So much of crowdsourced sleuthing seems to end in misadventure: innocents doxxed, offenders mis-IDed, lives (and search results) wrecked forever.

But on Sunday, Reddit’s armchair investigators chalked up a nice, clean, feel-good win: They had, at last — after 3+ years — identified the enigmatic “Celebrity Number Six.” 

Celebrity Number Six, you may recall, is the name Reddit gave to a stylized female face that appeared on a set of tacky patterned curtains sold in Finland in the mid-aughts. The other faces in the pattern were easily identified — but this high-cheekboned, unsmiling sixth face was not. 

A hyperactive subreddit grew up around the mystery. Some 40,000 people joined the search. And on Monday, following dozens of discarded contenders and debunked theories, the retired Spanish model Leticia Sardá confirmed the mysterious face was hers. 

This is viral frivolity of the purest and highest order: a whole lot of hijinx and hysteria for a “mystery” whose stakes could not conceivably be lower. But it’s also a testament to the growing power and efficacy of crowdsourced investigations — for good as well as for evil. In the past five months alone, online sleuths have closed out three high-profile, long-running “internet mysteries,” culminating with Celebrity Number Six. Recent crowdsourced investigations have also cracked cold cases, outed January 6 rioters and advanced historic research, said Kurt Loder, a professor of computer science and the director of Virginia Tech’s Crowd Intelligence Lab.

Empowered with new generative AI and facial recognition tools that make their work more effective, and armed with far more free time than experts could ever muster, these sleuths have raised significant questions about privacy, vigilantism and the so-called wisdom of crowds. But when they get it right … it’s kind of magical.

“There have been so many misidentifications,” Loder acknowledged. “But there have been so many successes, as well: missing people found, criminals identified — there are a lot of compelling examples of the power of crowdsourced investigations.” 

Identifying “Six” might seem trivial next to something like, you know, solving a 50-year-old homicide. But the technologies and social dynamics at play in r/CelebrityNumberSix are actually pretty similar to those playing out in other online investigative communities, Loder said. For years, Sixers have deployed a mix of conventional and open-source investigative techniques to try to identify the woman on the curtain: contacting the original fabric supplier, for instance, or running the stylized print through facial recognition engines.

Over the past 18 months, as generative AI tools became both more powerful and more accessible to the wider public, members of the community began attempting to create more photorealistic, 3D images of Celebrity Number Six, rather like a police sketch artist drawing out a portrait. Last week, a 20-year-old Redditor named u/StefanMorse tried a slightly different approach, shading the print with skin-like colors but leaving it two-dimensional. When uploaded to PimEyes, the terrifying facial recognition search engine beloved by many a TikTok doxxer, that colorized version of the Number Six image repeatedly matched the obscure Spanish model Leticia Sardá.

Galvanized by the new lead, other Redditors promptly dug up old ad campaigns and fashion spreads that Sardá appeared in. A 2006 cover photo from Tendencias Woman, a supplement to the Spanish fashion and beauty magazine Woman — now Woman Madame Figaro — then led sleuths to Leandre Escorsell, a fashion and product photographer based in Barcelona. 

Reached by email, Escorsell told Links he had never heard of Celebrity Number Six or the attendant online mania until a Spanish Redditor emailed him about it. He did recognize the face on the curtain, however: It was clearly taken from one of several photos of Sardá that Escorsell made as part of a spring/summer fashion editorial.

“It really surprised me — like the number of emails I have received” since, Escorsell said. He sent the Redditor back a scanned image from the print magazine, which does not appear to have existed online and was indeed a match. A day later, Sardá herself — who left modelling in 2009, though she did feature in a recent shoot for the small Spanish fashion brand 7.rooms — took a picture of herself holding the 2006 Tendencias Woman photo. 

How that image ended up on a curtain alongside the likes of Jessica Alba and Orlando Bloom remains a mystery. The permissions and publication rights to the photo belonged to the magazine, Escorsell said; to his knowledge, they were never farmed out to any Nordic home decor outlets. Contacting the magazine was also a dead end: It changed hands several years ago. But if anybody’s going to work this last puzzle out … I’m sure it’ll be the Redditors. 

This was, incidentally, just one of several enduring internet mysteries online sleuths solved this year. In late April, members of the subreddit r/everyoneknowsthat successfully traced a viral “lostwave” song ” back to an ‘80s porn film. Just one month later, hobbyists in a dedicated Discord server identified the location of a mysterious and widely circulated creepypasta image, often called “The Backrooms,” which depicted the windowless, drop-ceilinged, carpeted interior of hell a former furniture store in Oshkosh, Wisc.

These types of cases, silly though they may seem, foreground the unique resources of crowdsourced investigations, Loder said: an infinite appetite for menial, time-consuming work … and a wide range of specialized knowledge. Think about the hours it took Reddit to track an obscure fabric or review hundreds of unrelated celebrity images. Or consider the fact that u/IndigoRoom, the Redditor who finally contacted Escorsell, only did so  — in flawless, culturally appropriate Spanish — because they are also from Spain, themselves.¹ 

Lately, Loder and his team have become interested in harnessing these types of crowdsourced skills for more formal investigations. A model that marries the resources and range of committed amateurs with the oversight of professional investigators is, he told me, “the best of both worlds.”

Since 2018, for instance, Loder has run a site called Civil War Photo Sleuth, which provides a standard framework and facial recognition tools to help amateur investigators ID people in Civil War-era images. The project has collected and identified hundreds of historical photos, using methods similar to those of the Number Six searchers.

Even here, however — in the safe, sepia-toned confines of distant history — a motivated crowd can still veer off track. Before the 2020 U.S. presidential election, Loder said, some investigators became (falsely) convinced that one of President Joseph Biden’s forebears had fought for the Confederates.

r/CelebrityNumberSix has also contended with overreaches and indignities of its own: IndigoRoom, the Spanish Redditor who first contacted Escorsell, told Links they received a flood of threatening and nasty messages after they posted the 2006 photo of Sardá; some of those people — convinced the photo was faked — even threatened to doxx them. (IndigoRoom said the whole thing is fine and has since been resolved.) In the aftermath, however, IndigoRoom’s defenders also allegedly sent death threats to a former subreddit moderator who questioned the veracity of the Escorsell shot. Current mods have urged Sixers to knock that off, and also to stop haranguing Sardá.²

Still, there’s a sense of triumph in r/CelebrityNumberSix, even three days after the big discovery. A sense of triumph, and also of loss: Six provided hours (… and hours and hours!!) of entertainment for many.

There’s plenty of mystery where she came from, though: unidentified songs, puzzling cookie cutters … even missing kids. And off Reddit, Loder said, there’s a whole universe of Facebook cold case groups, Twitter OSINT threads and Websleuths investigations.  

Sardá, meanwhile, has launched new Instagram and TikTok accounts and told The New York Times she plans to start posting publicly herself.

“I’m trying to give them what they were looking for,” she said, “because they made a lot of effort, you know, just to find a person on a fabric.”

Ongoing internet oddities

• The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet: a cassette recording of an unknown song from German radio, most likely created in the mid-1980s and still unidentified after a 20-year search. (r/TheMysteriousSong)

• Help Me Find: a Reddit community for altruistic amateur sleuths, who help strangers locate everything from lost childhood toys to forgotten tea flavors.

• Reddit Bureau of Investigation: a Reddit community for more serious amateur sleuths, who help strangers locate missing relatives, identify the cars involved in hit-and-runs and deal with spammers and stalkers.

• Endless Thread: a long-running podcast from Boston’s WBUR, which “digs into the internet's vast and curious ecosystem of online communities to find untold histories, unsolved mysteries and other jaw-dropping stories online and IRL.”

• TikTok’s “consensual doxxer”: Kristen Sotakoun, a content creator/actual genius? in Chicago, unearths her followers’ ages and birthdays with little more than their TikTok handles.

• What Is My Cookie Cutter: personal fave; speaks for itself. Who is making these strange, sugary amoebas??

Please share your personal faves in the comments; I’m barely scratching the surface of this. Until the weekend … !