The Biggest Music Scam Of 2018 Is Only Getting Weirder And Weirder

Over the weekend, an elaborate web of lies spun by a little-known metal act named Threatin unspooled in front of the internet. And today, it’s spiralled out of control.

For those not in the know, here’s a quick run-down. Composed of one permanent member, Jered Threatin, this LA-based ‘band’ has just kicked off their first European tour, booking a bucketload of stops across the continent. This is despite having no actual fanbase, meaning that three people came to the tour’s opening concert in London.

The venue was understandably pissed, given that Threatin said they’d pre-sold 291 tickets. So how does one unknown name convince a spate of overseas venues to hold his shows? And why?

As reported by Metal Sucks, Threatin pretended to be his band’s promoter to book the gigs after elaborately inflating his clout, faking a record deal, awards and fans through fabricated concert footage across YouTube and fake social media followers.

While the latter isn’t that odd, unfortunately, the former is super elaborate: if you search the band on YouTube, you’ll find a spate of ‘fan-uploaded’ footage of high-octane Threatin gigs.

But they seem to be spliced together — the band never appears in the same shot as the crowd, and it sounds like the audio of the band and rapturous audience have been dubbed into corresponding shots. According to the captions, that’s because it was super hectic, obviously.

As this below says, “I could only get a few seconds here and there the crowd was pretty wild. i kept almost dropping my phone…great show though.”

Threatin also seems to have deleted fake interviews with himself, where the ‘journalist’ is off-camera.

This is all very funny, except for the fact that it leaves venues across Europe out-of-pocket: two more English venues put Threatin on blast after equally empty gigs, before the tour was officially cancelled.

Now, Jered Threatin has made a statement explaining that he’s actually a brain genius for engineering the whole scam. You see, this has been social commentary all along! Or something.

“What is fake news?,” he writes on Twitter. “I turned an empty room into an international headline. If you are reading this, you are part of the illusion.”

What is Fake News? I turned an empty room into an international headline. If you are reading this, you are part of the illusion.#Marketing #Psychology #SocialMedia #FakeNews #Threatin #BreakingTheWorld #MusicIndustry @NBCNews @BBCNews @JoeRogan @RollingStone @billboard pic.twitter.com/vsvHHPDpze

— Threatin (@JeredThreatin) November 14, 2018

He also added a lot of hashtags, including #Marketing, #Psychology, #SocialMedia, #FakeNews and #BreakingTheWorld.

We could explain that fake news isn’t actually people reporting on a very real scam, but we have a feeling Threatin isn’t one for logic or reason. Then again, we are giving him attention, which is clearly what he wants: really makes you think, doesn’t it?