Washed up rapper Soulja Boy was left holding the bag for $175K in an online hoverboards chargeback scam.
The 25-year-old one-hit-wonder, whose real name is DeAndre Cortez Way, emailed Stripe, the company that processed the credit card orders, to plead for help.
“I need help all the payments are fraud, and it sent my account to negative because they all say they weren’t authorized,” Soulja Boy wrote in an email to Stripe. “please help in any way you can thanks. I don’t want to have to pay all this money because of frauds is there any way to reverse these payments and get my account to Good standing.”
DeAndre sold the hoverboards for $1,500 apiece through his now shuttered online store.
Buzzfeed.com Joe Bernstein was the first to report the story. He reached out to the Atlanta rapper for a comment.
“How did you get my number?” DeAndre asked Bernstein.
The reporter explained that he found DeAndre’s number among some documents.
DeAndre never responded to Bernstein’s request for a comment.
When the story ran the next day, DeAndre reacted with anger, tweeting out Bernstein’s personal cell phone number with a request to “call me.”
Hundreds of Soulja Boy’s 4.8 million followers called the number, thinking it was the rapper’s.
.@souljaboy tweeted my phone number because he's upset w a story i wrote. i am being harassed by 100s of his fans. please tell him to stop.
— Joe Bernstein (@Bernstein) December 13, 2015
“I woke up from a nap to dozens of texts: ‘hey soulja,’ ‘is this really your number?’” said Bernstein. “I suspect he’s mad because of a story I wrote about him getting defrauded on his hoverboard business.
Bernstein added that “a rep of his had previously called me and said I’d be hearing from his lawyers.”
Gawker.com reached out to DeAndre, who said “I was just mad because he got my number and info out my email and I didn’t know how. Now this story is public it’s just embarrassing and unnecessary when you’re trying to handle Bizness.”
DeAndre accused Bernstein of hacking his emails, according to Gawker.com.
“People are thinking we lost that money in a scam,” said Soulja Boy. “We are working the fraud orders out with Stripe. But why is it ok for him to post this info if it’s between me and Stripe?”
DeAndre asked Bernstein to take the “embarrassing” story down. But Bernstein refused.
Bernstein told Gawker he doesn’t take stories down just because the subject of the story is unhappy.
“That just means i’m doing my job,” he said.
