Mr Worldwide

Let’s start by searching for the newly founded company Globetrail2024 on Instagram.

It didn’t take long to find their account, and among the posts, one in particular stood out. The post mentioned a contest winner and included a QR code that looked interesting. Scanning the code seemed like a good next step, and sure enough, it led to the profile of the contest winner. At this point, it was clear that the display picture on the winner’s account matched the image from the post.

There were two ways to move forward from here: either browse through the posts with the same hashtag or directly search for the winner’s account. The display picture seemed to provide a clue, and after some searching, the account of Anirudh Vedant was found, confirming the identity of the contest winner.

Next came the task of identifying the cities linked to the contest. For the first post, which featured a coffee shop, increasing the brightness of the image revealed hidden coordinates, which led to a coffee shop in New York (NY). The second city was easier to uncover, quick reverse image search showed that the photo was from Paris (P). The same technique worked for the third image, which pointed to Tokyo (T).

With all the pieces falling into place, the challenge became clearer!