Over the weekend, a screenshot surfaced from the personal website of Emma Chamberlain. It claims the multi-hyphenate (fashion plate, coffee maven, YouTube creator, podcaster… the list goes on) was asking for $10,000 for “a personal thank you note… in Instagram DM.”
The screenshot shared around Twitter and Reddit was widely derided for its absurdity, with most citing the price and the option to pay for the listing in $902 installments via ShopPay.
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This afternoon, Cozack, Inc., the company behind Chamberlain’s merch, posted this statement to shopemmachamberlain.com(Opens in a new tab), which they requested Mashable print in its entirety:
“There have been false and inaccurate claims that Emma Chamberlain was offering DM’s in exchange for $10k. As background in 2018, Cozack (Emma’s merch company) 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 data 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 program was never discoverable on the main page or product listing site, which is another reason that Emma had no knowledge of this. With the internet’s tendency to create false narratives around sensationalized stories we wanted to provide you with the truth firsthand and from the source.
The site is currently down for internal review.”
While the website was still live over the weekend, a Reddit user(Opens in a new tab) pointed out that the $10,000 listing was not accessible via the website’s homepage and could only be reached at its direct link “shopemmachamberlain.com/products/personal-thank-you-note-from-emma-in-instagram-dm.”(Opens in a new tab)
Another(Opens in a new tab) user(Opens in a new tab) noted that the listing could be added to their shopping cart and would rack up $1,025 in taxes at checkout.
It looks like the listing had been around since at least December 4, 2022 when a Twitter user wrote, “why does emma chamberlain’s merch website have a “personalized thank you note” via instagram dm listed for $10k.”
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Mashable reached out to the original poster of the screenshot to discuss how they accessed it, but has not yet received a reply.
This is a developing story.
