In 2017 I placed a fabricated story about a 20-year-old named Quiane Crews who claimed he had sold a manufacturing company for $100 million. I believed his forged documentation at the time. When I found out the story was a fraud, I requested takedowns from every outlet that had run it; some pulled, some didn't. I haven't operated that way since, and this page is the canonical record of what happened, what I did about it, and what changed at Influencer Press as a result.

The $100M story I placed, and how I found out it wasn’t real

This is the most-cited thing about me online, and the public record of it is incomplete. I want to tell it in my own words because the version a careful researcher pieces together from third-party sources is partial in ways that matter, both to me and to anyone deciding whether to work with my firm.

What Quiane claimed, and why I believed him

In early 2017, Quiane Crews told me he had bought a Chinese manufacturer called Shenzhen Jinli Communications Equipment for $200,000, grown it from $10M to $50M in annual revenue, and sold it to a buyer named “Mr. Wenming” on February 20, 2017 for $100 million. He claimed a second sale of a smaller factory for $60 million through Wenming’s network, bringing his public number to $160 million. He was 20 years old, from Fort Wayne, Indiana, with no prior public footprint to verify against.

None of it was true. The companies, the buyer, the exits were invented. I didn’t know that at the time.

When I asked for proof before I started pitching journalists, Quiane sent me forged Wells Fargo screenshots showing a checking balance of $155,245,178.78 with a $50 million deposit from his own name and a follow-on $3.16 million deposit. He sent a “proof of funds” document from an entity called P&B Business Solutions. The savings balance on one of the screenshots reads “$2,500,00.00.” The comma is in the wrong place. I didn’t catch it then. People in Facebook comments did, immediately. I believed him because his documentation looked credible to me and because I wanted the story to be real. Both of those failures are mine.

The methodology I built, and what it actually did

I want to be precise about my role here, because this is the part of the story that gets compressed in third-party retellings and it shouldn’t be. Quiane invented the fabrication. I invented the placement methodology that gave the fabrication reach. Without me, he is a 20-year-old in Indiana with a story nobody can find. Without him, I am still the architect of a credibility-laundering playbook that worked exactly as I designed it to work. Both of those things are true and they sit alongside each other.

The methodology worked by sequencing. I would place a subject first in lower-editorial-review outlets: contributor blogs, marketing-focused publications, sites where the bar for evidence was effectively zero. Future Sharks. Rafi Chowdhury’s personal blog. A handful of others. Once two or three of those were live, I had something to point to. When a contributor at a tier-one outlet asked “is this guy real?” I could send links to existing coverage. The coverage looked like verification. It wasn’t. It was just other coverage I had also placed. The verification gap in the 2017 contributor economy was exactly the size of a determined fabricator and a PR person who wanted the story to be true.

Applied to Quiane in good faith, that methodology placed him into Inc. through Nicolas Cole’s contributor piece on May 31, 2017, into Entrepreneur through Peter Daisyme’s piece on June 13, 2017, into a Forbes roundup by Mei Mei Fox on May 2, 2017, and into a standalone HuffPost piece titled “From High School Drop Out to Multi-Millionaire: 3 Tips From a 20-Year-Old Worth Over $100 Million.” When HuffPost’s editorial team flagged the piece and asked for a source on the $100M sale, I had Quiane send the forged bank statements and the P&B “proof of funds” document, and I forwarded those to journalists myself. There is an email in my outbox dated April 13, 2017, pitching Quiane to a writer at Business Insider, where I wrote: “At first I doubted it until he sent me his bank statements and a proof of documents which I attached.” That email is the cleanest evidence I have that I was not running a deliberate hoax. I was the mark, and I was also the engine.

How I found out, and what I did next

I don’t have a single moment I can point to where I knew Quiane was a fraud. By mid-2017 it was a cluster of signals at once. He stopped paying people he owed money to, multiple people I knew started calling him a scammer independently of one another, and I went to my mentor Neil Patel and asked him to verify any of the underlying claims. Neil came back with nothing. There was no Shenzhen Jinli of the size Quiane described. There was no Mr. Wenming. There was no $100 million wire. Once I knew to look at the Wells Fargo screenshots properly, the forgeries were obvious.

By early August 2017 I was certain, and the cleanup started immediately. On August 6, 2017 I emailed Rafi Chowdhury and asked him to pull his piece; he pulled it the same night. On August 13, 2017 I emailed flagcontributor@huffingtonpost.com and flagged the HuffPost piece, writing: “I am the writer of this article and I found out that Quiane Crews is a scammer. Please put this article down as I’m embarrassed to have published it.” HuffPost took it down. Thrive Global pulled theirs. Future Sharks replaced the article body with “[interview has been removed]” but left the URL active. Several smaller placements I’d made went quiet.

Two of the original placements never came down, despite my requests, and they remain live as I write this:

I’m linking them here because I’d rather the canonical version of this story include the artifacts than pretend they don’t exist. The contributor economy at those outlets in 2017 was permissive enough that a quote from a fabricated subject in a contributor’s broader piece did not meet whatever internal bar they had for retroactive editing. The Forbes piece by Mei Mei Fox may also still be live; I have not been able to confirm either way as of this writing.

What changed at Influencer Press, starting immediately

The change in how I operated began within weeks of the cleanup. I want to be specific about it because “I learned my lesson” is the kind of phrase that does not survive contact with a careful reader, and the actual operational changes are concrete.

I stopped placing online gurus and self-described flexers. I moved the firm toward real operators: founders with real revenue, real customers, real products, real third-party-verifiable track records. The current client roster reflects that, and it’s publicly visible on the site.

I built verification into the front of every pitch process. When a client tells me their company is worth a number, I ask for the document. Recently a client told me his company was valued at $225 million; I had him send the BDO valuation report before I pitched a single outlet. I cannot verify everything. I am not an auditor, and a determined fabricator can produce documents I will not catch. But the bar moved permanently from “his bank statements looked real to me” to “the third party that performed the valuation is one I can call to confirm.”

I stopped paying contributors under the table to run client pieces as if they were editorial. That practice was the standard way the contributor economy ran in 2017, and I had been part of it. I no longer do it. I continue to believe strongly in paid placement as a category. I think earned media gambles on a journalist’s mood and paid media controls for it. But every paid placement Influencer Press secures today is run through outlets that label it as sponsored, or marked as sponsored on its face. The line is whether the reader knows what they’re reading. The operational specifics of how that works in 2026 (what counts as paid, what counts as earned, how disclosure is handled per FTC guidance, what clients get at each tier) are on a separate page at /transparency.

What I believe now, and why I’m telling this story publicly

The thing I learned from the Quiane episode is not that the media is corrupt. The thing I learned is that the contributor economy at major outlets in 2017 had a verification gap, and the gap was exactly the size of a determined fabricator and a PR person who wanted the story to be true. I was that PR person. I built the methodology that exploited the gap in good faith and got exploited by it in turn. The system worked the way I designed it to work, which is the part I had to sit with for years before I was able to talk about it cleanly.

I talk about this publicly now, on Dr. Phil’s podcast in 2025 (Episode 573, “Media Psyops Exposed”), at Nasdaq, in interviews, because the playbook I built still exists in the industry and the people who know how it works should be the ones explaining it. The version of me that placed Quiane in Forbes in 2017 had no business explaining anything to anyone. The version writing this page does, because nine years of operating differently is the only thing that earns the right to. The artifacts of the 2017 episode are public, on my name, with the cleanup and the changes and the receipts attached. That’s the whole story. Anything else I say about media credibility traces back to it.

If you found this page because you’re researching whether to work with my firm, the honest answer is: I am the person who built the credibility-laundering system, got fooled by my own system once in 2017, cleaned up what I could, changed how I operate, and now run a PR firm on the other side of that line. That is the entire picture. Everything you need to evaluate the firm is on this page, the transparency page, and the client roster on the site. If you have questions the pages don’t answer, I’d rather you ask me directly than guess.