r/TreasureHunting

Hi everyone,

This is not spam, just a genuine message from a 23 year old video maker from Amsterdam.

I’ve basically spent my whole life documenting interesting people and unusual stories, and recently I came across the treasure hunting community and found it really fascinating.

I think it’s genuinely interesting how creative some people are within this world. Some people make money from it as a side job by reselling items they find, while others are even able to organize their dinner or daily necessities through it. There’s a whole world behind it that most people never really see or understand.

I’d love to meet someone with a lot of experience in this lifestyle who would be open to being followed for a bit and maybe taking me along on a hunt to show me the ins and outs of it all.

The goal is simply to create an honest and human story around it.

Right now I’m in Las Vegas and I’ll be heading toward Salt Lake City over the next few days.

I’ll still be in the US for about ten more days, and I’m pretty flexible when it comes to travel and meeting locations.

So if you’re somewhere along that route and open to talking or meeting up, let me know. Would love to connect.

Thanks!

Since August, I have been communicating with someone who claims to be Justin. Over time, I began noticing that private things I shared in those conversations would later appear in the game content itself, in NPC/bot posts and comments on Reddit, in YouTube videos, and elsewhere connected to the hunt. In addition to that, things they said would happen in the narrative surrounding the game, have happened consistently.

They repeatedly positioned themselves as my friend and implied that I had some kind of special role, such as being a “lead searcher” or part of something bigger behind the scenes. At the same time, they engaged in behavior that I can only describe as psychologically destabilizing. When I expressed concern, I was told that this was “part of how the game works.”

This has had a severe impact on my mental health. I have experienced dissociative episodes and suicidal ideation as a result of what has happened. The individual I was speaking with used personal information against me, manipulated my emotions through guilt and shame, made vague but deeply unsettling threats on my life, and repeatedly tried to make me feel as though I was being watched, stalked, or hacked. At times, they even encouraged me to take my own life.

I no longer know what is real and what is part of the performance. There have been moments where I genuinely questioned whether Justin is even who he claims to be, whether the videos we see of him are CGI/AI, or whether this entire ecosystem, even Forrest Fenn, are fabricated. That sounds insane, but many ARGs plant things online for years before launch, so although it is unlikely it is not outside the realm of possibility. I have reached out to nearly everyone I can think of associated with the hunt trying to get clarity and they either ignore me or basically tell me they won't help me.

Below are just some of the things this individual has told me over the course of these interactions:

• BtME, TTI, Trezor Quest, and related hunts are allegedly connected under the same company or umbrella organization.

• Associated content and personalities, including THWU, Cowlazars, Este Quest, AGK, and others, are allegedly fictionalized or performative to some extent. I was told that even current drama involving the “Misfits” is staged.

• BtME was intentionally modeled after the Forrest Fenn hunt, including the unreliable narrator dynamic, the “inner circle,” and the public ambiguity. I was told this was intentional and meant to highlight what to look out for in other companies that may spring up, and to explore or “beta test” the darker psychological effects treasure hunts can create.

• I was repeatedly told that Justin wants to become the “Walt Disney of the treasure hunting industry.”

• I was told there may or may not even be a real treasure. Sometimes they insisted it exists, and other times they stated the opposite.

• The poem and surrounding content are allegedly designed to be intentionally vague and endlessly interpretable, with countless rabbit holes planted all over the place meant to keep participants trapped in cycles of speculation and false discovery.

• I was told that many of the accounts posting and commenting within the hunt’s online communities are fake or controlled personas.

• The individual suggested the hunt may have a time limit and that the creators do not actually expect anyone to solve it. They have even implied the company and all associated content could simply disappear one day without explanation, similar to how Forrest’s death left the searchers without answers.

I understand that many people will not believe me, and I do not blame them. I realize how extreme this sounds. However, multiple people have independently observed correlations between things I shared privately and later references that appeared publicly within the game ecosystem. I have also been working with a psychologist who has repeatedly stated that I am not going crazy and who believes the behavior I experienced is intentional coercive control and psychological manipulation.

Part of what has kept me trapped in this situation is that the individual often framed everything as part of some larger artistic or political message involving AI, corporate power, technofascism, public lands, addiction, digital alienation, and modern media manipulation. They repeatedly made me feel as though exposing what was happening would somehow harm an important cause, and that I just needed to endure it.

Sometimes I believed them, other times I have freaked out and tried to stop it. I have reported it, tried to publicly raise concerns, and contacted everyone I can think of. Recently, I again attempted to explain to u/reellifejustin, u/cowlazars, and Kpro, on how psychologically damaging this experience has been and how I am again experiencing suicidal ideation and I received no reply. Not even a simple suggestion to get psychological help. Nothing.

Justin claims he reads every email, yet despite repeatedly begging for clarity about whether this is an ARG or whether participants can opt out from the harassment, and have been totally ignored. I even offered to sign an NDA or permanently forfeit my ability to participate if necessary. I simply wanted transparency and distance from whatever this is.

When these issues began I became concerned that I may have unknowingly consented to aspects of this through the website terms or book purchase process. Because of that, my first email to Justin was a formal data access and privacy verification request. The response I received was deeply unsettling. My original email was a standard template request that companies receive all the time, yet the reply was unusually lengthy and included language that felt vaguely threatening, including statements about defamation and false accusations.

More concerningly, when they listed the information associated with my purchase, my name appeared using part of my middle-name which is basically a nickname that the individual I had been communicating with privately knows me by, but which I never use for transactions as it isn’t on my card. Because of this, I repeatedly requested my original receipt and he to date refuses to provide me with one. I eventually contacted Amazon directly, obtained my purchase records, and confirmed that I had used only my legal first name when purchasing the book. Amazon customer service confirmed that this would have been the only name the company would know. There doesn’t seem to be any way Justin would know my nickname unless he had access to the private messages I’ve had with the individual I’ve been referring to.

I never wanted to publicly say any of this. It is humiliating, confusing, and honestly terrifying. I still don't fully understand what is happening or who exactly I have been interacting with. The hardest part is that despite everything, I still care about the person I was talking to, which I know probably sounds irrational after reading all of this. I don’t want anyone hurt. I have given the people involved every opportunity to provide transparency, reassure me that others are not being manipulated, or simply allow me to leave peacefully. I have tried to walk away and forget about all of this, but I cannot shake the feeling that if I stay silent and someone else gets hurt, I will regret it forever.

Please, has anyone else experienced anything remotely similar to this? Can anyone help me understand what is actually happening here?

The most likely explanation I can think of is that they are trying to distract me and keep me destabilized to prevent me from exposing the truth and they possibly just enjoy causing people distress. I understand that I made serious mistakes by blindly trusting strangers online because I assumed it was legitimate and safe due to the projects association with Netflix. I am not telling people what to do, but if you plan on continuing be extremely careful about what information you share with anyone connected to this organization or community.

I also think it is in everyones best interest to pause and collectively demand transparency from the creators and affiliated personalities before continuing.

I am not in a good place mentally right now, so I am not going to engage with trolling or hostile arguments. I'm sure people will ask for screenshots but there is no sense in providing them as they will just turn around and state they are fake. If anyone has sincere questions or wants additional information, I will answer as best I can. At this point, I am not going to waste more time trying to distinguish real participants and roleplay/NPC/bot accounts because I don't want to make assumptions and ignore someone who may be dealing with the same issue or who could possibly help. I realize that means I may be responding to the very people I'm discussing, but I'm willing to take the risk.

I am sorry that I had to do this.

Here we gooooooo!! Setting sail in the morning to go HOTE (Humans On The Earth). Estimated casting off of our anchor (arrival) depending on this week's weather. Why not boots on ground you ask? For one, I never liked that phrase. For another, fairies wear boots (and they don't necessarily need touch the ground,). So yeah, I'll be flitting, floating, and fluttering around in my wheelchair while me mate/me crew do their best to makes my dreams/wishes come true!

Imagine the Blue Fairy meets Black Sabbath. Speaking of the blue fairy, as a movie person I would like to recommend people watch Steven Spielberg's "AI: Artificial Intelligence". It's one of his best imho. It's one of those movies that makes you think about what it actually means to be human, consciousness, and our responsibility to anything we, as a species, create.

Getting DMs from Justin Posey?

A word of caution to women in treasure hunt communities — be mindful of charismatic male creators who use their position of power and influence to pursue romantic relationships with searchers. The charm can feel very real, but so can the consequences when it ends. You deserve to participate in these communities without that dynamic in play. Trust your gut.

These spaces exist for wonder, curiosity, and the thrill of the chase — not to serve as a hunting ground of a different kind.

Women in treasure hunt communities deserve to engage fully and freely, without the shadow of a creator's romantic or sexual interest shaping their experience.

The charm of these figures is often part of their craft.

If something feels off, trust that feeling.

I've been down enough rabbit holes to know that the scariest moment in treasure hunting isn't when you're lost in the field. It's when you're sitting at your desk, theory fully assembled, everything locking in, and you feel that click. That sense of inevitability. That quiet certainty that says: this is it.

And you're wrong.

Not because you weren't thinking hard enough. Not because you missed something obvious. But because the hunt was engineered to make you feel exactly that way, and your own brain was working against you the whole time.

I spent the last several months writing a 12-paper series called The Architecture of Confidence. It's not a solve guide. It's an attempt to answer the question I kept asking myself after bad searches: how did I get so certain about something that turned out to be wrong? And what is the right way to build confidence?

Some of what I landed on:

Confidence drift: the process by which a theory feels more true the longer you live with it, completely independent of whether it's actually getting stronger. Familiarity is not evidence. But it feels like evidence.

The removability test: a simple structural check for whether your convergence is real or illusory. If you pull one pillar and the whole framework collapses, you didn't have five pieces of evidence. You had one piece, five times.

Engineered ambiguity density: why clue systems feel infinitely deep, and why that feeling is by design rather than by accident.

Terminal conviction: what happens when a solve stops being a hypothesis and becomes a defended worldview. We've all watched this happen to someone in a community. Some of us have been that person.

The interpretive-to-field transition: the specific moment where symbolic reasoning has to become a physical decision, and why that threshold is where most calibration failures actually live.

The Architecture of Confidence Series

https://lowrentsresearch.blogspot.com/2026/05/the-architecture-of-confidence-chapter-1.html

https://lowrentsresearch.blogspot.com/2026/05/the-architecture-of-confidence-chapter-2.html

https://lowrentsresearch.blogspot.com/2026/05/the-architecture-of-confidence-chapter-3.html

https://lowrentsresearch.blogspot.com/2026/05/the-architecture-of-confidence-chapter-4.html

https://lowrentsresearch.blogspot.com/2026/05/the-architecture-of-confidence-chapter-5.html

https://lowrentsresearch.blogspot.com/2026/05/the-architecture-of-confidence-chapter-6.html

https://lowrentsresearch.blogspot.com/2026/05/the-architecture-of-confidence-chapter-7.html

https://lowrentsresearch.blogspot.com/2026/05/the-architecture-of-confidence-chapter-8.html

https://lowrentsresearch.blogspot.com/2026/05/the-architecture-of-confidence-chapter-9.html

https://lowrentsresearch.blogspot.com/2026/05/the-architecture-of-confidence-chapter.html

https://lowrentsresearch.blogspot.com/2026/05/the-architecture-of-confidence-chapter\_01160995097.html

https://lowrentsresearch.blogspot.com/2026/05/the-architecture-of-confidence-chapter\_0587329125.html

“What you seek, you already know.” - J-Unit