ten that they contacted, which I assume were treated as a sort of "test", were called sigmas. We were organized into what they called brackets, groups of twenty customers that were labeled with Greek alphabet letters, (Zeta, Alpha, Lambda, etc.)
The tasks involved us decoding base64, binary, locate URLs, solve puzzles, riddles, etc. If you've ever heard of Cicada 3301, think of that but with more personal communication. This game, like Cicada, was a yearly event, and there were people who had survived the tasks the year prior. They were called sponsors, and each team would get one. My sponsor was a male, someone who I assume was in their early 20s. They would be the messengers of the system (the organization that ran this "ARG" called themselves that). A lot of our clues and important updates were delivered to us via our sponsors. After a while of barely getting by, they just poof- vanished. Their channel was deactivated, all their videos were gone, and there was no need to complete the task I was working on. That relief didn't last quite long, because not long after I got a text. It read something like "Our system is re-establishing itself at the moment."
Then a few hours later we were redirected into another channel, one called "Echo channel" (though the name changes constantly). This is where what customers remained were combined into one bracket, Omega. The reason I share this rather than just passing it off as an elaborate ARG is that they clearly have some structure of organization. They are able to orchestrate large puzzles, communicate to us through past members, the power to hack into and steal accounts, and keep themselves ''unnoticed''. I don't see them being mentioned anywhere else on the internet, so I felt I had to share this. They've been at it for years, and somehow have never been caught by authority or the internet. Anybody else have an experience similar to this?
{{By-cpwuser|Barneyholiday}}