5 Weirdly Complex Pop Culture Frauds

All of this is an impressive enough ruse on its own, but Threatin then actually followed through on it. He showed up to his first concert gig in Europe, even though he hadn't sold any tickets and wasn't really in a band. No one showed up to that first show aside from guests of the opening act, which pissed off the venue, which had been told hundreds of tickets were sold. The same thing happened at the next show on the tour. Threatin's "band" was hired musicians working the gig for him. In his own music videos, he can be seen playing all the instruments. As far as anyone can tell, he's one guy pretending to be a band, a concert promoter, a record label, and an entire fanbase, all to live out a rock star fantasy.

Once the story broke, Threatin took to social media to explain that this was all a social experiment, and now everyone is talking about his band, so is it really fake? Then he presumably tented his fingers and continued to not play with a band in front of a crowd.

A guy claiming to be a producer convinced the British government he'd made a movie called a Landscape Of Lies with a budget of just under $20 million and some big-name British talent. There's a law in Britain that says that any movie made with mostly British talent under $20 million gets a cash rebate up to 25 percent. You can see where this is going. Making that movie might have been lucrative, sure, but merely pretending to make it gets you $5 million! Not too shabby, as fraud goes -- you just need to hope no one ever thinks to ask to see the finished product.

Someone asked to see the finished product. So while the producer was being investigated for fraud, he came up with a new idea: Actually make the movie, but for $100,000. And he did that. Or he hired a guy who didn't know any better to do it. After duping a screenwriter into taking over creative duties on the film, with a slim budget and barely any actors, the movie was made. And word is it isn't half bad. It even won the Silver Ace at the Las Vegas International Film Festival ... which the festival later took back, claiming that no it didn't.

The whole scam was far more involved than what I can do justice to here, featuring falsified documents for expenses on the big-budget movie that never was. They had receipts for travel, the script, and even consultations with professional actors like Richard Burton, who's been dead since 1984. Can you even imagine what he costs these days? When they realized they were being investigated for tax fraud, the scammers threw the "real movie" Hail Mary based on the hope that maybe the division of the British government that hands out money for making movies can't tell the difference between a $100,000 film and a $20 million one.

It didn't work. The producer got six and a half years in prison. But hey, at least he produced a real movie. Sometimes your dreams come true in unexpected ways, kids!

In other words, Mitchell appears to have gutted a real Donkey Kong arcade cabinet and installed an emulator inside of it in order to convince the world he was better at this ape-themed video game from 1981 than he actually was. He even had a judge on hand to verify his run, except that guy has also been implicated in the fraud and lost his own records after someone proved one of his record-breaking runs at another game is literally impossible with the software. It was an entire Kongspiracy!

Albert used "JT Leroy" as her author pseudonym, which is a thing many writers do and is usually OK. Except she took it a step further. Her sister-in-law made public appearances in disguise as "Leroy" when people started questioning the author's existence. It turned out that Leroy was the product of Albert's therapy sessions, in which she was encouraged to write to express herself. When she got famous, she made herself a member of JT's entourage, going everywhere with her disguised sister-in-law and using a fake cockney accent. Which sounds a hell of a lot like how Queen Amidala conducted business in The Phantom Menace.

Where Leroy/Albert crossed the line from pen name to utter fraud seems to be somewhere around the backstage passes to U2 concerts, the special request Peruvian bananas, and the autobiographical story of a boy that a woman from New York never actually was. She'd previously had a habit of calling emergency hotlines set up for children in dangerous and abusive situations, pretending to be this abused boy she'd invented.

After the press investigated Leroy and discovered he wasn't a real person, the whole thing fell apart. Albert doesn't consider any of what she did to be a hoax, just part of the whole construction of a story. Which is exactly what someone who got called out for hoaxing an entire life story would probably say.

Over the course of 2011, Washington, D.C. police and the ATF posed as a recording studio and managed to rope in more criminals than you'd think. By the end of the year, they had 70 arrests, $7 million in confiscated drugs, and 161 illegal guns seized. The face of the studio was Richie "Not His Real Name" Valdez, who of course wasn't really a promoter or producer, but still liked to buy lots of guns and drugs from criminals because he ... maybe needed them to make cool videos? If anyone asked why, they were obviously satisfied with the answers, as they kept coming back.

And note that this operation didn't just exist on paper. Manic Enterprises had a real location which the police built to look like a recording studio. "Executives" there were undercover for the whole year, and they bought the astounding amount of meth, PCP, and guns it requires to record modern music (real acts kept showing up wanting to record there, and they had to turn them away). It was going so well that eventually suppliers were offering to sell the undercover agents things like hand grenades and rocket launchers. The whole deal only came to an end when an officer overheard on a bugged phone that people were planning to rob the studio because clearly, it was full of drugs, guns, and cash.

The sting was wrapped up quickly and many arrests were made, probably weeks before they'd have been forced to put out a fake album with a bunch of cops trying to rap.

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