If you’ve forgotten the Willy Wonka-themed scam event in Scotland from this past February, that makes sense, though I recommend revisiting the haunting images. Children wandered a barren warehouse with a few folding tables, scarfed down paltry helpings of jelly beans and lemonade, groaned at ill-prepared actors, and wept. Police showed up to address angry crowds. The company behind the event announced that they’d be issuing full refunds to all customers.
Surely it gets harder and harder to pull off these scams on progressively savvier audiences. Surely the consumer begins to pick up on the obvious tells, like the gibberish AI posters promising “encherining entertainment” and “exarserdray lollipops,” in the case of “Willy’s Chocolate Experience.” But it happened again!
This past Sunday in Detroit, the marks were not candy-oriented children, but grown-up fans of the Netflix show Bridgerton. The venue was not an obscure building in industrial Glasgow, but Detroit’s historic Harmonie Club, which was built at the end of the 19th century and is one of the city’s few surviving examples of Beaux Arts architecture. Tickets ranged from $150 to $1,000. Attendees were promised “an evening of sophistication, grace, and historical charm” straight out of the Regency-era show. There would be carriage rides and prizes for the best-dressed.
Hindsight is 20/20 and all that, but perhaps attendees could have realized that not everything was on the up-and-up. First clue: There’s an official Netflix-sponsored version of this called “The Queen’s Ball: A Bridgerton Experience,” but a couple seconds spent probing the drab site for the “Detroit Bridgerton Themed Ball” should have reasonably indicated that this was a different sort of event. Second clue: The event organizers, Uncle & Me LLC, abruptly postponed the ball by a month, days ahead of its initial date in August. Third clue: The event organizers were called “Uncle & Me LLC.”
The next time you spend several hundred dollars to attend an event that is postponed, and the organizers post images like this in an announcement about the postponement, take it as a cue to alert the authorities:
Gown-clad attendees arriving in limos on Sunday evening absolutely had themselves an Uncle & Me-ass experience upon entry. The assembled testimony across Twitter, Reddit, and local news is damning. According to attendees, despite the prices, there was apparently no particular programming for the event. Tickets were not scanned; “random people” wandered into the venue; vendors were peddling Kit Kats; the dinner, which included chicken wings and blue drink, was reportedly raw; cups were reused. Period-appropriate entertainment consisted of a pole dancer and a solitary violinist.
“The way that it was described was this was going to be a Bridgerton evening. We were gonna have classical music, good dinner. There was gonna be a play and they were gonna pick ‘Diamond of the Season.’ They were gonna give away all of these prizes, and we went in and it was completely empty in there,” attendee Amanda Sue Mathis told TV station 7 News Detroit. “There is nothing going on. They have a pole in the middle of the dance floor. A stripper pole in the middle of the dance floor.”
“It was definitely the price tag that had given us this expectation of luxury, regality, class, the Bridgerton experience, and even arriving to the event we were told there would be valet service, and we had to end up self-parking and paying for parking,” said attendee Ayrton Henrick, who had paid $250 for the “Duke and Duchess” ticket package for him and his girlfriend to celebrate her birthday.
What did the organizers envision, when they promoted the event in an interview with CBS News in June? “Seeing people able to just lay their burdens down for a minute, to lay work down for a minute, to lay the troubles of children—because there are no children allowed here at our events—to see them being able to lay their troubles down and just enjoy themselves while looking their best, that is going to fill my heart up,” said Jeremy Scott, co-owner and eponymous uncle of Uncle & Me. Do these images fill Uncle’s heart up?
In a statement Tuesday, the company told 7 News Detroit that it is “taking full responsibility and accountability for these shortcomings.” Uncle & Me will be “reviewing resolution options” for all the angry guests who dressed up for 19th-century high society and instead received a defining experience of the 21st century middle class: getting swindled out of money online.
