Microsoft Australia set up an online game in which the person who found the money that was buried on the Internet would get $10,000. They aimed at promoting Internet Explorer 8. They also wanted to encourage visitors of the campaign website. When it was introduced, it indirectly told users of other browsers to ‘get lost’ in an unpleasant way. This led to the setting up of a parodying website by a Mozilla developer. This forced MS to change the wording.
A while back, the treasure hunt apparently ended quietly. This happened when the campaign’s Twitter account  announced on August 18 that someone had won the game. He successfully retrieved  both the website address and password to access it. 11 days before, they announced the winner, Mr. Gavin Ballard. Most of us were just surprised to see a blog post on ‘i.techreport’.   The post revealed that the website was ‘FastSafePrivateBetter.com’ and the password was ‘Courval’.
If you go to this website, they will ask for a password. Enter the password, so that you can download a document which contains all the answers to the clues which were provided by Microsoft to find where the $10,000 was ‘buried’.  Reading the document, it is clear that the campaign was more elaborate than what we expected. The clues were transmitted through the campaign’s Twitter account which has about 3550 followers left. The clues were quite clever and apparently mind-challenging at times. The treasure hunter has to use Microsoft’s and many other online products very often to solve the puzzles. Gavin Ballard took 67 clues and 65 days to find out the correct answer. After reading this, are not you regretting not having played this online treasure hunt?