In a sneaker world rife with false information and photos of fake sneakers, accuracy sets Yeezy Mafia apart. “I just want to share the truth, because so many other people get noticed for sharing fake samples or fake news, and then people get hyped for releases that are never coming out,” Don says. From this angle, Don is a sort of muckraking journalist, reporting on a subject people are desperate to know more about, and obtaining this information by any means necessary. But he doesn’t pretend to be objective—more than anything else, Don, like the hundreds of thousands of Twitter users who hoover up his posts, is first and foremost a fan. “I could release their entire release schedule for 2018 right now if I wanted to,” Don says. “But I don’t because I am a fan of Adidas and respect what they do.” He speaks warmly of the Yeezy brand, and shows me that he is wearing a Yeezy Season 5 denim jacket as proof. It’s a sweet gesture, but unnecessary: How could anyone but a superfan spend this much time and energy thinking about the inner workings of Adidas?

Adidas has not publicly condemned Yeezy Mafia, and declined to comment on them specifically for this piece. (A statement provided to GQ stated that Adidas is actively trying to fix the problem of hackers infiltrating their ecommerce platforms, but did not name Yeezy Mafia specifically.) Privately, however, Adidas is obviously aware of Yeezy Mafia. On at least once occasion, someone on Adidas’s social media team “liked” a Yeezy Mafia tweet, seemingly by accident. And Jonathan Wexler, Adidas’s Global Director of Influencer Marketing, recently fired back at the account on Twitter after Yeezy Mafia claimed that Stormzy, an Adidas-signed musician, had worn fake Yeezy Boost 350s on stage. (YM maintains that Wexler was either protecting Stormzy, or simply misinformed about the product.)

But Yeezy Mafia isn’t just a resource for sneaker news—it also provides a look into the increasingly opaque world of sneakers, serving as a resource when Adidas can’t or won’t be one. An example: Last October, dozens of pairs of the Adidas Yeezy Boost 350 V2 “Frozen Yellow” surfaced on the Instagram accounts of popular re-sellers in the North Carolina area, weeks before their planned release date in November. When I reached out,Yeezy Mafia explained that Adidas’s distribution center in Spartanburg, South Carolina had been robbed, or that its employees had been paid off to steal pairs early. Yeezy Mafia info in hand, I reached out to Adidas, which wouldn’t comment beyond saying that employees were “looking into the allegation.” The broad response made sense: a few dozen pairs of sneakers aren’t worth a PR nightmare. Still, Yeezy Mafia helped illuminate the complicated cat and mouse game Adidas and other brands have to play not just with leaked information, but with their own supply chains, as well—information Adidas wouldn’t discuss with me on the record.

Still, the age of the sneaker leak—a moment in many ways typified by Yeezy Mafia itself—has had an effect on how major sneaker companies handle release information. Today, brands like Nike and Adidas have become increasingly tight-fisted. Journalists are often left in the dark about forthcoming releases until a day or two before the info goes public. Interviews with designers and executives are watched over by PR reps who don’t hesitate to interject if a question is perceived as potentially controversial. When it comes to Yeezy releases, Adidas often won’t announce the time of a release beforehand. So it’s inevitable that this information would come from an unsanctioned source.

“I could release their entire release schedule for 2018 right now if I wanted to,” Don says. “But I don’t because I am a fan of Adidas and respect what they do.”

Legally speaking, Adidas might not be able to do much about Yeezy Mafia, anyway. The use of “carts” or “bots” is technically forbidden by the Better Online Ticket Sales (BOTS) Act of 2016, which "prohibits the circumvention of control measures used by Internet ticket sellers to ensure equitable consumer access to tickets for certain events.” But Adidas can’t do much to stop pictures of their sneakers from surfacing online—Yeezy Mafia’s more recent focus. “They’re not violating any copyright of Adidas by doing that,” says Christopher Sprigman, a law professor at New York University who specializes in intellectual property law. Sprigman also explains that even if factory workers in China are sending Yeezy Mafia pictures of the shoes, it would be the factory, not Yeezy Mafia, at fault of violating any non-disclosure agreement it has with Adidas. And as for the Yeezy Mafia name itself, Sprigman says that while Adidas and Kim Kardashian West may argue that the name gives the impression that YM is affiliated or sponsored with Kanye West or Adidas, “The response [Yeezy Mafia] could use would be, ‘No, we’re using the Yeezy name descriptively. We’re not using it as an indicator that we’re a source of products, we’re using it to describe that we’re a group that’s heavily into Kanye West’s clothing line.’” Any litigation might be a waste of time and money.