K-Pop

K-pop fans scammed by these “fake” idol groups that don’t actually exist 

The following names are cases of fake K-pop idols. 

With plenty of rookie groups debuting every year, it’s not difficult for K-pop fans today to pick a favorite team to stan. However, some fans are “deceived” as they mistakenly like groups that don’t exist.

Lion Girls

In 2016, a Twitter account claiming to be the official account of a girl group called Lion Girls announced that the group would debut soon. Specifically, the group includes three members Kim Stella, Yuki, Park Yoona, and their agency was said to be Hunus Entertainment. Not only posting teaser photos of the members, this account also released a teaser video that made many people believe that there really was a rookie girl group called Lion Girls. Some famous Kpop news sites reported this debut and there even appeared a few fansites for the group.

When the teaser video was widely spread and attracted attention, fans began to get suspicious and realize that the scenes in Lion Girls’ teaser were actually taken from the “Escape” MV by Megan Nicole. Not long after, the Lion Girls’ account made a confession on Twitter that the group was non-existent, saying, “I fooled Soompi, girlgroupzone and allkpop.

6irlfriend (6irly)

A similar case happened again in 2020. The Twitter account created for the group 6irlfriend claimed that they were a new artist under JCM Entertainment. Immediately, the group received attention from the public, especially Gfriend fans because of many similarities in their names. The Twitter account of 6irlfriend then suddenly announced that the group’s name would be changed to 6irly. This account gained over 2000 followers in just a few days.

However, fans began to be doubtful after spotting many mistakes in both Korean and English in the group’s posts.  Later, a netizen discovered that one of the photos introduced as member Im Da Eun of 6irly was actually of a random girl with a different name on Instagram. Furthermore, JCM Entertainment halted all activities after their last group called 4L as they disbanded in 2016. After being exposed, this account admitted that 6irly is not a real girl group.

The person behind this prank said that they did this with the purpose of attracting followers and using it to promote rookie groups, but then the account was deleted.  Although the scam did not last long, some gullible fans even set up dedicated accounts to update news and photos about the group despite not having any clear information about the members.

To a certain extent, this shows that today’s social media users are very easily manipulated by unorthodox information on the Internet. Besides, such pranks can also partly damage the reputation of entertainment companies when the company names were illegally used. Therefore, not only do K-pop fans need to be more cautious when receiving information floating around on the Internet every day, they also hope that companies will take practical actions to avoid similar situations happening again in the future. 

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