No, Emma Chamberlain was never charging $10k for an Instagram DM, here’s what she’s said

One tweet spiralled into something much bigger


Over the weekend, a screenshot surfaced from Emma Chamberlain’s website and it claimed she was charging $10,000 for a “personal thank you note in Instagram DM.”

The screenshot was thrown around Twitter and Reddit and it quickly blew up. So many people were quick to judge Emma for it being real and believe she was genuinely charging her fans $10,000 for an Instagram message.

But no, it’s not true.

Emma Chamberlain has set the story straight herself, in a statement provided to E! News she explained how she became aware of the online rumours. She said: “A few days ago I started seeing comments asking why I was selling a DM for $10k. I assumed this was an online scam, as I never offered to sell a DM for any amount of money, let alone $10k. People were saying this was for sale on my merch site, so I checked the site to see if it had been hacked and couldn’t find anything out of the ordinary.”

It’s down to Cozac Inc., the company behind Emma Chamberlain’s merch that posted this statement to her website: “There have been false and inaccurate claims that Emma Chamberlain was offering DM’s in exchange for $10,000. As background in 2018, Cozac was testing a prospective reward program related to Emma’s merch without her knowledge. In testing they created an outrageous, never activated reward level that was not intended to be active or purchased. These reward ideas were never run by Emma since they were not meant to be available for sale or reward, but simply intended for internal testing purposes. What we suspect is that date was activated and crawled by Google’s SEO indexing system and discovered by an individual who then began spreading false information to press outlets. This was never made public, and certainly was never planned to be sold or purchased. The test programme was never discoverable on the main page or product listing site, which is another reason that Emma has no knowledge of this. With the internets tendency to create false narratives around sensationalised stories we wanted to provide you with the truth firsthand and from the source.”

The site temporarily went down for an internal review also.

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