What started as three students deciding to make a campuswide Snapchat account called iastate_snaps for entertainment exploded into a hub for thousands of photographs and videos of drugs and nudity.

“We thought it’d be a cool idea,” said one of the initial owners, who preferred not to give his name in concern for personal privacy. “We weren’t thinking it’d get big at all.”

In less than two weeks, the images on the account were being viewed by more than 16,700 people.

Launched in 2011, Snapchat is an application where users can send texts, photos and videos, also known as “snaps,” that will disappear one to 10 seconds after the receiver opens them. Users can either share their snaps with individual people or post them to their own story feed, which can then be viewed by all of their friends who have added your account. Each Snapchat story includes a list of everyone who views it.

By using third-party applications, such as SaveSnap, SnapGrab or Snap-Hack, owners of the accounts are able to save the photos and videos that get sent to them and then upload them to their story feed without the user’s knowledge.

Monitoring the iastate_snaps account was a 24/7 job for the three students — Alex, Mitch and Kevin.

“We had 2,000 users adding us every day,” Kevin said. “If one of us was in class, the others would be running the Snapchat account.”

The username iastate_snaps first gained traction throughout the student body around Oct. 15, but it was shutdown by Oct. 27.

“We have no idea how it got shutdown,” Kevin said. “We didn’t receive any threats, and we weren’t contacted by anyone. We weren’t using it for personal gain at all, and there was no legal trouble.”

According to the Snapchat guidelines on the website, users cannot snap “nudity or sexually suggestive content involving minors,” “minors engaged in activities that are physically dangerous and harmful” or “invasions of privacy,” among other things.

In terms of Snapchat Stories, the guidelines state, “If … you post a story that is not suitable for sensitive viewers (but does not otherwise violate these rules), other Snapchatters may be shown a ‘sensitive content’ warning before viewing your Stories.”

So far, no “sensitive content” warnings have appeared on the existing Iowa State accounts, the creators said.

Any Snapchat user can report another account through the support site by stating the age of the recipient and sender and explaining what happened.

After iastate_snaps was shutdown, replica accounts began to appear using different usernames. The account owner of cy_snaps, who asked to remain anonymous, said he figured iastate_snaps was reported for their images of drugs.

“It’s so risky, and that’s why I’m very careful,” the owner of cy_snaps said. “You’ve got to be sneaky and creative.”

Darin Van Ryswyk, the investigations captain for the ISU Police, said he was interacting with college students through a club when the students suggested that the police needed to look into the iastate_snaps account because there was a lot of “bad stuff” on it, especially nudity and drugs.

“I said, ‘Oh my gosh, there’s nudity on the Internet?” Van Ryswyk said. “As a cop, it doesn’t surprise me for you to say that there’s a lot of marijuana out there. But to say that there are pictures of marijuana doesn’t help me a whole lot.”

Van Ryswyk said by the time they would get through with an investigation, it’d be hard to figure out where the drugs were.

“If you had a pound of marijuana in your dorm room, and you took a picture of it sitting on your futon, how am I going to know where that is?” Van Ryswyk said.

He said even though they have full-time narcotics investigators on the drug task force, the task of trying to catch people by finding the data on the backend of a photo if it’s geo-located and getting the subpoenas to do that would take all the officers in the department and require them to no longer take any other reports.

The owner of cy_snaps said if people find out it’s him, he will shut the account down because anonymity is the “name of the game.”

“I feel like if people put a face to what’s happening and what they’re sending, they’ll stop,” he said. “I’m not doing it for fame. I feel like it’s the mystery behind the whole thing that makes it.”

However, Van Ryswyk said the anonymity “is only so-so.”

“We see this with students a lot—they get into this realm, and they don’t have a filter,” he said.

Geoff Huff, the Ames Police investigations commander, warned that photos never go away.

“I’ve got a guy down the hallway that can still get it off your phone even if you didn’t save it,” Huff said. “It’s always still there, until that information is overwritten. It’s just like a hard drive—if nothing else is overwriting that space, it’s still always there. I don’t think a lot of people understand how that works.”

The cy_snaps owner said if someone sends a photo with a face in it, he will block out the face before posting it.

“There are backdoors in Snapchat. Everything can be hacked,” he said.

It’s mild and fun, he said, and the competition between the different Snapchat accounts that are currently running brings a better quality of entertainment for viewers.

State_snaps is another popular Snapchat account that is active. An image posted to its story on Nov. 6 showed that their stories were getting 10,000 views, with one image on the story having 355 screenshots.

The owner of cy_snaps said his account currently has about 7,000 followers.

“That’s 25 percent of the student body I have access to,” he said. “People like seeing this stuff—it’s seeing what your peers are up to.”

The cy_snaps owner thinks people are drawn to these accounts for more than just the racy images.

“You get a glimpse of everyone’s life, and the thing that binds us all together is we go to Iowa State,” he said. “With Iowa State snaps, people want to be a part of something—they want to be a part of the cy_snaps story. It’s within our human ability, our DNA—people want to be a part of a greater story.”