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Real Estate Agent Hijacked The Geotag Of Thousands Of Coachella Photos, Fans Say
Selfie! (Photo by Matt Cowan/Getty Images)
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A high-end real estate agent may have tricked thousands of Coachella attendees into tagging their photos with his Facebook page instead of the festival venue.
Roughly 99,000 festival-goers who initially geotagged their Facebook photos with the location "Coachella — Weekend 1" later discovered that the name of the location switched to "Rami Atherton," the name of an L.A.-based property agent, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Now, rather than seeing all of the bands, food and inspiring fashion choices they enjoyed in Indio, instead their Facebook posts link to Atherton's page, leaving many to feel they were duped by a shady publicity stunt.
"That is some sneaky s—," Buzz Chatman, a TV producer whose Coachella posts now link to Atherton's page, tells the Hollywood Reporter. "It's a pain in the ass and I can't change them back so now his name is all over my timeline."
According to his professional bio, Atherton is an agent with Nourmand & Associates, a firm with offices in Beverly Hills, Hollywood and Brentwood. He also boasts of an "unparalleled level of discretion and personalized attention" as some of his professional attributes, though some may beg to differ following the geotagging.
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He also seemed to be happy that so many Angelenos were heading to the Indio Valley for the festival:
Reached for comment about the geotag hijacking by the Hollywood Reporter, Atherton contends that the social media mix-up was entirely unintended. He maintains that confused fans were "tagging our group. We had about 100 people do that and I disconnected it because it was getting kind of obscene. People were tagging it that weren't in our group."
"I didn't realize it was a public group," Atherton explains. "I caught it this weekend and changed it."
Asked directly if the geo-tag mix up was part of a publicity stunt, he replied, "No. Absolutely not."
And, to be fair, the first weekend of Coachella was not without its user-error mix-ups. We'll just have to wait and see how weekend two goes.
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