Aspiring Rapper Arrested For Spending $4,100,000 On Employer’s Credit Card To Buy A Rap Music Career Via Jewelry, Billboards, Fake Followers, Falsified Streams And Manipulating The Billboard Charts

July 25. 2019

Chad Focus

There’s a facetious phrase that goes, “Fake it till you make it.” Well, some people took it literally. One such person is aspiring rapper, Chad Focus, real name Chad Arrington, who engaged in an elaborate scheme, in an effort to jump start his rap career.

Focus used his employer’s corporate credit card to rack up $4,100,000 in purchases to create a rap career. Focus bought a massive billboard in Times Square and other locations for millions of dollars. He paid a music promoter $300,000 to promote his music on the Billboard charts and at radio. He bought fake views on YouTube. He purchased fake music streams on Spotify. He spent thousands of dollars buying followers on Instagram to have a following of 180,000 people.

He bought thousands of dollars in jewelry to give the false appearance he is rich. He spent $100,000 on hats emblazoned with his stage name “Focus.” He spent $125,000 on tickets to his own concert. He created a fake career through fraud and theft. He created the illusion he was a popular rapper.

This occurred despite the fact people were not buying or streaming his music, going to his fake concert and his follow counts on social networking were all paid for via fraud. I guess he hoped his career would catch on and if he was caught he would have earned money via streams and shows to pay it back, thus buying his way out of jail. However, his career didn’t catch on with the public.

The irony is there are artists who start with nothing and legitimately get noticed on You Tube, Sound Cloud, Instagram and Twitter. The exposure resulted in them becoming successful, as they built up a real fanbase/following from scratch and with appealing music. The key is to build up an online following of real people, not automated bots. What’s the sense of having a bought following of automated bots, when there aren’t real people behind those fake accounts to listen to and buy your actual products (music, concert tickets). Who will listen to your music under those fake circumstances.

Another irony is you have washed up major label recording artists such as Madonna and Jay Z, who are struggling to sell albums, singles and concert tickets, doing the very same thing Focus did in faking music streams, buying their own music or getting corporations to do so, purchasing massive amounts of followers on social networking, paying for large amounts of advertising, and giving away music and concert tickets at their own expense (Jay Z And Madonna's Tidal Reported To The Police For Falsifying Music Streaming Sales and Madonna's New Tour To Be Staged In Smaller Venues As Ticket Sales Have Been Poor And New Album 'Madame X' Only Sold 5,000 Copies).

Madonna and Jay Z are also two thieves who do not legitimately earn money in the industry, as their careers are built on copyright and defrauding people out of their pay and assets (resulting in lawsuits). They have massive egos and can’t deal with their significant decline in popularity over the years. So, they try to buy relevancy. What Focus did is not far off from what frauds like Madonna and Jay Z do all the time in trying to give the false impression of success when their sales have been in the toilet for years.

Focus wanted to be relevant. Madonna and Jay Z are trying to be relevant again after many years of irrelevancy. It’s not hard to see why Focus thought this would work. The public has seen similar scams by major label recording artists. However, it did not, as Focus has been arrested on massive fraud and identity theft charges. He is being held in a Baltimore, Maryland jail pending trial. It will be very difficult to have a real rap career after starting off on such a negative note.

STORY SOURCE

Wannabe Rapper Stole $4.1 Million on Company Credit Card to Build Fake Rap Career: Feds

Published 06.04.19 9:45PM ET - Rapper Chad Arrington, aka ‘Chad Focus,’ allegedly spent $125,000 on fake tickets to his own concerts and thousands more on Instagram followers, YouTube views, and Spotify streams. Until he faced a federal judge on Tuesday, Maryland rapper Chad Arrington looked like an artist on the rise.

He had a giant billboard in Times Square that showed him surrounded with stacks of money, and dozens more billboards all across Baltimore and Washington, D.C., under the name of his hip-hop alter ego, “Chad Focus.” One of Arrington’s songs had earned more than 4 million views on YouTube, and more than 180,000 people followed his posts on Instagram. He spent than $65,000 on custom jewelry, including a custom bear-shaped pendant worth more than $10,000...

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