Did someone confess to murder on 'secret sharing' website? Amateur sleuths at it again after mystery social media message 

By Daily Mail Reporter

Published: 21:09 EDT, 1 September 2013 | Updated: 04:44 EDT, 2 September 2013

A website that allows members to anonymously submit postcards bearing secrets has created a media furor after a user posted an apparent murder confession on Saturday.

PostSecret, describes itself as an ‘ongoing community art project where people mail in their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard.’

On Saturday it posted an image of a postcard featuring a map with an arrow and a message that read ‘she dumped me, but really, I dumped her (body).’

Within a few hours of the PostSecret tweet Reddit users had pinpointed the location on the postcard to a driving range in Chicago's Jackson Park

Cryptic clue or hoax? Reddit users quickly pounced on the information posted on PostSecret and established that the map showed a driving range in Chicago

The post reads like a clue and that’s exactly how users on the popular social media platform Reddit have been treating it.

The wannabe sleuths quickly picked up the case after the cryptic message was tweeted by PostSecret founder Frank Warren rather than reported to the police.

On Saturday night he tweeted: 'I have tried to share all the information I have on the top secret this week. Can we ask reddit to help identify the location?'

Warren’s attempt to crowdsource information about the potential crime has attracted plenty of interest from Redditors but also from other people who believe he should pass the information over to the police to establish if a real crime took place if it is a bogus post from a cruel hoaxer.

Reddit users falsely identified missing person Sunil Tripathi as one of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects in April

This isn’t the first time Reddit users have attempted to play at being private detectives and their track record so far is less than impressive.

Reddit was forced to apologize in April in the aftermath of the Boston Bombing, when users looking at footage of the Boston Bombing suspects wrongly identified one of them as Sunil Tripathi, a 22-year-old missing Brown University student.

With no evidence beyond that Tripathi looked similar to one of the suspects, Reddit users falsely accused the missing student of involvement in the bombing that left three dead and more than 180 injured.

'I'd like to extend the deepest apologies to the family of Sunil Tripathi for any part we may have had in relaying what has turned out to be faulty information,' the moderator of the FindBostonBombers subreddit wrote in a statement.

'We cannot begin to know what you're going through and for that we are truly sorry. 

'Several users, twitter users, and other sources had heard him identified as the suspect and believed it to be confirmed. We were mistaken.'

Reddit was in the headlines for the wrong reasons a second time in April when a user, named Naratto, caused a sensation after posting an apparent confession to murdering his sister’s abusive boyfriend using a Confession Bear meme.

Reddit user Naratto caused a sensation after posting an apparent confession to murdering his sister's abusive boyfriend using a Confession Bear meme

Naratto's startling admission read: 'My sister had an abusive meth addict boyfriend. I killed him with his own drugs while he was unconscious and they ruled it as an overdose.'

His post quickly attracted more than 3,000 comments with many Reddit users taking him at his word.

Naratto then attempted damage limitation by claiming he had only been ‘joking’ but by that stage other Reddit users had began unearthing his personal details and informing authorities.

The posts were traced to a 24-year-old with ties to San Diego, local police investigated the incident and Naratto was forced to involve lawyers.

Understandably Reddit is concerned about the propensity of its users to jump to conclusions when provided with scraps of evidence about a criminal case or potential crime.

Within a few hours of the PostSecret tweet Reddit users had pinpointed the location on the postcard to a driving range in Chicago's Jackson Park

But as the wannabe sleuths worked on their latest case, Reddit moderators moved quickly to try and shut down the investigation and promptly deleted many related posts.

Within an hour, Reddit users had established that the map on the postcard was a driving range in Chicago

The Reddit feed was largely deleted by site moderators on Sunday, based on worries that the feed might wrongly implicate someone in a crime.

The interest in the possible crime has even prompted local police to scour the area, reports the Chicago Tribune.

Chicago Officer Daniel O'Brien, a police spokesman, said the Grand Crossing police station received an anonymous phone call on Sunday about the posting.

'They said they had found this cryptic message on a website,' he said.

The police search at Jackson Park turned up nothing, O'Brien said, but the information was passed on to Chicago detectives.