One of the worst-kept secrets in the influencer world is that it’s a pay-to-play game. For a few thousand dollars you can also be on the cover of Playboy magazine. Okay, sure it’s Playboy Africa or something like that, but you’re still technically on the cover of an actual Playboy magazine. I think Maxim and FHM also have pay-to-play deals with photographers. However, these are real magazines with REAL followers and real established brands.
Some people have used this information to scam models, influencers and adult performers into paying to be on the cover of a fake magazine. This particular group of scammers come from India and in May of this year they created a website called Billboard Lifestyle, which aims to mimic Billboard magazine’s website, which does indeed have a lifestyle section.
The real website of Billboard magazine is very well known. It’s like Playboy, but for musicians. Being featured in Billboard magazine is very important for people in the music industry.
Their website (Billboard.com) attracts more than 20 million visitors every month. The company that owns them is called Pekse Media Corp, and they own a lot of other really big brands like Variety, Deadline, Rolling Stone and many more. Let’s just say these guys are a big company.
In May this year, a group of scammers from India set up their own website called Billboard Lifestyle to mimic the original website. They made a bunch of posts and then went to scammers to pay them for a cover of Billboard Lifestyle magazine.
I’m told they charge anywhere from $5,000 to $9,000, and so far they’ve tricked quite a few girls into doing this. These rates are comparable to what it takes to get a cover for other magazines like International Playboy’s, so I understand why some might not question that.
But they should have. Because in the end they pay for nothing. They don’t get any attention because they’re in a real magazine with real subscribers or readers, nor do they get mentioned on a website with any traffic.
Here are some of the fake Billboard Lifestyle covers.
Let’s take a look at one of the girls who fell for it. She’s an up-and-coming iG influencer named Ariana Amadeus, who, as you can tell from her post, is actually tagging Billboard (the real company), and not the scammers. Then it provides the link to a fake website. It couldn’t be more obvious that this girl thought she was being featured in a story from the real Billboard.
The Billboard Lifestyle Instagram page looks real, but is far from legit.
The low engagement rate and no comments per post should be a warning sign, but there’s more.
Here you can see that the account is actually based in India and has changed usernames several times over the last few years.
Their website is nothing more than an attempt to sell the scam. If we dive deep, we see that their website only has 2300 (estimated) visitors per month, including the guys who run the site and post fake posts. They get less than 100 visitors per day.
And as you can see, most of it comes from India. So it’s all fake ‘bot’ traffic.
The Billboard Lifestyle website made its first post on May 4, 2024. By June, it had already recruited several influencers and aspiring models.
This is a copy of their first message.
This was taken just a few months ago. Now they have posted thousands of seemingly genuine messages, but they are all just a way to mask the fact that their website is a scam.
There’s no such thing as Billboard Lifestyle magazine.
This company is in no way associated with the real Billboard magazine.
Please be careful, ladies, and don’t fall for this scam. And please share this post with your friends so they don’t get tricked into doing business with these kind of guys.
