YouTuber Fakes Being Rich On Instagram And Fools Everyone

Spend one minute on Instagram and you're sure to see a raft of photos from influencers posing with some seriously glamorous props, whether that's a bunch of designer shopping bags, expensive shoes and clothing or even a private jet.

However, the constant displaying of wealth begs the question as to whether it's all entirely real. One YouTuber, Byron Denton, who runs the channel tbhbyron, spent a week faking a super-rich lifestyle, posting pictures of him to his Instagram account living his best life as a flashy influencer.

Byron's glamorous photos - which ranged from him going on a Louis Vuitton shopping spree to relaxing on a private jet - were all totally faked and photoshopped.

This didn't seem to register with his online fans, who liked his photos in their thousands: Byron realised immediately that if you're wearing designer gear, your photos immediately get more links. One one video, he got almost 1,000 likes in seven seconds.

Byron shared a video to his channel, which has nearly 90,000 subscribers, explaining how he faked the experiment. Entitled "I faked being a rich bitch on instagram for a week & this is what happened...", the video went down a treat with his followers, who made a series of hilarious comments including "Being famous on social media is like being rich in Monopoly" and "When you only have 1 week trial on photoshop".

Though he called the private jet photo "the most embarrassing thing I've ever done in my entire life", he pointed out that the fact he'd gone from sitting on a green sofa to a swanky private jet with the help of Photoshop shows you that "anything's possible".

He also said that his experiment had been to "try and compare whether wearing designer items would actually encourage people to like your photos or not" - and it turned out that it "clearly worked".

If you want to boost your Insta following, you know what to do... or otherwise, we could all just agree that everything we thought we knew on our favourite app is a lie.

Topics: Real

Deborah Cicurel

Deborah Cicurel is a freelance journalist at Tyla. She writes entertainment, travel and lifestyle content for a variety of print and digital titles.

@Debscic