Help New England Patriot Vince Wilfork Recover His Stolen Super Bowl Ring!

Be sad for New England Patriots nose tackle Vince Wilfork (#75). Someone has stolen his precious Super Bowl XXXIX ring, and now Big Vince needs your help to get it back.

Help Vince is an local interactive marketing game for the New England Patriots that integrates SCVNGR, a location-based, check-in style smartphone app. A few weeks ago, Patriots sports bloggers received simple shirts to start the buzz, but the Help Vince game officially opened last week.

According to the official press conference, Vince brought his Super Bowl ring to his 7th annual draft day fundraiser benefiting diabetes charities. While showing the ultimate prize in American football to a lady Patriots fan, a man in a New York Jets helmet grabbed it and sped away in a vintage Pinto. In the ransom video filmed in his mother’s house, the Ultimate Jets Fan owns up to the crime and claims he just wants “the satisfaction of knowing that [he’s] smarter than the average Patriots fan.”

To baffle Patriots fans, the Ultimate Jets Fan has created a long sequence of numbers which, when collected and deciphered, will lead to the location of Vince’s Super Bowl ring. The Ultimate Jets Fan has sent a few numbers (with a bouquet of flowers) to Access Hollywood correspondent and “die hard” Patriots fan Maria Menounous. Individual digits are also apparently embedded into Patriots-themed SCVNGR challenges and sometimes appear in-app when a player completes a challenge.

While fulfilling challenges to hopefully unlock digits, fans also collect SCVNGR points. The top overall scorer and three of his friends will have lunch with a Patriots player. Players with over 150 points will be entered into a sweepstakes for a similar prize event, and daily prizes award lucky registered players with Patriots gear. Full contest rules are available at the Prizes page.

To play Help Vince, fans need to install SCVNGR on their smartphones and input their SCVNGR username to their Patriots FanZone Account. Information can be collected and shared with other players through the #HelpVince hashtag or by following the Patriots’ team Twitter account. You can also follow Big Vince on Twitter and console him, I guess. Poor thing.