I'd just started college at Oxford University, living in a tiny flat off Jericho Lane with a bunch of freshers from all over the world, when I came up with the idea of starting up an online shop selling cocktails infused with caffeine. It sounded like fun, and there was money involved, too.
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I struggled with the recipe for a few months and just when I got it right, Daniel, a social media influencer, whom I'm guessing must have been bored sitting around behind his computer all day promoting crappy products decided to steal my idea.
Since I wanted to build my brand in public, they have been plenty of shots floating around online showing me mixing ingredients into my drinks, using tools that help with the process and my experimentation.
This afternoon I decided to send him an angry email telling him off, asking him why the hell he'd stolen my idea and demanding to know exactly what his deal was, and whether he planned to make money off my hard work too.
A few minutes after hitting 'send' Daniel sent me a message himself. It was pretty aggressive and seemed designed to shut me down immediately rather than trying to come across as sympathetic.
Afterward, I sat staring blankly at my laptop screen for ten minutes or so, feeling numb. What the hell had happened to me? I mean, I'd spent years writing copy for my websites, creating ads, and running marketing campaigns for my coffee brand, and I'd done okay for myself, and yet somehow this kid I barely knew was beating me at my own game, becoming rich without lifting a finger while he slumbered in bed all day, probably playing games and drinking milkshakes. It felt unreal.
Was I supposed to accept that I'd fallen victim to someone else's clever scheme when the evidence suggested otherwise? There had to be a reason why my brand had gone unnoticed until now. Had Daniel stolen the recipe from me in person and used his skillset to replicate my product, or did he have any help from one of my assistants was willing to cut corners and risk losing our relationship?
Whatever the answer, it didn't seem fair. All those hours I'd spent studying and experimenting with different recipes, all those hundreds of thousands of pounds invested in equipment, and yet I'd been completely oblivious to the existence of this disastrous end. How many more brands had fallen foul of similar plots in the past, leaving their founders penniless while their businesses failed, or their investors lost everything they'd poured into them?
As soon as I'd recovered from the shock of discovering that Daniel had ripped me off, I began wondering what I could do to get my revenge on Daniel and take back my recipe and the spotlight from Daniel's new business.
After some thought, I settled on a tactic that other people had probably chosen for such scenarios: Exposing him. It was a classic move, and one I was familiar with.
The first step was finding out what Daniel looked like. The internet is chock full of information about everyone these days, and thanks to Facebook's open data policy anyone can find almost anything they need, provided they have enough determination and patience. So I went hunting through his profile pictures, starting with his most recent photo uploads. Unfortunately, he kept his privacy settings high, and the majority of his images had been taken from private messages. His public profile picture had disappeared ages ago.
Next, I tried looking through photos of his friends on social media, searching through their tags for any mention of his name. This proved easier said than done. Most of his old classmates were still active on social media, but their profiles contained very little personal information beyond the obligatory selfie. Some had updated theirs regularly, others sporadically, and there was no obvious pattern.
I needed to go back to plotting my revenge and I wasn't getting headway until today I stumbled on something that helped me finally get to it.
A website called 'Who Is?' offers an online service which uses publicly available information on social media accounts to identify the owner of each account by using data recognition software. Once you've uploaded the information on a particular person to the site, they use a combination of several detection technology and machine learning to match you against tens of millions of images, then return a short list of matches along with a probability score based on the accuracy of its identification.
My heart leaped as I saw Daniel's name appear beside another young man wearing his trademark black leather jacket. He was sitting in a bar surrounded by his friends, all laughing and having fun, but his profile also included links to his various social media accounts. One of them linked directly to his page on a popular dating app, so I followed the link to his dating profile.
A few minutes later I was staring at his version of the infamous Daniel's image: a blurry close-up shot of his left eye, captured under poor lighting conditions, overlaid with a grid showing him exactly where the lens has been trained. Underneath the image, he'd written: "Don't let my looks fool you, this boy's a complete freak!"
Once I figure out who he was, my revenge began to take shape. I'll publish all of my recipe-making videos as proof alongside his photos and posts telling the world how much of a thief he was. Then we can settle things once and for all. I'll post his photo and ask my followers if anyone recognizes him... I'm going to enjoy seeing Daniel squirm when his fans tear into him for being such a fake and a thief!