You found me! A Critical Line puzzle solution

When I was offered this job, I wasn’t expecting a round-the-world trip with all expenses paid! Thank you to the 10+ puzzlers who attempted to catch my captors. I can confirm that we have unmasked the devious bunch who kidnapped me – read on to see the answer!

The solution

The mysterious group may have been clever enough to kidnap me, but they made one key mistake…

I had my trusty 360-degree camera (hidden in plain sight, of course).

The street view shots were transformed into panoramas and then provided in a very specific order. You might have recognised Australia Square in the first photo, noticed the flag of Thailand in the third, spotted a London bus in the fourth, and maybe even ID’d Cape Town’s Table Mountain in the background of the last. Taking the first letter of each country begins to unmask the identities of the kidnappers.

Putting it all together:

• A – Australia
• C – Canada
• T – Thailand
• U – United Kingdom
• A – Argentina
• R – Romania
• I – India
• E – Ecuador
• S – South Africa

My kidnappers were ACTUARIES!

The exact locations gave you an additional method to identify the countries. They are all national institutes or associations as listed by the International Actuarial Association.

For anyone who wants to pin-point the locations of the original 360 photos, check out this challenge link on GeoGuessr .

The destination detectives

Thank you to those who submitted a solution in time for me to figure out who my captors were! The following six puzzlers were the first to correctly identify my captors, in order of submission:

• Andrew Zheng 🥇
• Daniel Ah-Sun 🥈
• Stephen Edwards🥉
• Min Chen
• Jon Shen
• Noah Gribble
• Larry Uy

One lucky sleuth Daniel Ah-Sun was randomly selected from these submissions and has won the prize of a $50 book voucher from the Actuaries Institute!