**Disclaimer**
This piece is written solely for sharing the of the facts. Names have been changed to protect the persons involved. All portions contained therein are reported as told to the author, and while having been fact checked and verified, does by no means give anyone the right to harass, stalk, DoX nor give anyone permission to engage in any form of activity that goes against Upland's TOS.
Sometimes, before you can move forward, you must first go back.
Events In History
SourRings joined the metaverse, in May 2021, simply a visitor, he, like many of us, took a keen liking to the game, and after a minute obtained his first rare collection; El Camino. It was his "most prized possession" and "most expensive thing he owned in game." Shortly, there after he was approached by a super hero cloaked in mystery to trade it 1:1, as 50/50 had not yet been invented, and join his server Collaborating Collective. Being relatively new, and not trusting anyone with his precious, he declined the swap. But, he did agree to join the server. After a time, he quickly learned that he was the only person in it, who in fact had the El Camino collection. Realizing he was in a position, with his collection, to swap for almost any collection he didn't posses, which was nearly all of them, put him in a unique space within the server. And, being that El Camino has a 26k payout, it was a great place to start getting his feet wet with swapping. By the end of September 2021, with a net worth of nearly 9 million upx, mostly through USD investment, SourRings began buying collections regularly, to swap. This became and still is his strategy in the game, for making upx.
Now it's no secret that almost from the start, collection heists were a thing. These treacherous deviants, though few, compared to the swapping community on the whole, zeroed in on their targets, strikingly quickly, in an effort obtain some of the most coveted properties in the game. A few were reported and thrown into Alcatraz where "they remain to this day." Others got away with their crime, and became rich in the process. Though now they carry with them an unremovable stain, the mark of the thief, and are condemned to wander the metaverse on their own, Outcasts. Shunned. Forgotten. Their victims were left to rebuild, rebuy, and move on. While some, chose to quit swapping altogether. Others chose to continue swapping, repurchasing their collections again, though in the same collections they were different properties. To date this author has yet to find a collector who paid a ransom to regain their stolen property. While theft of property seemed very much ok in the minds of the greedy, apparently their preverbal line in the sand is drawn at bribery and extortion.
As the last of the collection servers closed down, for whatever reason, early in 2022, PapiVito decided to start his own. Several people had reached out to SourRings and invited him to join, as by now he was a well known swapper, with a well established reputation as a straight shooter, and had amassed a rather nice collection to swap. PapiVito added SPFlex to his team and they set to work growing their community; setting rules and tiers in place to hopefully cut down on collection theft. As time went on their community grew, and their rare swappers list grew with them. While not as large as one might think, considering that greed does often times fuel the hearts of humans, their "naughty list" grew as well. This list pretty much read like a petri dish of human crap. But despite that, the server they toiled over, flourished, and they were instrumental as a community, in getting several well known mulit-accounters thrown into Alcatraz, thus cleaning up our growing metaverse of the scuz, trying to eek its way into the shiny new world Upland players were trying to build.
But unbeknownst to any of them all, a letch was in their midst, and the very first prized possession in SourRing's arsenal of collections, had missiles pointed right at it. Time on target.......5 days.
