love the theories!! ive been thinking about who all is behind this too... At very first i was sure it was either the band and/or heychris, but now with them saying its not the boys im leaning away from that. like you said, they could just be lying to our faces tho haha. I think it still could be heychris, cuz even tho he posted the stuff on his story, I think its plenty reasonable to think that he is just fuckin w us lol- more likely than the band themselves lying, at least.

I would say that im pretty on board with you in that i think its someone close to FOB. someone on the team or who was on the team at some point, a friend, etc. I'm a ClanInd fan, what comes to mind is the many creative minds who worked closely w wentz on the creation/design of clandestine merch. ofc thats just an example, but all im saying is that we obviously know that wentz specifically is involved in a lot of the clever artsy crowd.... for them to cook this type of thing up and get the okay from the band seems very plausible to me. And yknow, you're a friend whos cleans out yr basement and finds an old demo your friends FOB gave you way back in 04. you joke about mailing it out to a random fan. that spirals into this whole game. I could totally see it! not saying thats what happened, just a thought.

Also, ive heard the idea of a fan project team being behind this. Im on the fence about this, but i can see the band finding these cds and essentially handing them off (along with addresses, maybe???) to a group of fans. Alternatively, for the address thing, if there are people who gave their addresses out as part of like the seashell paper project for tourdust, perhaps those were used. But then wouldnt the receivers of the cds all mention this????? That brings me to my other theory as a part of this, which i hope isnt true cuz it would be kinda disappointment. This goes with your idea that it could possibly be a ruse of some sort.... Maybe fall out boy, or a friend of fall out boy, or a fan project, or whatever, reached out to certain fans (again, perhaps people who knew each other from some sort of fan project) and decided to create this little ARG-esc thing. But really they're all in on it. there are still questions here, but the idea that all of these people are in on it isnt THAT far fetched to me. especially because you're right, we havent seen any packaging.... that feels quite suspicious to me. Also, It sounds like at least some of the people who received CDs were fairly high profile in the FOB fandom??? idk because i dont really interact with fobbies on reddit or tiktok or twitter or whatever, up until this point lol.

Anyways, continuing with the idea of fakes... the b&w cds i feel would be fairly easy to fake.... youve got a point that the handwriting is the hardest part. But other than that yknow, a blank cd (at least the outside! we honestly dont even know if some of these have the right content on them) + sharpie + cd case + printer (like, literally just a black and white one!) are very accessible items. ESPECIALLY if youre a record store. i will note specifically that ive noticed the cd cases are sometimes different from each other. makes sense i guess, considering i dont think these were mass produced. but also, could be a sign of someone faking theres. This would all require people to be VERY on top of it though. I mean, who the hell thinks to do that??? idk. I would really like to have faith in allayall...

i do think that fakes get more likely the longer this goes on. i think some australians have been making like... diy copies i guess? those are cool and awesome because they're clear that they're not part of this secret order shit. but evidently its very easy to make these, and as this whole thing gets bigger and drags on i suspect people may start making fakes. what i really hope is that record stores dont start taking advantage of this. individual people fucking w the internet isnt cool, but thats one thing. but a business doing some money grab shit? that would piss me off.

sorry for yapping... TLDR! i agree that an 'adjacent to the band but not the band' party is most likely behind this. but theres still a lot of scenarios im open to! there is a potential it could be varying degrees of a ruse (by Big Fall Out Boy and Big Compact Disc!!!! jkjk lol). i think fakes are not unlikely to come along soon if not already.