Someone on the Internet Will Pay You $100 to Find His or Her Real Identity

​How anonymous can you really be on the internet?

Through the years, man​y people have seen their online pers​onas exposed, even when they wanted to keep t​hem secret. So many, in fact, that it's become a controversial online phenomenon called "doxin​g."

Now, someone is offering a $100 reward for the first person that doxes her (or him?). That someone is named Chuahnahwhahhah, and she advertised her peculiar challenge on Me​dium and Re​ddit on Thursday morning.

"Tell me my real name and I will send $100," Chuahnahwhahhah wrote in her post. "Without any additional information from me, if you are able to discover my real name, tell me what it is, and provide detailed steps of how you found it, I will send $100 cash."

As the only rule, Chuahnahwhahhah wrote, is that "illegal or malicious activity," including "harassment, identity theft, defamation, or other unethical behaviour," is not accepted.

But with those risks in mind, why do this experiment at all?

"Primarily curiosity. I want to know firsthand how secure my real identity is online," Chuahnahwhahhah told me via private message.

She is giving very few, if any, clues, but Chuahnahwhahhah says that the internet is full of breadcrumbs. To create a Medium account, she noted, you need a Twitter or Facebook account, and for that, you need an email account.

"I started wondering what that daisy chain of digital footprints might look like under the surface of the internet and what it could reveal about a person, even when they have offered no directly identifying information," Chuahnahwhahhah said. "I don't have the expertise to investigate it thoroughly, so I decided to crowdsource it."

So far, however, the crowd isn't that interested. The Medium post has no comments, and on Reddit there are only three. But at least a couple of Redditors gave this a brief try.

One of them, nicknamed swf247, told me that he tried because he's interested in how well one can hide "in the machine," and because he likes this kind of online sleuthing. The other one, Xipander, did it because, you guessed it, he was "bored."

Julian Hansmann, a security researcher from Germany, also was curious and was able to identify Chuahnahwhahhah's email address.

For anyone working on that @chuahnahwhahhah riddle: The guy's email address is chuahnahwhahhah@hushmail.com.

— Julian Hansmann (@seclyst) March 12, 2015

Hansmann told me that he was able to find that out by trying to recover Chuahnahwhahhah's email address using Twitter's password recovery process, which showed him that his email was "ch**@h***.**"

That, he said, made him infer that the first part of the email was the nickname Chuahnahwhahhah and the provider was either Hotmail or Hushmail. Both of these providers tell you if a email address exists, Hansmann said, "so I just tried his username as the emails local part." And since Hushmail did not notify him that "chuahnahwhahhah@hushm​ail.com" did not exist or was disabled, he knew this was the right one, he said.

But other than that, not a lot of other clues have been unearthed. Someone on Reddit noticed that Chuahnahwhahhah is apparently the obscure name of a valley in the Rocky Mountains, according to a boo​k titled The American Indians: Their History, Condition and Prospects From Original Notes and Manuscripts. (Googling that name only returns two results other than the posts.)

With so few clues, and the strict rule of no illegal activity, the challenge might be unfair or just plain impossible.

"Being given nothing but a purposefully vague username (that has no post history to boot) with the limitations [Chuahnahwhahhah] stipulated makes this unnecessarily hard," said swf247.

"With the requirement of nothing illegal (sending phishing attempts to the email or trying to bruteforce the password) it's about as foolproof as you can get," said Xipander.

This challenge, however, might just be pointless.

"This is a childish contest," Steven Rambam, a well-known a private investigator who gives a famous​ talk about privacy at New York hacker co​nference Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE), told me. "It's like a stranger bumping into you in the street and saying 'tell me my name and I'll give you $100', with no clues provided."

Moreover, Rambam added, offering only $100 dissuades any motivated doxer from trying.

"Offer $50,000 and the net will pwn this jerk in a day," he said.

Noting the same clue that other found too, Rambam jokingly offered a theory.

"If legit clues, the poster is probably a bored 14-year-old kid, spends a lot of time on 4Chan, lives in middle Canada, future serial killer when he realizes that nobody cares about his contest," he said.

Perhaps. But after exchanging messages with me, swf247 actually offered an alternative theory: I was the author of the Medium post, and I did this just to get a story out of it.

"If I was a suspicious man (and I very much am) I'd say it's at least likely that you're honeydickin' me (aka created a honeypot with this)," swf247 wrote to me. "What a story it would make! Interview all the hopefuls and, best case, get an awesome story to write for the cheap price of $100."

Sorry swf247, I am not Chuahnahwhahhah. And, since we're here, no, I'm not Satoshi Nakamoto either.

So for now, the mystery remains. Both the Redditors I interviewed for this story said this was probably not worth even trying.

"Just not worth my time," sf247 said. "It's like someone saying to you 'hey man, try to break into my new gigantic fortress with nothing but a spoon.' Could I get there eventually? Maybe, but why bother?"

But hey, if you are bored and like a challenge, good luck!

UPDATE 03/13/2015, 10:38 a.m.: A few hours after this story was published, the Medium post that launched the challenge, as well as the social media accounts created for it, are all gone. 

Before deleting her Reddit account, Chuahnahwhahhah told Motherboard that she was planning to keep her online persona active during the duration of the challenge. 

"My plan is to make posts on Medium collating the information bounty hunters discover about my online presence and the techniques they used," she said in her last private message to me. "I will also use the account to post about other topics that I'm interested in, not necessarily related to privacy. Perhaps that will help build up a body of knowledge they can use to complete the challenge."

It's unclear what motivated her to backtrack and delete her online persona, but after this story was published, another Reddit user ​claimed to have identified her, providing new evidence. Chuahnahwhahhah, however, promptly said the user was wrong.