How Influencers Fake Being Rich

0:28This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. Prosecco. You want to be rich like us? Learn how to do journalism. You take our online course, publish articles, you get subscribers. It's that easy. Follow us, figure out how to learn more. You can be rich like us, take our online course, check out the dashboards. I'll show you. You want proof? I'll show you.

0:50Hello, and welcome to the 4-4 Media podcast, where we bring you unparalleled access to hidden worlds, both online and IRL. 4-4 Media is a journalist-bounding company and need your support. To subscribe, go to 44media.co. As well as bonus content every single week. Subscribers also get access to additional episodes where we respond to their best comments. Gain access to that content at 44media.co. I'm your host, Sam. Today, Joseph is out this week. And with me are 44media co-founders, Emmanuel Myberg. Hello. And Jason Kevlar. Hey, what's up? And we have two crazy, wacky, cool stories, both from Jason today.

1:30Jason is paying penance for being out the last couple weeks. I'm gonna grill Jason about this story which is a fan favorite and I'm a fan the headline for it is how I bought a private jet by selling$10 subscriptions to 4-4 media first of all congrats Jason on your private jet I can't wait to to fly it to various festivals and conferences like Davos and such. I mean, let's just stay at the top. Jason does not have a private jet, unfortunately. He was doing something called LARP influencing, which I believe you learned about via social media. Can you tell me where you first ran into this? Yeah. So I guess I've been thinking for quite some time that a lot of the hustle bros, which I guess I'll define as people who are like, I make a lot of money on the internet by doing something, whether that be making an AI influencer, whether that be day trading, whether that be doing Airbnb hustling, whether that be crypto stuff.

2:49I've had the sneaking suspicion that a lot of them are lying and that they are not wildly wealthy. But I think that if you are one of these people, Very often, you post videos of yourself driving luxury vehicles, being in a private jet, being in really exotic locations, like being in Bali, things like that. And the story goes that they got all this money to buy the Lambo, to buy the private jet by doing some sort of online hustle. And they can teach you to do that online hustle. If only you'll buy their course. and their course usually costs$30 a month or$100 a year or more than that. And I suspected for quite some time that this was fake or that a lot of these were fake, that these people don't actually have private jets, they don't actually have Lamborghinis.

3:44And I knew that you could rent a Lamborghini for a day, that you could ride on a yacht and take pictures of a yacht. But on my TikTok feed one day, I was basically served a piece of software that allowed you to fake a dashboard for Shopify, for OnlyFans, for Stripe, which are these different online payment processors and platforms where you can sell subscriptions. and basically they allowed you to pick the dashboard which is like the page that shows you the analytics of how much money that you're making and i clicked into this account and the entire account was about larping uh which we can define in a second but it's basically like pretending to be rich when you're not rich and so it had all these tips for how to pretend to be rich when you are not rich it reminds me of i also ran across this on social media but there's this company i forget the name of it but all they do is sell fake cash and various cases to display your stacks of bills and it's like it's their entire business it's like a pretty high-end service and as you can imagine it's like if you're shooting a video and you want to hold half a million dollars and pretend that you have that in cash you could just go to them and get that this has been a thing forever um in music and and flexing on social media and so on and i think everyone understands like a suitcase full of cash you've called uh this in the piece the new economy and i think a sign of that is it's not just a lambo it's not just the private jet which we can get into it's not just cash it's these dashboards and like that says a lot about the state of the economy i suppose what what what are some of the dashboards that you can fake how do you fake them and i guess like well more philosophically what do you think it means that like showing the back end of an only fans or a what's another popular one?

6:11A strike. What do you think that says about the current state of things? Well, I think that this has so basically like for a while, people who were LARPing, let's also just say LARPing stands for live action roleplay historically and is part of gaming culture and is like appropriate from gamers very broadly speaking and then also appropriate from like people who like reenact like sword fights in parks and things like this like what do you guys know LARPing to be because the use of it as like LARPing as a rich person is new and that is like gone viral in the last only few months I think but like it now seems to be kind of the dominant way that term is used at least on like TikTok and Instagram.

7:08I mean, I think of like Battlefield reenactors, right? Or like Sword and Sorcery Fantasy. Like those are the two LARP worlds that I think of. Civil War reenactment, I would say, is like the OG LARPing. But the term itself is popularized by literally taking the rules of Dungeons and Dragons and bringing it to like the physical realm. Yeah, the park. When you go to the park and you see people beating each other with foam swords and saying, fire spell, fire spell, that's LARPing. Yeah, it's famously in the movie Role Models is where I learned about it. There's also a good documentary, I think, where it really caught on in popular culture.

7:58But I think it just... I mean, to your question about why it became such a popular term to describe other things is that it's like it's a very powerful metaphor you know what i mean for someone pretending to be something that they clearly are not in like a no offense i'm into it i don't personally do it but like nothing but respect to my my various wizards out there but it's just like to an outsider it seems pretty pathetic to be like i am a i am a knight but you're just a guy in a in a it doesn't have a good reputation for sure it's not like seen it's not looked upon as a cool thing to do definitely but like people get really into it and i think it is super interesting that like the there's this emergent like modern day larping as like as an aspirational thing it's like the new like wizard is this dude with a broccoli haircut who's got a really fat stripe account that's so strange to me.

9:03But I guess it makes sense. Because that is the status marker that we have now. I'm going to answer your question about the dashboards, Emmanuel. But I think first I ask that because now you can LARP as anything. You can LARP... It's like you take on the role of an OnlyFans model of a music producer as an actor, as an influencer, as a celebrity. It's like this idea of fake it till you make it. And the idea of pretending to be someone that you're not online goes back forever to time immemorial. And for a while, when people were LARPing as rich people, when they were being like, hey, I got rich doing this stuff on the internet, what they were doing was they were downloading these clip packs.

9:55And so what that means is they were basically just buying stock footage of fancy places. And then they were editing TikToks and Instagrams using this footage that either they stole from somewhere else or they bought from someone or that they got from Pinterest. And what happened was people started being like, you bought that, you're LARPing, this is fake, where's the proof? Where's the proof? And so what has become the proof has been like, I will show you a screenshot of my account. And my account will say that I have tens of thousands of subscribers. It will show that I'm making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

10:42It will show that I'm making that I made a million dollars last year on OnlyFans or whatever. And honestly, when I was writing about AI slop and people making a lot of money on Facebook and that sort of thing, a lot of the times people would be like, I made$20 ,000 by having this image on Facebook go viral. And then all the comments would be, show Dash, show Dashboard, show Dashboard. Where's the Dashboard? Where's the proof? And so the rise of this Dashboard faking has been in response to that. Where basically what the software is, is it is a modifiable back end that looks like Stripe, that looks like Shopify, that looks like OnlyFans.

11:32And you can type anything you want into it. You can type that you sold$3 billion worth of whatever product yesterday, if you want to. It's literally just typing stuff in. There's graphs and you can click and drag them to show whatever. So if someone sees a footage of you on your yacht, and they say, where's the proof? You can show them this. And not only can you show them a screenshot, but you can show them a video of your laptop because it's literally software that is emulating and mocking the actual back end. And so, I mean, I think, one, it's like a culture where people think that it's cool to be on a yacht, but they also think it's cool to just show screenshots of their bank accounts or their, in this case, like their Stripe accounts or whatever.

12:22But also the LARPing has gone so far, the faking has gone so far that they're like, people are creating fake software to fake this so that people can fake their lifestyle so that they can sell a fake course and presumably try to make some real amount of money by doing a pyramid scheme where it's like, look, you want to get rich? Just emulate me, buy my course. And then, of course, their course is bullshit almost always. Yeah, I think before we move on to some of the more old-fashioned physical LARPing you did to just linger on these fake dashboards for a minute, I think it's interesting that people are not saying, oh, let me get a fake Capital One dashboard to show you my bank account.

13:22It's about these platforms. Everybody's aware of the rich people or the people who are getting rich on these platforms, like whatever star on OnlyFans or whatever star on Twitch or people on Stripe or Patreon or even something like Ghosts that we use. Everybody wants to get rich that way, and that is the fantasy that is being sold to you. But if you spend just two minutes thinking about it, you can come to the conclusion that it's a scam because the numbers of how many people get that wealthy from these platforms is kind of out there. And they're all extremely lopsided in the sense that there's like 1 % or half a percent of people who make a lot of money and then the rest of them make no money, right?

14:24It's like, this is why you see OnlyFans stars say in their bio that they're like top 1 % on OnlyFans. Or everybody talks about how most Twitch streamers have under 5 or no viewers watching them. That's like the vast majority of people on the platform. and I'm guessing it's just like is this what you're referring to by the new economy it's like this idea that people are not getting rich by getting a great job or even owning a great business it's just like I am the winner in this dog pile on OnlyFans which I mean if you get rich great most likely you will not but I feel like the the effect of like these fake dashboards is net positive for all the platforms, right?

15:24Well, it's become a flex to show this. And I think it's become more of a flex to show your OnlyFans backend than it is to show your Chase account backend or whatever. Because I think it is because there is some sort of cachet that comes with I am a self-made person who made this money because I'm popular on the internet versus like, I don't know, a Chase account. Like maybe you inherited that money. Maybe it came from working a cringe W2 job, like a nine to five or something. And here it's like, I created something out of nothing like on the creator economy, like on YouTube. I became a big YouTuber.

16:06I made like all this money. Like, here's why you should trust me versus like, if I was just showing you, hey, I have a lot of money. It's like, well, maybe it's your dad's money. Maybe someone died and you inherited it, whatever. And here it's like, well, I'm a self-made person who figured out the secret to the internet. I figured out how to game the algorithm. Or if you're making an AI OnlyFans model, or actually they sell fan view dashboards as well, which is what AI models are using because OnlyFans doesn't allow AI models, at least last I checked. Sam today, hello, now. I mean, you have to have a real ID attached to your account no matter what.

16:54Yeah. It has to match the content that you're making. So technically now. So basically, it's like I made an AI girl who's so hot that all these people wanted to subscribe and like, here, you should listen to me. And I think that's kind of like why this has so much cachet behind it. I'll also say that after I published this story about these fake dashboards and things like that I didn't write about this because I just got the tip and I think it's maybe too small to do but one of our readers figured out that you can just break into these dashboards and not pay for them because they're vibe coded and they're just really shitty but they are being put together to fill some sort of hole in the market.

17:48And so it's not clear how many people are doing this. But they're quite expensive. It's like the Shopify fake dashboard is$149 a month. And it's like, you got to sell a lot of... That's so much. It's so much. It's crazy. And it's unclear how many people are doing this. And it's funny because on the website itself, they're like, we're almost sold out of these dashboards because we're keeping them really exclusive. And only a few people are allowed to buy it because we want to keep this secret. And so there's an air of exclusivity to all that as well. It's very silly. And then I want to talk about one other piece of software before we talk about what I did in real life.

18:35But there's another one called Fake Notifications. And I bought this one on Telegram. And this one was a bargain. This was, I think,$100, but it's a lifetime use. So I didn't have to cancel the subscription. But basically, it's a web app that you install onto your phone. So it's a mobile website, but then you install it as a bookmark. So it looks like an app on your phone. And you give it the ability to send your phone notifications. And it spoofs notifications from Shopify or from Stripe. And you can make that notification say anything. And you basically go into this little app, you type what you want it to say, and then you type how many notifications you want it to send your phone.

19:28And then you can also have it generate random email addresses, presumably using AI, like fake email addresses. And so I can click a button on my phone and I can just send myself tons of notifications that make it look like people are buying my product. And so this also allows you to be like, I am making so much money that I am getting notifications as we speak. And I'm pulling it up on my phone right now. I can send myself hundreds of notifications. I'm going to send myself 300 notifications right now. and it's just like, this is the back end. You can maybe see a little bit of it, but it's like...

20:13You're blowing up right now. I'm blowing up. It's just like new subscriber, new subscriber, new subscriber. And it's like even that can be faked. I want that. That would fix my social media addiction, I think. My little pacifier of dopamine.

20:32Honestly, I felt something when I was using this. I was just like, oh my god, here we go. We're making a lot of money. Because as we'll talk about, I turned this into fake 404 media subscribers. And then I clicked a button. I was like, wow, new subscriber, new subscriber, new subscriber. And to be clear, we use Stripe as our back end. And the notification looks the exact same as the real one. is fully spoofed. I was going to say, should we take a break there to talk about the physical LARPing? Yeah, let's take a break.

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27:52Jason, please tell me about your private jet. Yeah, so I learned that these fake softwares existed and this notification app existed and all of this. And I started sending myself notifications, making myself feel like I was making lots of money. And I was changing the dashboard to look like I had a lot of subscribers and I typed 404 Media in. But I was just sitting in my bedroom while I did this, and it didn't feel very luxurious. It didn't feel as though I were rich. And I had seen enough of these TikTok accounts where I was like, you know what? I'm going to go try to get some content. I'm going to go try to film some content, show people that I actually am rich, and just basically copy what these guys are doing to see how difficult it is.

28:48And because I live in LA and so much of the economy of LA is influencer-focused and also Hollywood-focused, there's a lot of photo studios. And so I googled private jet photo studio and there was one. And it's almost never booked out. it was$60 for an hour. And I was just like, I'm going to book this photo studio and I'm going to go take pictures on a private jet. And so to be clear, it's not actually a private jet. It is like a warehouse in a relatively poor part of LA that you are basically like, you book it, you're sent a code to enter. The code didn't work. like it was a nightmare getting in and out of this place and you like open this creaky old door and then there is like the interior of a private jet and lights there and you can just like take photos and they're pretending like you're rich what do you mean by the interior of a private jet like what what is it actually that's a very leading question it is uh it is just like a room with some shitty pleather couches in it.

30:14And some circle, some airplane window cutouts, but they're not actually windows. They're made to look like windows, but they're just LED lights that are in a circle form. Right. I'm just saying, there's actually there are real, either for movies or for whatever, there's decommissioned jets that people use for this purpose. I was a PA once in a production where we had to wire a decommissioned jet to look like a functioning airplane for a movie. And we did it on an actual decommissioned airplane. This is not that. It's like there's no part of an actual. It's like just a piece of plywood. You're in an un-air conditioned room in a warehouse that has been built with two by fours and styrofoam.

31:06and it's funny because a few weeks ago my brother was visiting and i went um i went on a studio tour like that's another popular thing to do in la is like you go to the paramount studio you go to the sony studio so we went to the sony studio and like they let you see some of those sets that they build for like hollywood movies and the entire time like the tour guide is like yeah it's all made of styrofoam. And you can just... You see this load-bearing wall, and he just shoves it over. It weighs nothing. And basically, it was that. And I think that's another reason why LA has so many of these is that it has tons of people who work in film who make different sets for movies and TV shows.

31:51And so presumably, that skill transfers out to building a fake private jet interior and yeah you like walk in and and it's like concrete floors and one side is like a dressing room where you can like get ready to go in your private jet and then the other is just like an open like there there's a partition and there it's open and it's just another room and it has like a little bit of a lower ceiling and it has like airplane signs in where it's like, don't bother the pilot, like it says on the wall and things like that. But yeah, to be clear, you can go to the Santa Monica airport, for example, where there's real private jets and you can take photos there if you pay someone who has a private jet, which is something that's other advice given in the LARPing community is that you can pay actual significantly more than$60 to do this.

32:54I found one that does photo shoots in real private jets for influencers and for engagement photos, things like that. That was a few hundred dollars. I could have easily done that, but I was just like, I'm going to do this as shitty and as quickly as possible and see what it looks like. Yeah. It's like, basically they felt like Amtrak tables, like the cafe car of an Amtrak. and then these white cracking pleather Ottomans, basically. To be fair, as bad as that looks, and my favorite part is that it's just like... Yeah, it's like somebody bought some loveseat on Wayfair and put it in the room and that's the airplane seat.

33:45But the final product, The thing that you use these photos for, these photos and videos, I don't think you need a private jet. It works. You know what I mean? On camera, it looks like a private jet. It looks like you're living the dream. Dude, I think it turned out pretty good, honestly. You put a really shallow depth of feel. The background is blurred. I put on a suit top. I put on the suit top that I wore to Sam's wedding. and I brought a bottle of Prosecco that I had in my house that was like leftover from a party. And I was like, I don't know, I feel like I'm on a private jet. It's like 8 ,000 degrees in here.