Wine Country Womens Festival turns out to be an AI slop scam | Latest Tech News
Sonoma County girls are livid after an unknown scammer circulated AI-generated advertisements for a Wine Country Women’s Festival that even seemingly duped local officers for a bit.
The pageant was supposed to happen this Saturday at Keiser Park in the city of Windsor, and advertisements started circulating in the summer season on social media, selling alternatives for local companies, nonprofits, colleges and group teams to take part.
One of the AI-generated advertisements.
According to very suspicious-looking advertisements on its still-active Instagram page, the pageant pledged to “support women” and “build community” with hands-on classes, live performances and significant conversations.
A now-defunct web site provided distributors a 10-by-10 foot space for $79, $132 tickets for “food truck partners” and $185 “Home & Garden Showcase Partner” tickets.
The organizer even submitted a rental software in July, which the city processed. There was also a deposit and certificates of insurance coverage for an anticipated large gathering with upwards of 1,500 attendees.
But in September, two local girls started raising alarms about the event. The city ultimately began having issues and late last month, officers warned people about the event’s legitimacy. The software was canceled after unpaid charges.
“We tried to contact the event planner and didn’t receive any return to our phone calls or emails,” Olivia Lemen, Windsor’s parks and recreation director, told the Santa Rosa Press Democrat.
Keiser Park is pictured in Sonoma. An marketed girls’s wine pageant was supposed to be right here. Sonoma County Tourism
“This is the first time that we’ve really had an event planner pay for a deposit and the certificate of insurance and then not follow through with paying the fees and having an application canceled.”
One vendor reported the event to the Better Business Bureau after paying the sales space charge, SFGate reported, and Windsor police told the Press Democrat that it acquired one report of fraud linked to the purported scam.
One Sonoma mom on social media said members of her mother’s group also fell for the scam and paid up. Another girl said she paid for the seller charge. It’s unclear how many victims had been there and who was behind it. The Post reached out to local police for particulars.
Mary Orellana, proprietor of Lovey Coffee Company in Santa Rosa, and Hilary Richards, a Windsor mother who based a girls’s group group, have publicly complained that the city didn’t act immediately on their issues.
Coffee proprietor Mary Orellana introduced consideration to a pretend girls’s wine pageant that charged distributors up to $195 for an event without permits. Instagram/@loveycoffeeco
They stayed up until 3 a.m. every evening to examine the event, Orellana claimed, and when they went to the city to convey the issue up, “they wouldn’t take” them “seriously” and “kept telling people it was real.”
Windsor only canceled the appliance after the ladies went on social media to air their suspicions, Orellana said, and the city “acted like they knew nothing.”
“Let’s talk about authorities not listening to women, our local government not doing anything to protect its constituents,” Orellana wrote in a joint post with Richards.
The Post reached out to the ladies and to the city for remark.
Hilary Richards, on the ground, with She Can Club, a girls’s group group. Instagram/@shecanclub
Many in the ladies’s social circles commented that they interacted online with the organizer, which only fueled more suspicions. When Richards reached out to the web page for more particulars about the event, an organizer that only went by the title of “Jennifer” claimed it was doing outreach to prop it up, according to a screenshot.
“I was contacted about a booth and it all seemed super off to me from the beginning. Not buying it,” commented local realtor Kristen Preuss.
One of the AI-generated advertisements.
“Asked them to email us directly, twice and never received a response other than another dm! Either a scam or just incredibly disorganized/unprofessional,” commented a local dance studio.
“Every time people asked for more than surface level repeat info, they flat out stop responding. Not a good look,” Richards added.
The responses from the organizer appeared AI-generated, a number of people famous.
The Post also reached out to the organizer through Instagram asking for remark.
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