People even created fan accounts for them!
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Every year, countless K-Pop groups debut in the industry, hoping to make it big. Thanks to the growing reach of K-Pop, now fans from all across the world root for rookie groups and cheer them on their journey to success. But things are not as wholesome all the time. Sometimes, well-meaning K-Pop fans have been manipulated into supporting groups that never even existed in the first place!
The first story is about a girl group called “Lion Girls.” In 2016, an ‘official’ Twitter account announced that the group was supposedly under Hunus Entertainment and was going to debut soon. The group also had an official Instagram handle. On all their SNS channels, there were images of the members and some video teasers for their upcoming debut. Even some noted K-Pop publications covered their anticipated debut, and a few fansites for the group also popped up.
Right after the teaser videos of “Lion girls” started to get attention, their Twitter account seemed to have gotten hacked, and on August 4, 2016, a tweet from the account revealed that the girl group never existed in the first place!
i scammed my way into soompi girlgroupzone and allkpop when will you ever
— Lion Girls 라이온걸스 (@LionGirlsOffcl)
The second story is rather recent. In 2020, when a Twitter account for a group named 6irlfriend popped up, claiming that it was a new group under JCM Entertainment. It immediately got a lot of traction from K-Pop fans. The fans of the girl group G-Friend were the main catalysts in this case since they were primarily the ones who brought attention to this account after debating whether this new group should change their name since ‘6irlfriend’ (to be pronounced ‘girlfriend’) was too similar to the name G-Friend.
In the middle of the countless debates and fans fighting for and against 6irlfriend, the latter’s Twitter account announced that the group would rebrand as 6irly. Though the conflict with G-Friend fans ended there, the account of 6irly gained over 2,000 followers in a few days. People were starting to get suspicious of the group after they noticed that the Tweets from their account often had errors in both English and Korean. But it wasn’t until the account started introducing the 6irly members that it began to go downhill.
A Twitter user found out that one of the pictures that the 6irly account claimed to be of its member Im Da-Eun, was actually of an Instagram user @ryun__aa. Plus, JCM Entertainment had halted all its activities after the disbandment of its last group, 4L, in 2016.
After getting exposed, the account admitted that 6irly was not a real girl group and the owner actually wanted to promote rookie groups through the account once it got enough traction. But soon enough, the account was deleted from Twitter.
Even though the scam didn’t last long, people had already created fan accounts for the group and even started update accounts for a girl group they knew nothing about!
On one level, these stories of fake K-Pop groups are truly hilarious. But these two incidents are also indicative of how easily the internet makes people vulnerable to manipulation.
Source: Koreaboo
