The Internet Spent Years Searching for Her. She Had No Idea.

A mysterious woman came to be known on Reddit as Celebrity Number Six. She told us she is not sure how to feel about the sudden crush of attention.

Leticia Sarda is 43 and lives on the Spanish island of Tenerife in the Canary Islands. She has two children and used to travel the globe working as a model for brands like Burberry. For nearly the last five years, thousands of people on the internet have been trying desperately to find her.

She had no clue.

The search for Ms. Sarda began with a piece of fabric. Nearly five years ago, a Reddit user who goes by TontsaH posted an image of a piece of cloth printed with illustrations of several faces. Some were quickly identifiable as celebrities, like the model Adriana Lima and the actor Orlando Bloom, but one face remained a mystery.

For years, internet sleuths tried to identify the unknown woman. A Reddit community devoted entirely to the hunt currently counts over 40,000 members. (That number has swelled in recent days.)

For years, they tried and failed, chasing leads, testing theories and ultimately coming up empty-handed. This month, several users on the platform finally followed the right clues.

On Reddit, users identified each celebrity that was included on a piece of fabric, but the identity of Ms. Sarda, who is in green near the center of the image, baffled them.

A user who goes by StefanMorse wrote that he had digitally edited the original image to make it look “less like a fabric and more like a real person.” The user, who did not respond to a request for comment, said in his post that he then ran that image through a facial-recognition search engine, which turned up Ms. Sarda’s name.