How DID you create the username 50?
Belgium
Last question, how did you get into that world man?
I got 50 as my only reward for reporting a 0day exploit that allowed me to log in onto Twitch accounts without email or pass, including system admins.
I used that method to obtain 50. Prior to that I was essentially the kingpin of Twitch usernames on the market but by telling Twitch about the 0day, all records relating to my alias "Void" were wiped and I got to keep 50. They also said I would not be bannned in the future, unless I commit additional account theft/and or selling on their platform. So despite stealing hundreds upon hundreds of usernames, I now have a perfectly clean slate and all prior records in their system about me have been deleted.
I put that on my resume now, minus the whole account theft thing. I have a non-prosecution agreement though.
Those usernames under 3 characters were a glitch I think where their character limiter didn't function properly. They're all created around the same time.
A business partner and I took the entire alphabet and Twitch just decided to ban the whole alphabet before we could even sell them
Good times.
Not that it makes it much better but I only targeted accounts that had been abandoned for years, which I was able to see by looking at "last activity" on the public API.
During this time but prior to the Twitch deal; I basically did the same thing when Kik became popular, just bruteforce 24/7 while I was at school. No one prior to me had figured out that if someone deactivated their Kik account, logging into it made it active again. So I dominated that market as well for a while, until others finally figured out that I was getting Kik names they knew to be previously deleted. So this got me some of the most valuable ones. Obviously I wasn't the only one using a bruteforcer but the deleted usernames was a completely untapped pile of gold and I split it with a business associate who had helped doing some of the testing. This would also make it less obvious that I was the sole person suddenly bringing super high value Kiks to the market.
I was pretty poor when my mom divorced my dad who worked in chemical engineering so one day playing Halo and hanging around on Twitch, an online friend taught me and someone else how to bruteforce and sell usernames en masse.
So I decided to hustle and went from being poor to making way way more than what I'd make in a summer job in highschool. I initially started with illegal account theft by letting a bruteforcing script run 24/7 on Twitch but after my non-prosecution deal I moved on to IG and used what is called a "checker" or "autoclaimer" and only obtained usernames legally.
Basically because IG resets inactive accounts randomly, this program randomly scanned my custom homemade username list for availability. As soon as it picks something up, it registers the name to the account I had running on it.
And yes I did do my taxes properly.
The buyers were of course often shady people (including many who ended up in jail for all sorts of cybercrime) so you can probably see why my Paypal has been frozen like 7 or 8 times due to "EU Anti-Money Laundering Compliance Check."
Which I beat every time, and keep tons of records about every deal and all these Paypal compliance probes have gotten me to write damn near a thesis on the value of usernames and why people would buy them.
I do sell some of my old stock now and then but I'm not really active in that market anymore. My alias is is still known but the tech has advanced so far that I can't really do it as a sidejob.
People spend thousands of dollars now on the fastest "autoclaimer" possible, both to safely swap a username to a different account, or to steal someone's username that was attempted to be swapped.
Someone like me can't compete anymore, and besides I earn well from my IT job as a Software Test Engineer.