History

It was founded by a user known as "Ace". The owner, arc, is UID 4 and registered on 21 April 2017, and many long-standing trusted members registered on 29 April. Besides handles, early listings included PSN, Steam and other gaming accounts.

Reporters documented members trading hijacked Instagram and Twitter accounts with rare handles. One member showed off access to an internal phone-carrier portal. The admin answered that SIM-swap discussion had been banned and that black-hat activity broke the rules.

KrebsOnSecurity described the forum as a main hangout for SIM swappers, who hijack a victim's phone number to reset their accounts. OG handles were a common target.

A December 2018 backup with about 113,000 accounts appeared on rival forum RaidForums. It held usernames, emails, IP addresses, private messages and MD5 password hashes. Krebs expected investigators to make heavy use of it.

US prosecutors charged six members of a SIM-swapping group, and three phone-company employees who allegedly helped them, over about $2.4M in stolen cryptocurrency.

An attacker abused the avatar upload feature to plant a web shell, and reached data on more than 200,000 users.

Accounts belonging to Barack Obama, Elon Musk, Apple and others posted a bitcoin scam. Reporting traced it to people in the OG-handle scene. Before the attack, a member had advertised changing the email on any Twitter account for $250. Joseph O'Connor ("PlugWalkJoe") was arrested in Spain in 2021, extradited, pleaded guilty in 2023, and was sentenced to five years.

Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Twitter coordinated to remove hundreds of accounts tied to OGUsers, including "swappers" and middlemen. Instagram said the group targeted handles under five letters, and Facebook said many of those involved were minors. TikTok reclaimed squatted names, and Twitter suspended accounts under its spam rules.

About 348,000 email addresses were exposed and the data was sold on a rival forum.

About 529,000 email addresses, IP addresses and argon2 password hashes were exposed.

The site went down for about a week while rumors of a seizure spread on rival forums.

The forum moved to flipd.gg. It later explained that the goal was to distance itself from past controversy caused by weak moderation and unclear policies.

Free middleman deals no longer earn vouches, and a vouch requires a deal of at least $5.

The host's server failed along with the weekly backups stored on it. The forum was restored from a 10 April 2023 copy, losing about 3½ months of data, and moved to off-server backups.

Accounts posing as staff, including a fake arc, told members their accounts were "compromised". The official reply: staff never ask for passwords, and support happens only on-site.

Activity had dropped after the rename, and copycat sites had used the change to confuse members. The forum moved to oguser.com under the OGU name with a new design, redirected flipd.gg and ogusers.gg there, and survived a data rollback with daily backups.

An FBI and Europol-led operation seized major cybercrime forums and the Sellix shop platform, which many sellers used for automatic delivery. OGU changed its auto-buy policy as a result. Members have been asking for "a Sellix alternative" ever since.

An OGU member was served in a lawsuit over selling "illegally obtained" Fortnite accounts. The same issue warned about a Telegram bug that let people fake conversations while showing another member's username.

A $55k deal dispute came with accusations of faked vouches, plus an Instagram username incident and several bans.

News Week #19 described a rise in illicit deals and exits, including a member already in DWC who exited on his own partner. A Verified seller lost his rank over off-site disputes.

A site crash hit, an ex-Apollo member was placed in DWC, a fake OGU site was used to impersonate users, a Telegram flaw leaking IP addresses was reported, and a member was accused of a memecoin "rug pull".

The registrar suspended oguser.com, and the forum ran on ogusers.gg until the domain came back two days later. After "drama with Meta", the Instagram sections were removed. The OGUsers subreddit was banned, two staff stepped down, a Trusted member was demoted, and a member was banned for selling his OGU account.

The site passed 1,000,000 registered accounts and launched an official Telegram bot. An ex-staff member was reported to have exited with about $650k in total, and a $2.5M middleman deal for the Telegram username "ghost" set a record.

They came back but are visible only to upgraded members.