A Free OSINT Lesson: The "Velvet Sundown" Squatter Who Duped the News Media
Andrew Frelon: A fake band manager pretending to manage a band that doesn't exist. How Avant-garde.
The Velvet Sundown, a “band” that’s gone viral on Spotify, raked in over 700 million streams in just a few days. Every major music outlet, from Rolling Stone to Billboard, is asking the same question: Is this AI? And if so, who’s behind it?
While the creator of Velvet Sundown is still unknown, a dozen mainstream publications have covered the story, and cited an X account seemingly belonging to Velvet Sundown and conversing with their spokesperson and “adjunct” member, Andrew Frelon.
The problem is that Andrew Frelon is a trickster, squatting on an old Twitter account, and using the AI band’s newfound fame, to have some fun.
And he duped everyone.
How do I know?
He told me.
The steady rise of The Velvet Sundown began on June 26th with an article published by Music Ally. Noting the apparent rise and sudden viral nature of the band, the article raises the basic question of whether or not the band is legit, or whether this is an AI operation. A day later, and with listens slowly rising on Spotify, Musicradar picks up the story. Then Mashable. And by June 29th, the story, much like the “band,” began to go viral.
Who the hell is “Velvet Sundown?”
The problem for anyone looking into the story was that the band itself, and the keyboard warrior using AI to make them, was staying quiet.
Enter Andrew Frelon.
Repurposing an old Twitter account, he began to post as the band on June 29th.
“Because of these blank spaces in their story, and knowing from past projects something about the dynamics of journalistic news coverage, I thought it would be funny to start calling out journalists in a general way about not having reached out to ‘us’ for commentary,” he told me.
Using ChatGPT, he created several tweets, and went to work lambasting the press for calling their work AI generated.
As the story picked up steam over the next several hours, and with the true folks behind Velvet Sundown remaining silent (since their DMs were turned off), Frelon’s X account became the only act in town.
Frelon was swarmed with requests for interviews from the Washington Post, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Rolling Stone, NBC, Wired, Variety, and others.
As these requests for interviews were pouring into his DMs, MSN, Stereogum, Futurism, PC Gamer, The Times, and Cybernews were all running stories citing his squatter Twitter account as being directly from the band.
Frelon was swamped with interview requests, and suffice it to say, this internet trickster-turned-squatter has created a good deal of chaos.
“I’m not really this band,” Frelon (which is not his real name), told me over Signal. “But they’re getting huge coverage, and so I'm inserting myself into the story by squatting their identity.”
I had no idea what he was talking about.
He later sent me links to two news articles, one by The Daily Mail and one by Tech Radar.
”Both re-reported my Tweet storm,” he told me. “That I had ChatGPT write.”
That is when I knew something was about to kick off.
From an OSINT perspective, two immediate issues arose when I went to start fact-checking this.
First, and the most obvious, is that the journalists reaching out to Frelon were not doing their most basic due diligence.
According to Velvet Sundown’s Spotify page, which is verified, the band includes an X link at the bottom.
Clicking it brings you to the below X account.
And not to Frelon’s squatter account.
The user ID’s are totally different.
The second clue relates to the dates of account creation.
The official and actual X account linked to the band was created in June, and the same goes for the Instagram account, Spotify account, and everything else connected to the band. Frelon’s re-purposed X account was created in March.
These are two huge red flags, and Frelon told me that most of the journalists never even asked about it.
The obvious question for many reading this is, “How does a guy like me know Frelon?”
One answer is that I know a lot of interesting and strange people. It’s my job. Moreover, I write and research a lot about AI and disinformation, so I receive a lot of emails from folks interested in the question of artificial intelligence and its use in the manipulation of the media, and by extension, knowledge and information.
Frelon was a guy in that circle. He is, for all intents and purposes, a trickster for the internet age. A sort of AI-fueled Loki, causing digital mischief to prove a point. This is not his first escapade, and definitely not his last. He’s a curious dude, and one who enjoys pulling stunts to encourage us to question what is real.
“Perplexity AI tells me its not morally defensible to impersonate a fake AI band for deceptive purposes,” Frelon texted me an hour later.
“Well, I mean…it’s true,” I responded to him.
“I’m not doing this for personal gain. Just for the lolz,” he said.
In a previous project, he used AI to create and seed fake historical artifacts online. In another, he’s made up new conspiracy theories that are still whispered about in small little online forums.
He’s an interesting cat.
Ethics aside, he knows what he’s doing. He had the journalists email their questions or requests to a Gmail account he made up, and he began responding to them.
He created multiple images of the band using ChatGPT, and posted them. News outlets published them, and cited Velvet Sundown.
He then conducted two telephone interviews. One with the Washington Post and one with Rolling Stone. He told them two very different stories.
And then, it happened. The entire story surrounding Velvet Sundown shifted.
Rolling Stone got an “exclusive” with the band, and citing Velvet Sundown’s band spokesperson, Andrew Frelon, the journalists with the magazine believed that they finally got the inside scoop.
Frelon told the journalists that the band does sometimes use AI, chiefly Suno (a popular AI music generating service), that this was a bit of an “art hoax,” and that “things that are fake sometimes even have more impact than things that are real.”
Soon, Stereogum followed suit, citing the Rolling Stone’s article, and that the band had finally come forward to admit that this was an AI generated hoax turned art project.
And then, a couple hours later, Billboard jumped into the fray.
Except Andrew Frelon has nothing to do with the “real” Velvet Sundown.
But to quote him, and his words published in Rolling Stone, “things that are fake sometimes even have more impact than things that are real.”
Frelon explained to me that he felt his little trick was reminiscent of the infamous Leeds 13. They were a group of 13 art students in the UK who claimed they took a university grant and spent it all on a holiday in Spain, with the audacity to call their stunt “art.”
The British media, filled with self-righteousness, called them out for this horrible waste of money.
The twist is that the Leeds 13 faked the whole thing. No wild party in Spain on university grants. The media’s reaction was the “art.”
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Frelon was trying to prove a point. Gaps and errors in information are everywhere, and we live in a time where fact and fiction seem to exist in shades of one another.
After the Rolling Stones piece dropped, anyone following this story entered “the desert of the real.”
While no one knows, yet, who Velvet Sundown is (and they are not slowing down, they have over 750,000 listeners at the time of publication), Frelon told me that he’s done and that he’s made his point.
"So funny even if its ‘morally indefensible,’" he texted me shortly after the Rolling Stone piece dropped.
I reserve judgement.
“As journalists are trying to race to be the first to publish, many will disregard best practices around fact-checking and verification,” Frelon said. “They have tight deadlines. This is kind of like red-teaming the media.”
Early in the morning of July 3rd, the official Velvet Sundown band Twitter and Spotify pages have since put up a warning about “Andrew Frelon” and that he does not represent them in any way.
But the damage was done.
Frelon, love him or hate him, has proven that shaping reality can be as easy as creating a decent X profile and leaving your DMs open, especially when journalists race for that next scoop.
But there is an OSINT lesson here, whether you are an intelligence analyst or a journalist. Information. Data. Interviews. They can be manipulated, and you, no matter who you think you are or who you work for, can be played. Careful fact checking matters, and in this situation, the old adage rings true.
“Trust, but verify.”
There are people like Frelon in the world who want to make a statement about how we live our lives, and how we come to trust what we see (or hear). Frelon was able to convince many journalists that he was the real thing, and they spread his narrative far and wide.
A fake band manager, promoting a fake band that he has no actual connection to, via a fake social media profile?
It’s poetry.