An opportunist saw a way to bring in money by selling tickets to a music festival featuring an amazing lineup of stars in Montreal’s Old Port this June. The gag is there would be no festival.
On Instagram, a page named “festivalauroramtl” posted a series of lineups that included Harry Styles, Doja Cat, Tyler, the Creator, and SZA. Also billed is Charli XCX, Caroline Polachek, Khalid, Ice Spice, Ashnikko, Troye Sivan, FKA Twigs, and Kevin Abstract. But after review by the Vieux-Port de Montreal, it was eventually confirmed that the festival wasn’t legitimate, Complex reported.
“We learned about this festival like the general public, through social media and their online platform,” Kaven Gauthier, Vieux-Port de Montreal’s spokesperson, told MTL Blog. “A festival with such popular names would have to be planned months in advance, and neither the SVPM nor the other partners on our territory (Port-de-Montréal / Grand Quai) were approached.”
The Instagram account’s bio had a link to the promoter’s website where tickets could be purchased. What was off about the whole thing was the price. Each day costs nearly as much as a weekend at Montreal’s other music festivals. Three days at the event totaled out to$900 roughly triple what typical festival weekends cost.
It wasn’t long before people started calling out “scam,” including the Instagram account “Mayorofmontreal,” which posted several stories pointing out it was a scam.
For one, the artists started looking up some of the artists’ listed availabilities for that month and discovered that most had already been booked for tours in Europe.
The Instagram user, who goes by Sam, also reached out to Caroline Polachek’s management and got confirmation that Polacheck would not be in attendance.
Sam decided to contact the festival’s promoters individually on Instagram to ask questions and posted a screenshot that was sent to Complex Canada, a user named Alessio Piccolo, who told them that the Groupe Cenari festival team is new and that there has to be a lot of effort to pull off an event of that magnitude. But Piccolo claimed that both American Express and Pepsi had signed on as sponsors and that Cenari has “a lot of credibility” referencing a sex-oriented show they had allegedly put together in the past.
But the sponsorships were also found to be untrue as well.
In five days, Cenari has made over $7,000 in fraudulent ticket sales.
La Presse, a Canadia newspaper, contacted Kyllian Mahieu, Cenari’s president and CEO, who blamed Cenari’s co-founder Nathan Scuderi.
“He’s screwing up my life,” Mahieu told La Presse. “I don’t even know if I’m going to make it. It’s surreal that something like this could happen to me.”
But Scuderi couldn’t be reached for comments.
Mahieu also claims he is one of several victims of Scuderi’s fraud attempts.
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