Armchair logging of TB’s

[Captain and Mate]

We were surprised today by 2 notifications regarding discoveries of two of our TB’s that have been missing for several years. One of them disappeared from the first cache we placed it in and never had any miles at all. The other vanished from a cache in Washington state in 2007. In any case, upon checking the cacher’s profile, we found he has over 3,000 finds and even more TB logs. Most surprisingly, he appears to have logged over 600 TB logs just today. Aside from the effort required to do that, we are puzzled as to how he did it. We don’t really care, but wouldn’t he need the tracking numbers? We’re just wondering if anyone has experienced this with any of their bugs.

[Barry Butrymowicz]

If I can see that they have never actually seen my TB or coin, I delete the log. There are many random number generators out there, I am sure that it would not be that hard to write a program to search for TB #’s

[Captain and Mate]

That makes sense. We didn’t consider that possibility. The cacher in question appears to be from the Netherlands (no surprise) and some of the other logs referred to “found on the internet” and a “virtual discovery.” We did delete the bogus logs.

[Trekkin and Birdin]

I’ve been told there are facebook groups where tracking numbers are placed so that people can virtually log a TB. I don’t understand why, but apparently that’s part of the game for some folks.

I have never seen such a group, but someone else told me at an event about one.

[Trekkin and Birdin]

And also…..I did a short stint writing about geocaching on the Examiner.com website, and had done a gift giving article around Christmas time. I had posted some items in a photo to accompany the article, and without really thinking about it, had included my “Hi My Name is…” badge style travel bug as one of the items. After a time, I started getting logs like you mention and knowing it had been in a box for a couple years, finally asked one of the loggers. I hadn’t blurred out the tracking number. I finally asked Groundspeak to lock that one for me. I can’t use it to let others discover now, but I just lost interest in the whole TB thing, anyway…..

For reasons like this.

[Author]

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