Chapter 35: The Job I Never Wanted

I never asked for this job.

I never wanted it.

Unfortunately, I am a tenacious bitch.

I do not like getting screwed over. I do not like watching other people get screwed over. And I really do not like watching my country get screwed over.

So, here we are.

Fuckery, fuck, fuck, fuck.

POST SETUP

This is the opening chapter. It starts with real life, moves into the website blackout, then returns to the investigation and the HTML trail.

Real Life Happened First

The last couple of weeks have been, well, a lot.

A close family member became seriously ill. Then Mother Nature apparently decided she was not getting enough attention and rolled through with a series of storms. The kind that knock your power out for three days, rip trees out by the roots, and leave you wondering whether your internet provider has simply packed up and gone home.

One thing about being Canadian is that you learn a few things. You keep cash in the house because eventually the gas pumps stop accepting cards. You learn how to survive without power. And you definitely know how to run a generator.

I am not talking about one of those cute little push-button generators either. I am talking about the ancient beast somebody has owned for thirty years. The kind where the screws decide they have had enough of life and launch themselves into the grass, leaving you elbow-deep in a junk drawer trying to find one that fits before the whole thing starts sounding like a toddler with a cymbal addiction falling down a flight of stairs.

"The internet can wait. Or so I thought."

The Great Blackout

Then, about two weeks ago, my website experienced what I have affectionately started calling The Great Blackout.

Months of work. Articles. Research. Late nights. Rabbit holes.

And then, poof.

For a while, it looked like almost nobody had ever read any of it.

Thankfully, I managed to recover the important pieces, but watching your analytics suddenly look like you have been writing into the void is a special kind of existential crisis.

You start wondering if all those hours were worth it. If anyone was actually reading. If anyone cared.

Then I had a thought.

If family emergencies, three-day power outages, fallen trees, disappearing internet, website disasters, and months of chasing corporate rabbit holes still have not managed to wear me out, I guess I am not done yet.

INVESTIGATOR NOTE

The blackout did not end the project. It clarified something. If all of this has not worn me out yet, the investigation is not finished.

Back to Pen and Paper

Once the lights came back on and life settled into something resembling normal, I grabbed my notebook.

Call me old-fashioned.

I have shown you before. I have notebooks full of company names, domain registrations, trademarks, payment processors, corporate addresses, licence numbers, and pages of arrows that make me look like Charlie Day standing in front of the conspiracy board.

Writing slows my brain down. It forces me to actually read contracts instead of skimming them. Sometimes paper shows me connections that a computer screen never does.

Maybe that is because I grew up in the 1980s. After all, Mr. Poliavich and I are both children of the same decade. We grew up before smartphones and cloud storage. We highlighted things. We wrote in the margins. Those habits have served me surprisingly well.

Sometimes the best thing you can do in the middle of an investigation is walk away from it. Your brain quietly keeps working. Then one morning you remember a screenshot you took months ago, a sentence buried in a Terms and Conditions page, a company name, a trademark owner, or a date that suddenly matters.

Click.

The HTML From Hell

To be clear, I am not some elite HTML expert.

I know just enough to be dangerous. Or at least curious.

Before these lovely operators decided to close my account after I started asking uncomfortable questions, I figured I should preserve everything I could still access.

EVIDENCE I STARTED SAVING

ScreenshotsPayment pagesTransaction historyTerms and ConditionsAnything that might disappear later

Then FinTelegram published an article mentioning NALMI.

Back in November, I wandered down that rabbit hole thinking it was just another trust office. Interesting. Worth noting. But probably not the centre of the story.

At that point, I was still learning. I was trying to understand how domains connected to operators, how operators connected to companies, and how trademarks fit into the picture.

So I parked the HTML trail and went in the opposite direction.

Corporate registries.

Payment processors.

Trademark filings.

Licensing.

Corporate service providers.

The paper trail.

When I finally came back to that original HTML months later, I was not looking at it as a beginner anymore.

I had context. I knew the names. I recognized the companies. I understood the jurisdictions.

The HTML had not changed.

I had.

"Sometimes the evidence does not change. The investigator does."

Where This Goes Next

So I sharpened a pencil, poured another coffee, opened the notebook, and started pulling on the next thread.

That is where the next chapter begins.

Next time, I want to talk about the rabbit holes that came after the HTML from hell. NALMI. Kinza. Cyprus. Trust offices. Corporate service providers. Registered offices. Trademarks. Payment processors. All the boring little details that eventually started making the map look less like chaos and more like a structure.

Not every clue proves something.

But every clue teaches you what question to ask next.

This wasn’t the path I planned. It was simply the one that unfolded, one discovery at a time. And tomorrow, we’ll carry on.

youtu.be

Fun.: Carry On [OFFICIAL VIDEO]

Fun.'s music video for 'Carry On' from the album, Some Nights - available now on Fueled By Ramen. Celebrate the 10th anniversary of fun.’s breakthrough album and relive the magic of 'Some Nights'. Listen to the full album here: https://lnk.to/FunSomeNights Go behind the scenes of this video at http://youtu.be/3k4EvMh7xWk Directed by Anthony Mandler and featuring an original score by Andrew Dost Website: http://ournameisfun.com iTunes: http://smarturl.it/somenights Spotify: http://bit.ly/1dhwfAc Facebook: http://facebook.com/ournameisfun Twitter: http://twitter.com/ournameisfun Store: http://store.ournameisfun.com LYRICS Well I woke up to the sound of silence The cars were cutting like knives in a fist fight And I found you with a bottle of wine Your head in the curtains And heart like the Fourth of July You swore and said We are not We are not shining stars This I know I never said we are Though I've never been through hell like that I've closed enough windows To know you can never look back If you're lost and alone Or you're sinking like a stone Carry on May your past be the sound Of your feet upon the ground Carry on Carry on, carry on So I met up with some friends At the edge of the night At a bar off 75 And we talked and talked About how our parents will die All our neighbours and wives But I like to think I can cheat it all To make up for the times I've been cheated on And it's nice to know When I was left for dead I was found and now I don't roam these streets I am not the ghost you want of me If you're lost and alone Or you're sinking like a stone Carry on May your past be the sound Of your feet upon the ground Carry on Woah My head is on fire But my legs are fine Cause after all they are mine Lay your clothes down on the floor Close the door Hold the phone Show me how No one's ever gonna stop us now Cause we are We are shining stars We are invincible We are who we are On our darkest day When we're miles away So we'll come We will find our way home If you're lost and alone Or you're sinking like a stone Carry on May your past be the sound Of your feet upon the ground Carry on Carry on, carry on #fun #somenights #carryon

NEXT POST TEASER

The next chapter follows the Kinza rabbit hole and how one company name pulled the investigation into Cyprus corporate records, trust offices, and the wider Soft2Bet ecosystem.