A man named "Shane West" (NO not Shane West the famous actor) contacted us about doing a gig....said he wanted a band for a private anniversary party in Plainfield NJ and claimed to be in a hospital ICU while booking this event. Private parties are not really the kind of thing we do - so we said "we play jazz" to which he replied "I want jazz." Stuff seemed off right from the beginning (like when he wanted jazz) so we asked for the party location. He gave us an address and upon going on Zillow it really didn't seem like a place where someone would throw a big expensive house party with caterer and band. We discussed a price and not too long after were told we would be getting a check in full for a larger amount than agreed upon so that we could take the check to the bank, deposit it, write and send a certified check to Shane's personal chef and keep a couple hundred dollars for ourselves as a "tip." Super scammy, scummy, illegal, etc.. Multiple checks were sent to us (Fed Ex!) and they looked fully legitimate but knew that this was a form of fraud. We played along in order to get as much material on text messages as possible so we could write a song and make a video about it. Because that’s just want we do to have fun! Eventually Shane called, alarmed that we had not sent money to his personal chef, so we replied by texting him our video and said “guess what? we wrote a song about you!”

For anyone interested in knowing - our experience with the FBI was lackluster and impersonal (just an electronic report with no follow-up) They are super overwhelmed with internet fraud and stuff like this doesn't seem to be very important which is sad because some people have no idea, then suffer significant losses from these crimes. It's also sad because we wanted to feel like we were on an episode of Law & Order but nothing exciting happened with law enforcement whatsoever and we didn't get to see “Fake Shane West” taken away in handcuffs or anything. Check out our video on YouTube, (with Adriana’s leg in cast LOL) and remember to Subscribe. OH! Also, a few months after we made it other musicians contacted us to say they had been scammed by the same guy (same name ha!!)