Zimbra, who is prominent on the rap-leak forum Leakth.is, claims to have acquired the OK Computer sessions through the Leakth.is Discord group. “I advertised I had some unreleased Beatles,” Zimbra tells me via Discord direct message. “So I get a DM from a Hoserama account saying he has 18 hours of unreleased Radiohead… Google the username and of course I find the whole thing about him and concerts and so on. I figure well, this guy seems legit, he has snippets and everything which verify it’s really unreleased. I trade him after an hour of banter trying to learn how he got it.”

Back on Leakth.is, Zimbra apparently offered one of the newly obtained versions of “Lift” for $500. “Considering that Kanye mumbling for 2 minutes sells for about $2K, I think that’s a pretty good deal right?” Zimbra tells me. “Turns out it’s not.” Direct messages start arriving consisting of “people just massively hating on me, some asking how much for all 18 hours… I toss the $150K figure to someone as a hypothetical because at some point you can just do the math... Then the Reddit post drops and at this point everyone kinda freaks out. I do, the now-known-false Hoserama account does, Reddit does too. And it leaks.”

The actual Hoserama, whom I reach through several online accounts, denies taking part in the leak. “I’m not the guy who released the OK Computer sessions,” Hoserama says through the Radiohead Discord group, which he only joined after hearing about the drama. “It’s some guy, no idea who, who basically took my name.” Later over email Hoserama reiterates, “I had nothing to do with the Radiohead sessions.”

John Nicholas, the Google doc guy, says the Reddit post helped shame Zimbra into posing as the more established Radiohead bootlegger and leaking the same files they had been trying to sell, just hours before. “I don’t get the sense that Zimbra is the actual thief, but none of his stories about how he obtained the files really add up either,” Nicholas writes. “In the end, he was so spooked by the chance of being outed beyond the private, Martin Shkreli-like trading circles that he briefly impersonated Hoserama.”

For their part, Zimbra declines to comment on the record about who posted the leak. When it comes to Radiohead’s official release of it, Zimbra seems ambivalent. “Their response is for sure a very Radiohead-ish response,” Zimbra tells me via a secure email account. “Even my anxiety is giving me a confused look trying to figure out if this is good or bad. Sucks the whole $150k thing and ‘ransom’ was taken way out of context to the point of the band saying it, but oh well.”

Nicholas, from the Google doc, actually concurs on this point. “Apparently the band is under the impression that they were being extorted by the original leaker,” he writes. “I don’t think that was Zimbra’s intent. While we’re not a fan of what Zimbra was trying to do, at all, he never told us anything to suggest he was trying to get money from the band, only from fans.”

For now, who might have traded the OK Computer leak to Zimbra in the first place remains a mystery. “I’m pretty much as in the dark as you,” Zimbra writes to me. “The fake Hoserama is who I got it from initially. I tried to contact them afterwards… even tried to figure out myself who it was. But stuff like this happens. People will make alternate accounts to sell one specific thing if it’s too risky. I’d say that’s the case here.”

Unsurprisingly, Nicholas has a theory about this as well. “The situation that makes the most sense to me is that these minidiscs were digitized by a third party so the band could choose material from them for the OKNOTOK box set, and that someone involved at the third party stole the files and traded them,” he says, but notes that Zimbra also mentioned having other Radiohead music that was not part of the leak. “It’s possible that there was a larger theft at work here.”

This time, hyper-vigilant fans—and Radiohead themselves—appear to have made the best of a strange situation, transforming a leaker’s personal profit motive into charitable support for Extinction Rebellion: an environmental activist group that wants to save the physical world.