Stolen!

~ the last words ~

Stolen! was a trading game played with real people. Every Twitter account was a card, including yours, including the accounts of people who had never heard of the app. You spent in-game currency to buy one, collected income from it, and somebody else could buy it off you for more. Owners could also set a nickname on the people they owned.

It launched as a closed beta in November 2015 and spread the way invite-code apps did that year, through screenshots of other people's handles with a price next to them. By the second week of January 2016 it was trending, and it had still never been released to the public. Hey Inc., the studio behind it, was run by Siqi Chen.

The complaints arrived the day before the end. The Mary Sue and Gadgette both published pieces on 13 January pointing out that people were in the marketplace without being asked and that opting out was something you had to go and do yourself. The renaming feature was the part that made it a harassment tool with a leaderboard attached. On 14 January the servers went off and the App Store listing came down the same day. An Android build was in testing and never shipped.

None of this was ever going to reach me. It needed an invite from somebody already inside an American iOS beta, and it died before it had any other kind of door. I read about it later, from the shutdown coverage.

~ the record ~

~ the invite codes ~

Stolen! never had a website. getstolen.com was a GoDaddy parking page through the autumn of 2015, and the entire public surface of the product was an App Store listing plus a Twitter account that posted its own announcements. When the company wanted to tell its users the service was dead, the only place to do it was that account.

"We've decided to shut down the Stolen! app and service until further notice." Then, an hour or so later: "The app is no longer available in the App Store. We've heard everyone's concerns and have decided the best thing to do is to shut down." BuzzFeed's headline that week read "Hot New Game Stolen Is Already Dead".

~ the congresswoman ~

Katherine Clark, who represents a Massachusetts district and had been pressing federal agencies to take online harassment seriously, wrote to both Apple and Twitter and posted the letters publicly. Her argument was that the app let abusers own other people's profiles, and she asked Apple to review the listing and Twitter to look at the developer's access to its API.

Hey Inc. has never said whether the letter is what did it. The shutdown landed within a day of it, and the developers framed the decision as responding to users rather than to Congress. Either reading leaves the same shape: a product whose core mechanic required non-consenting participants lasted ten weeks once anyone outside the invite list noticed.

~ the second try ~

In February 2016 the same team came back with Famous, which kept the trading and dropped the ownership language, pitching it as fans supporting the people they liked. Apple removed that one too, on the grounds that it did not want apps assigning numerical values to people, and Famous moved to Android instead.

getstolen.com today answers 200 and redirects to a Discord invite belonging to somebody else entirely.

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