A scuba diver wiped away the algae on a submerged car's license plate and exclaimed: "It's them!" That discovery of two long-missing American teens' apparent remains was the latest tragic find for a subculture of YouTube sleuths.
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Among the platform's viral hits scoring billions of views is a niche of YouTubers who use sonar devices to search waterways for vehicles linked to US missing persons cases - and the bones they may hold.
That formula was central to revelations this week in a 21-year-old mystery in the southern state of Tennessee, one of a series of cold cases unravelled with the revenue generated by the clicks that these operations' clips generate.
Experts note the larger boom in internet sleuthing has had a mixed impact, with high-profile misfires and the temptation for viral content, but in some key instances the crowd's contribution has been critical.
Teens Erin Foster and Jeremy Bechtel disappeared in April 2000 from their small central Tennessee town of Sparta, leaving family and friends to hope they had just run away to start a new life.
But 42-year-old Jeremy Sides - a scuba diver whose YouTube channel Exploring with Nug focuses on finding missing property and people - posted a video on Dec 4 that has since been viewed some 1.4 millions times and which seems to have resolved the mystery.
"Once I confirmed it was the tag (license plate) ... it was just a wave: This is going to be over, they get to go home, their families have answers," he told AFP of his dive to find the car in Tennessee's Calfkiller River.