An Instagram Influencer Is Being Called A Scammer For Her Poorly Planned Creativity Workshops

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Caroline Calloway being called a scammer

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Instagram influencer Caroline Calloway is being dubbed a scammer after poorly planning expensive creativity workshops. Calloway has over 829,000 Instagram followers and her page is an Instagram stories account, which she boasts is the “first of its kind.”

Calloway’s “scam” has gone viral thanks to writer Kayleigh Donaldson. Donaldson made a thread of how scammy Calloway’s $165 four hour seminars appear to be.

The seminar is called a Creativity Workshop. She has multiple dates in New York City, Chicago, Dallas, Washington D.C., Austin, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Charlotte all lined up. The original price of the workshops was $165. They’re now $178.68, but we’ll get to the price increase later. None of these dates have a location despite some being a few weeks away.

According to the Eventbrite page, the workshop will cover creativity, writing, making art, making mistakes, building a brand on Instagram, salad, mental and physical health, heartbreak, authenticity, orchid crowns and care packages and photos.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BqsXwhIBn5b/

The page states that everyone who buys a ticket will get coffee, tea and oat milk, new friends, a personalized journal, lunch, fresh orchid crowns, photos, care packages and two and a half hours of learning.

The workshop starts at 11 A.M. with “New Student Orientation Coffee & Tea” and for the first hour, Calloway won’t even be there!

“I will not be here for this. I don’t want to steal focus. I want you guys to get to know each other and, most important: get caffeinated together,” the description for the event states. She says this part is optional, but even if you don’t go the ticket price will be the same.

Then from noon to 1:30 P.M., Calloway will cover creativity, writing, making art, making mistakes, building a brand on Instagram and mental and physical health. All of that in one and a half hours!

https://www.instagram.com/p/4chPr7neq3/

Then for 30 minutes, the workshop will break for lunch and everyone will be able to eat a vegan salad Calloway has made.

“We probably won’t find a giant banquet table that seats all 20 of us, so we’ll just be sitting around the room with plates in our hands EATING A DELICIOUS HOMEMADE VEGAN SALAD AND HAVING FUN,” the event exclaims.

After lunch, the seminar will continue and cover heartbreak and authenticity for 30 minutes! The last 30 minutes will be dedicated to making orchid flower crowns, taking photos and giving out care packages.

There are obviously lots of holes in these events. The fact that there is no location, the price for the value of the workshop, no seating and much more.

Donaldson’s Twitter thread started in December 2018 and documents in detail the arc of Calloway’s suspicious workshops. On December 28, 2018, she tweeted a screenshot of Calloway’s Instagram Stories asking for a videographer to cover the events. The videographer would be unpaid.

Calloway quickly changed her mind and decided to pay the people she was planning on hire to document her workshops.

She then announced she was going to take her creative workshop overseas to Europe.

When 2019 rolled around Calloway realized how expensive holding this workshop would actually be. She announced that next tour she will be upping the price of tickets because she “undersold my time” with this workshop tour.

Donaldson compared Calloway’s workshop tour to Fyre Fest, the elite music festival that turned out to be a scam. On January 11, Donaldson pointed out that many of the workshops were sold out, but Calloway didn’t have any venues booked. Also, the tour starts the following day.

She somehow managed to book a Brooklyn Loft for her first tour date in New York City.

Calloway announced that for her second tour weekend in Washington D.C. she didn’t get to writing personalized letters to guests and asked people to bring their own lunches to the event.

After all of that, she decided that the Brooklyn loft was too beautiful to hold her workshops anywhere else. She then asked her fans who bought tickets for Boston and Philly to come to NYC for their event.

The whole thing turned into a big mess.

It was too late for her to cancel her D.C. stop and she went and showed off on her story that she did get around to personalizing journals for her guests. But ultimately she decided to cancel the tour. She also saw Donaldson’s thread pointing out all the ways she is scamming her followers. Calloway posted that everyone will be refunded even those who attended the first two workshops.

Despite canceling her events the Eventbrite pages are still up and you can still purchase tickets.

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