His name has been attached to hits by Justin Bieber, The Weeknd, and Zayn, but is it all a lie?

Over the past year, Cali The Producer has made a name for himself as one of the biggest hitmakers in the world. The 20-year-old Linz, Austria, native—whose real name is Sebastian Fuchs—has been credited with producing a litany of smash singles, including Justin Bieber’s “What Do You Mean?”, Zayn’s “iT’s YoU,” Jason Derulo’s “Naked,” The Weeknd’s “Can’t Feel My Face,” Jeremih’s “Pass Dat,” Chris Brown’s “Liquor,” and Meek Mill’s “Pullin’ Up,” as well as contributing to high-profile albums from Kanye West, Future, Carly Rae Jepsen, and August Alsina.

Only, he didn’t actually do any of it, according to numerous well-known producers Genius contacted, who deny Cali’s involvement in their work.

When a new album page is posted on Wikipedia, Cali’s name frequently appears in the credits as a producer. His work has been mentioned in articles published by XXL, AllHipHop.com, Complex, Music Times, FADER, and many more (including this site). Fuchs proudly posts screenshots of his press and Wikipedia mentions on Instagram with his signature “100” emoji. His Twitter bio says he’s a “super-producer” and Grammy nominee.

But Cali The Producer’s resumé begins to unravel when you look closely. His name never appears in the official credits for the songs he claims to have worked on. The publishing repertoires where musicians register the accurate credits for their songs in order to collect royalties show no trace of Sebastian Fuchs anywhere. A few producers publicly denounced Fuchs’ involvement in their work, calling him out on Twitter for lying. In the fall of 2015, skeptics took to forums like KanyeToThe.com and AbsolutePunk.net to speculate that Fuchs changed Wikipedia pages to include his name on the releases in order to bring attention to his own beats for sale.

It’s a perplexing case of creative ownership for contemporary times, one where an aspiring musician can falsely build his or her artistic profile with a click of a button and a few keystrokes, sharing glory for work that others did, without having to do any of the work. Fraud on the Internet is nothing new, but stretching it out to this extent over such a long period of time, and continuously getting away with it, is something that the music industry had yet to see. And yet, if the media and music fans are relying on the claims of a single individual who is updating crowd-sourced information databases, and taking those updates for fact, who’s to say what’s real and what isn’t?

What began as a profile on Cali The Producer was standard enough. I reached out to him for an interview, to which he eagerly responded, and followed up numerous times over the next 24 hours. We connected a few days later over Skype, with him dialing in over video but obscuring the camera lens so it remained blacked out. Throughout the discussion, Fuchs gave a backstory that matched his Wikipedia entry. As he told it, he was born on June 8, 1995, in Austria and began making music when he was 12, learning piano and guitar in elementary school and experimenting with beat-making on FL Studio after a friend introduced him to the software.

He started his production career on Twitter, sending links to other rappers and putting beats on an old SoundCloud account under the name CaliBeatZ, which features some of his original production. He said he got his first placement in December 2012, co-producing a track with Izze The Producer for Waka Flocka Flame titled “Where It At,” all done over the Internet.

“I was sending beats to Waka, and he said he liked it, but he wanted to get another of his producers on it,” said Fuchs. “I sent the beat to Izze, and he was just like, ‘Yeah, it’s cool, but I changed something.’ Then I send the FLP [session] to him, and he changed the beat his way, and that’s how it came out.”

Izze, in an email response, denies Fuchs' story: “His claim is very inaccurate!!” It’s the first in a long line of incredulous producers reacting to Cali’s claims.

From there, Fuchs said he connected with Mike WiLL Made-It after he sent over a beat CD that piqued his interest, encouraging him to fly over to the States, first to L.A. for two months and then Atlanta, where Mike is based. “I was basically part of the EarDrummers family,” Fuchs said.

Mike WiLL doesn’t recall this. “Lololol he trolling,” Mike wrote via text when asked about Cali. “Def lying. Never heard of him.”

Cali’s story next led him to London, where he did little production but picked it back up soon after, using the contacts he says he accrued from working with Mike to connect with big-name artists like Miley Cyrus. Then the timeline gets foggy. He said he’s signed to Def Jam, which didn’t respond to a request in time for confirmation, though he previously tweeted about parting ways with the label due to “big issues.”

So how exactly did he get his placements? “The label, Def Jam, which I’m signed to, is sending me requests to do some things,” he told me. I asked him about producing “What Do You Mean?” for Justin Bieber, an Island Def Jam signee, and how it came about. When the song came out in August 2015, many turned to the track’s Wiki page, which stated that Cali co-produced it with Skrillex. An interview between FADER and Fuchs was posted shortly after its release, though it was swiftly unpublished, and numerous publications reported both musicians as the song’s producers. It was later reported that MdL, a.k.a. Mason Levy, and Bieber were the sole producers of the track.

“Any claims by the gentleman known as Cali The Producer (he’s tried out this odd story a few times) for having music production credit on Justin Bieber’s released ‘What Do You Mean?’ record are humorously puzzling and false,” said a representative for MdL. Fuchs has also claimed to have produced Bieber’s “Sorry.”

I asked Fuchs why his name would be stripped from a song he produced and is claiming credit for. He chalked it up to ghost producing, a process where a producer supplies services to an artist, gets paid upfront, and receives credit either through agreed-upon payment without disclosure (it’s often written into a contract) or in the liner notes and publishing repertoires, when he or she can collect royalties. It’s rare that a producer would continue ghost producing this long without being included on the official credits.

“Ghost producing brings you a lot of money in a real quick way, because you just go ahead and sell the beats, sell the rights for a couple thousand at a time,” Fuchs says. “You’re not collecting any royalties; you’re selling the rights.”

Why would he publicly claim to have ghost produced songs, if the concept of ghost producing is that you never reveal your work? “You’re selling your rights to the other producer or to the label,” he explained. “It’s not what I want. People should know that I did it, even though I’m not properly credited most times. I deserve it. I put in work, so I show them.”

He continued: “I’m posting my credits online, as you see on the new Jason Derulo track [‘Naked’]. I’m always searching on the Internet. Every single post, I’m making a screenshot of it and posting it. That’s the thing, it’s what ghost producing is all about. You sell your rights to the label.”

Smash David, the producer behind Jason Derulo’s “Naked,” immediately responded to a query. “I produced ‘Naked’ myself, only me,” he said via text. “I don’t know who he is. He claims to have made the track, but when I contacted him he blocked me, like two weeks ago or more. Even my manager and lawyer tried contacting him. Even on Derulo’s Wiki it said produced by him. And I’m signed to Derulo lol. But had them fix it. I mean, go on the YouTube video, says produced by me. Idk what he’s smoking. He looks like a scam.”

David’s manager, Kash Johns, echoed his statements. “We don’t know Cali The Producer,” he said in a phone interview. “If you pull up to see the producers were on the track, he’s not listed on there. He has nothing to do with it. I notified Jason Derulo’s manager, because Smash has a publishing deal with Jason Derulo. So Smash works directly for Jason. …If you’re doing something for mixtape placements, that’s going to work. But if you’re doing something that’s actually released to a major label, it’s going to be a paper trail. Trust.”

The easiest way for Cali to fortify his statements would be to play me songs not yet released. So we scheduled a follow-up Skype interview for later in the week, so he could preview unreleased music by The Weeknd, Bieber, and “almost everybody hot right now.” He never dialed in and didn’t respond to follow up. He went almost entirely silent on social media, and my four subsequent emails went ignored, including the one laying out the secondary reporting that discounted several claims he made in our interview. His manager, Albert Hinterdorfer, said that Fuchs was busy on a trip to Korea but that he would be happy to instead chat with me about the process of connecting Fuchs with artists like Zayn for placement, something Fuchs said Hinterdorfer did. The manager went quiet, too.

Before ending our lone Skype call, Cali said, “I was just feeling like you were a cop because you were just asking, ‘Are you ghost producing. Is this true, that people think you’re a fraud?’” he said, with a nervous laugh. “I feel bad about it because people really do think I’m a fraud. I mean come on.”

Soon after, the ghost producer revealed a different side of ghosting: never responding to me again.

After we spoke, I looked through the songwriting repertoires in search of Cali’s name. Nothing showed up, which is highly unusual for a ghost musician. Even Rhymefest, a.k.a. Che Smith, who ghost wrote Kanye West’s “Jesus Walks,” has a credit on the page for the song and got an Academy Award and a Grammy for ghost writing Common and John Legend’s “Glory” last year.

A rep for ToneStith, who produced Chris Brown’s “Liquor,” denied any affiliation with Fuchs. “We are not associated with Cali in any way, and he did not have any involvement in the creation of ‘Liquor.’ All credit for that goes to ToneStith,” she said.

Representatives for Zayn dismissed Cali’s work on “iT’s YoU” as well. “That is absolutely incorrect,” she said. “Malay produced ‘iT’s YoU.’”

Across the Internet, musicians have gone on a direct attack. Ben Billion$, who helmed Meek Mill’s “Pullin’ Up,” fired back after Cali tweeted about producing the song. “I’m confused,” he wrote. “U didn’t produce ‘Pullin Up’ why would you take credit for something you didn’t do?”

As far back as 2013, the producer Kongo Beats responded to @RealCaliBeatz, his previous Twitter handle, about taking credit for his instrumentals. “If you steal anymo my beats and say u made them ima beat da fuk out you, @RealCaliBeatz,” he wrote.

The suspicion that Cali edited Wikipedia pages to credit himself is understandable, granted the open-sourced ability to modify data on the platform. Cali instantly dismissed this. “Would you really think I would be this dumb to edit Wikipedia pages and say, ‘Yeah, I produced it’? And then people say you’re a fraud? Come on, I’m not this dumb,” he said. A few hours of digging into the archives of past Wiki pages seems to contradict his denial.

A simple search on Wikipedia revealed an IP address that updated “Cali The Producer” into at least nine different pages between June 22 and Aug. 23, 2015. That IP address, which was responsible for inserting “Cali The Producer” into pages for Rita Ora, Iyaz, Jepsen, Bieber, and Rotimi, was registered back to one location: Linz, Austria, where Fuchs is from, though in fairness, it could have been anyone. Elsewhere, a user named Alvandria updated Bieber’s “What Do You Mean?” page to state that Cali produced the song with Skrillex. It was changed later that day to reflect the correct information, and Alvandria was blocked by the service indefinitely, reported as a sockpuppeteer, or someone who “created multiple accounts, or sockpuppets, to abuse Wikipedia policies, or are strongly suspected to have done so.”

Even with all of the producers’ condemnations on record, Cali’s claims could have a resilient effect. People are likely to believe anything they read on the Internet. An official press release from Universal Music Enterprises listed him as a producer on Justin Bieber’s Journals when it was being reissued earlier this year on vinyl. It could be legitimate; it could also be the result of lazy research that looked to the Wikipedia page for the album, which didn’t edit out Cali The Producer’s name from helming Bieber’s song “One Life” between July 3 and Dec. 7, when it was finally removed.

The Internet is an easy place to catfish others and pretend to be someone you’re not. It can be even worse when members of the media and fans don’t bother to do the research, when labels are slow to register songs and issue proper credits. In the case of copyright law, there’s protection for scammers: It can be even more difficult to prosecute someone committing offenses of this nature, if they were substantiated. Daniel K. Stuart, of King, Holmes, Paterno, & Soriano, LLP, who represents MdL, broke down the legal ramifications of saying you’re responsible for someone else’s work online, stating that it’s often not worth pursuing on account of being too expensive, time-consuming, and in return, can give someone like this exactly what they’re seeking: free publicity.

“Sooner or later, it’ll catch up to you and people will find out,” said Stuart. He contacted the producer to take down tweets stating that he produced Bieber’s “What Do You Mean?” after it was released, and Fuchs complied. Fuchs told me he did so when Island Def Jam told him to delete the song from his SoundCloud and step back from the track altogether on Twitter. Over on Instagram, it remains.

“Maybe someone in that position thinks that in the midst of that confusion, maybe I’ll get a placement that’s legitimate and then I can just focus on my own authentic success to build my profile and if nobody ever holds me to account, then I’ve gotten away with it,“ Stuart continued. “But this industry is very small. First and early impressions are very important, and there are enough people now who associate this guy’s brand with taking other people’s work that I would be surprised if it wound up being successful for him.”

If the tactic holds weight, it could be construed as a form of marketing and self-promotion that might lead to a chance session with a major artist, one who may not even care about allegations of fraud. And it would be brilliant. But even so, the strategy is unlikely to yield anything positive, said Stuart. “It’s a terrible way to build your profile because you’re doing it at the expense of the real people who created it,” he said. “It’s creatively dishonest, it’s morally dishonest, it’s ethically dishonest, it’s illegal.”

Litigation could be possible, if he were lying. It would be expensive, and a U.S. law firm would have to hire one in Austria to prosecute him. It would take a truly persistent producer to hold him accountable and see through the legal process. The only way that it would ever be truly worthy of litigious action is if Fuchs were seeking production fees, which he has reportedly yet to do.

According to Fuchs, his days of playing Wikipedia musical chairs may soon be coming to an end. “I got an album on the way—by myself,” he said, naming Future, Kevin Gates, and The Weeknd as featured guests. If true, it’s hard to imagine anyone confusing the project’s creative force. “The album is going to be titled Cali.”

[Editor’s Note: Since the publishing of this story, Cali The Producer has set his social accounts to private.]