Riley Walz is an American software engineer whose viral web projects treat public data as raw material for jokes that behave like journalism. Born in 2002 in Ballston Spa, New York, and based in San Francisco since January 2023, he built his reputation on small, fast, cheap sites — Bop Spotter, IMG_0001, LooksMapping, Panama Playlists, Find My Parking Cops — and then, in November 2025, on Jmail, the Gmail clone that let the world scroll through Jeffrey Epstein's released emails as if logged into his inbox. In February 2026 he joined OpenAI's OAI Labs.

## Formation: verification exploits and voice-overs

The through-line starts early. At twelve he was selling voice-overs on Fiverr (500-plus orders, he told The New Yorker, with earnings lent out on r/Borrow). At sixteen he built Routeshuffle, a random running-route generator that earned his first internet money. At seventeen, over Christmas break in 2019–2020, he manufactured a fictional congressional candidate — Andrew Walz, Republican of Rhode Island — submitted him to Ballotpedia, and collected a Twitter verification checkmark on February 9, 2020, days before anyone asked for an ID. CNN put a camera crew in his high school classroom; Twitter suspended the account. Around the same period he won an internship at MSCHF, the internet-prank products company, by getting a city permit for a newspaper box holding his resume on the sidewalk outside their office — the clearest documented influence on his later format.

He studied business in college, dropped out, and in December 2022 co-founded Numerous.ai — ChatGPT inside spreadsheets — with his best friend Mehran Jalali. The pair moved to San Francisco in January 2023; the company, he told the Times, still runs.

## The New York pranks

Walz's New York period produced the stunt that established his physical-world register. A roommate's joke Google Maps listing — "Mehran's Steak House" — accumulated a waitlist of about 900 parties; rather than let the bit die, the group staged a real one-night restaurant on September 23, 2023, serving roughly 140 diners with dozens of friends as staff. The New York Times and the Guardian covered it as equal parts prank and genuinely competent pop-up.

## San Francisco: data exhaust as interface

In San Francisco the method crystallized: find data that is technically public but practically illegible, then reissue it inside a pixel-faithful parody of a product everyone already knows. Bop Spotter (September 2024) hid a $100 solar-powered Android phone on a Mission District pole to run Shazam 24/7 — "ShotSpotter, but for music," or as his own page puts it, "culture surveillance... about catching vibes." IMG_0001 (November 2024) surfaced five million unseen early-iPhone YouTube uploads at random, a found-footage time capsule that drew 600,000 visitors in a month and later an exhibition at the Kunstkerk in Dordrecht. LooksMapping (July 2025) ran a CLIP model over 2.8 million Google Maps review photos to rank restaurants by clientele "hotness" — self-described as "a mirror held up to our collective vanity." Panama Playlists (July 30, 2025) published the inferred Spotify accounts of JD Vance, Pam Bondi, Sam Altman, and others; partial confirmations suggested the sleuthing was mostly right.

Then the institutions started answering back. Find My Parking Cops (September 23, 2025) exploited sequential citation IDs on the SFMTA payment portal to map all 325 parking officers near real time; the agency obscured the data within about four hours. His "Waymo DDoS" — fifty people ordering robotaxis at dusk to the city's longest dead-end street, staged in July and revealed in October — got the service geofenced out of the area overnight. Offline, he posted "Coming 2026, Chick-fil-A" signs on a burned-out building and "$950" shoplifting placards outside Louis Vuitton. The New York Times profiled him in October 2025 as "The Tech Jester Who Pranks San Francisco"; the New Yorker had already placed him in "a lineage of prankster art." He resists the label: "Just engineer is fine."

## Jmail

When the House Oversight Committee released roughly 20,000 pages of Epstein estate documents on November 12, 2025, Luke Igel called Walz. In about five hours — with Cursor, and AI OCR on the scanned PDFs — they built Jmail: a faithful Gmail parody in which "you are logged in as Jeffrey Epstein," every message linked back to the government's source scan. It launched November 21 and did at least 18.4 million visits that month; CJR later counted 25 million-plus unique visitors. A volunteer crew expanded it into a suite — JPhotos, JDrive, JFlights, Jamazon, Jacebook, Jmessage, Jotify, and the Gemini-parody "Jemini" — plus a redacted Yahoo inbox routed through Distributed Denial of Secrets and Drop Site News. The same interface joke, aimed at the decade's biggest document dump, had become infrastructure for reading a public record.

## After the jester

The months since have run in both directions at once. In March 2026 came Payphone Go — a scavenger hunt for California's ~2,200 licensed payphones, built on a public-records request — and the purchase, with two friends, of a foreclosed Sunset alley for $26,000. In April they auctioned its naming rights; Notion paid $140,000 and "Dirt Alley" became The Notion Way, its pavement carrying a crowdsourced mural of 1,280 pixel tiles. Meanwhile, in February 2026, OpenAI hired him into OAI Labs, Joanne Jang's team prototyping new interfaces for collaborating with AI — the institution hiring the stress-tester.

## What the record does not settle

The packet keeps the seams visible. His exact birth date is unpublished; Bop Spotter's hardware status is unverified; Panama Playlists' attributions are inference that only some targets confirmed; Jmail's traffic figures differ by metric; and nothing about his OpenAI work is public. Coverage also skews toward his last two years — the New York period before San Francisco is thinly documented.

*This index was compiled from public sources and does not imply the subject's endorsement. Citations live in the packet's source catalog.*