War as a PR stunt: how far will a narcissist go for an ego-boost?

 

War as a PR stunt: how far will a narcissist go for an ego-boost?

Yi Zhou thought she got away with this…

 

This February marks the 4^th year of the War in Ukraine. Four years for turmoil, pain, hardships and awe-inspiring heroism of the Ukrainian people fighting for their freedom have been unravelling before our very eyes. The media has been documenting every detail, artists commemorated the sacrifices made by soldiers and civilians alike, the unbroken Ukrainian spirit resonating with people all over the world.

Unfortunately, not everyone saw a humanitarian crisis and international tragedy when the war broke out. Someone saw a PR opportunity.

This article is about Yi Zhou. Yes, again, I’m afraid. Because the story I’m about to tell you is one of the most disgusting, ghoulish PR stunts I have ever seen. And she doesn’t deserve to get away with it.

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Our story begins in March, 2022. The War in Ukraine broke out days ago. The world is buzzing with anxious premonitions of conflict escalation, multiple countries open their borders to refugees, regular people and enterprises begin sending donations to help the war-torn state.

Yi Zhou gets an idea. She’s been trying to make money off of selling NFT’s since January of the same year, to no avail. And with the war in the news, she runs to two media outlets with an interesting story: she wants to sell 4 NFTs, $25,000 each, and donate the money to help Ukraine. The offer is discussed in the following interviews published by Deadline and the NFTgators on March 4, 2022.

The four NFT “films”, supposedly titled with the Greek word for “freedom #number”, were going to be sold exclusively on the Open Sea platform.

Sounds like quite a feat, doesn’t it? And what do you know, less than a month later, on March 31, she told Variety she did it! All 4 NFTs sold, $100,000 raised and donated to Ukraine!

A lovely tale, huh? Well, unfortunately it’s just that. A tall tale. And I’m about to show you the proof.

Check out her Open Sea page, accessible through her Instagram NFT page that she will most probably scrub off the Internet once this article goes online.

Here we have the “Peace collection”, uploaded 4 years ago.

Only two of the alleged 4 films are actually uploaded. The “films” Zhou is selling are 10-second loops of abstract AI-pictures with static effect slapped on top of them. Underwhelming, to say the least.

The About section of the “films” states: “NFTs for Ukraine. 100% of the proceeds will go to UN Crisis Relief to fund critical work in humanitarian crises.” Lovely. Now we know we’re looking exactly at the supposedly sold NFTs.

One problem, though… Open Sea displays sales for each page on the platform. And when we search for the sold items on Zhou’s page…

NO RESULTS. None. Nothing has ever been sold on that page.

She brazenly lied about her donation. The films were never sold; money was never raised.

And, of course, it gets a little more disgusting!

Her Instagram page created to promote the NFTs, @intothesunnft, had three posts made at the time the NFTs were allegedly on sale.

All three posted on March 21, 2022. Now, why post them after the whole NFT story? Why miss out on the opportunity to draw attention of potential investors/philanthropes to her NFT page early on, especially at the very beginning of the war, when any news about Ukraine immediately gained thousands of views? This is basic marketing. Yi Zhou has a degree in economics. Hiding her charity project and staying quiet about it on Instagram NFT page was a clear choice. She never intended to sell anything in the first place!

 And take a closer look at two out of three of the posts that mention Ukraine:

As you can see for yourself, the #Ukraine is misspelled both times as #ucraine. Such tricks allow Zhou to mention a “news hook” without actually attracting any attention to the posts, since the misspelled hashtag won’t allow anyone searching for actual information on the Ukraine situation to find these posts and ask inconvenient questions about the donation.

Again, some might say Yi Zhou, who went to a London University and claims to be a polyglot, just doesn’t know how to spell “Ukraine”. Yet she had no problem spelling the word correctly on her Open Sea page. Or in her Instagram posts years later, when she thought she’d gotten away with it.

So, yeah. The typo was intentional. And incredibly gross of her.

 Yi Zhou clearly wanted to execute a publicity stunt, using the war as PR for her NFT page. There was no real intention to sell any films as NFTs. The information in the Variety article is false and Zhou did not contact the magazine with a clarification. One might think she wasn’t aware of the article even existing, somehow, but it is linked to her imdb.com page, as well as her studio website, yizhoustudio.com (see below):

She very clearly read it and saw no reason to correct the blatant lies. When Esquire published an article accusing her of fishing for a financial settlement late last year, she ran to them with her clarifications pretty much the same day. Yet here she didn’t feel like a clarification was really needed...

The whole “NFT for charity” deal sounded too ambitious to begin with. No one would have judged her for trying and failing to raise money, had she been open and truthful about it. But the narcissistic urge to pat herself on the back for stolen valor outweighed any shadow of integrity Zhou might have had. A narcissist did what narcissists do. Color me shocked.