Is Emma Chamberlain Really Charging $10,000 for a DM?

How much would you pay to receive a message from your favourite star? That's the question many have been asking after a screenshot of Emma Chamberlain's online shop surfaced over the weekend offering fans the chance to buy "a personal thank you note... in Instagram DM." for $10,000. The corresponding fee? 1,025$. In short, the amount Carrie Bradshaw would spend on shoes in a week, or the equivalent of monthly rent, gas, coffee and ramen for one of the content creator's followers. But do not worry, because if you do not want to pay it all at once, there's always the option of a payment plan of just over $900 a month. As soon as the news was shared on Twitter and Reddit, comments started piling up, ranging between astonishment and derision from people who obviously found the demand for such a sum of money for a small phrase from Emma in return absurd.

It's fine to spend a few dollars on her coffee or sweatshirts or sketches, but that's about it. And Chamberlain agrees. The socialite told E! News that when she started getting comments asking why she was charging so much for DMs, she thought it was a scam: 

«A few days [ago] I started seeing comments asking why I was selling a DM for $10k. I assumed this was an online scam, as I had never offered to sell a DM for any amount of money, let alone $10k. People were saying this was for sale on my merch site, so I checked the site to see if it had been hacked and couldn't find anything out of the ordinary.I immediately got in touch with my merch company Cozack who further investigated and put the site under construction while looking into the issue».

So what happened? According to Cozack, Emma had absolutely no knowledge of it and "data was activated and crawled by Google's SEO indexing system."

«There have been false and inaccurate claims that Emma Chamberlain was offering DM’s in exchange for $10k. As background in 2018, Cozack (Emma’s merch company) was testing a prospective reward program related to Emma’s Merch without her knowledge. In testing they created an outrageous, never activated reward level that was not intended to be active or purchased. These reward ideas were never run by Emma since they were not meant to be available for sale or reward, but simply intended for internal testing purposes».

Will anyone have fallen for this and actually paid for it? A reminder for the future: do not trust everything you read.