Description

Church Street, Cape Town. De Wet & Kirkwood Merchant Bank's original branch is being cleared ahead of demolition — until a night security officer notices something wrong: the old sub-level vault's inner seal has been disturbed and reset, during a scheduled power outage, in a space every system the bank owns has listed as empty and decommissioned since 1994.

The bank's Head of Compliance & Legal has brought you in quietly, before this becomes a board matter — or a police one. Your job: work out whether anything was really stored down there, what it was, and — if it's gone — who took it, and why.

What you get: A full printable evidence packet — incident logs, decades-old personnel files, financial records, and personal correspondence going back to 1983 — paired with three real digital gates: a staff webmail account, and two external banking portals, each only accessible once you've found the right credentials hidden in the physical evidence.

Five people had some form of access, motive, or history tied to that vault. Only one actually opened it. The rest are real leads, not decoys you can rule out by guesswork — you'll need to cross-reference financial records, decades-old paperwork, and inconsistent alibis before you can name who, what, and why with confidence.

• Format: Printable PDF evidence packet + web-based digital investigation
• Players: Solo, or gather a group — works as a quiet night in or a full investigation board on the wall
• Typical solve time: 60–90 minutes for the core case
• Framing: You're private investigators, engaged directly and confidentially by the bank's own Compliance & Legal department

Every institutional detail — the vault procedures, the financial records, the 1983 paper trail — is built to hold up under real scrutiny. Nothing hands you the answer; everything has to be assembled.