This guy proved that if you can’t actually score tickets to Coachella (or don’t want to), you can still pretty easily dupe your Insta followers into thinking you went. Nineteen-year-old Byron Denton set out to teach people that social media isn’t quite what it seems by faking a weekend at Coachella. After the success of his previous prank — faking a rich lifestyle on Instagram — the London-based YouTuber “thought it would be fun to see if I could fool people again.” He told INSIDER, “With Coachella being such a big thing across social media, I thought it was the perfect chance to try and fool people a second time.”
To carry out the prank, Denton posted deceptive photos of himself pretending to be at the airport, and then wearing Coachella outfits with a photoshopped Coachella background. His first edited photo garnered over 13,000 likes at the time of its posting. Although it certainly looks like Coachella, the photo was actually taken in a park.
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Another photo, seemingly taken in front of Coachella’s ferris wheel, was also snapped in a park.
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Eventually, Denton came clean in a YouTube video, admitting that his trip was a hoax.
Whether you fell for the prank or not, Denton hopes that people learned something from it. “You really shouldn’t compare your life and what you have to anyone else’s,” he said, “whether you think you know them or not. Especially on social media, because like I’ve demonstrated now, it is so easy to lead a fake life online.”
H/T: Insider