I Was Scammed by a Celebrity Influencer. Which one you might ask? Aggie of Travel in Her Shoes — currently an Instagram Superstar sitting at 860k followers. Aggie convinced me plus 500 wannabe influencers to take her course, and then disappeared because of “lack of wifi”.

I paid $500 for a 12-week course taught by one of my favorite Instagram Stars: Aggie Lal of @Travel_inhershoes. Why? Well I was damn curious. I have been following Aggie since early 2016. I watched her hit the benchmarks of followers: 200k, 400k, 500k. Hell, I even witnessed her hit 890k and then weirdly drop to 840k in ten minutes… Watched her travel the world through her stories. Knew that there was also a man behind the camera. And knew I would no way create the content she did because I don’t have the money to travel that much, don’t own the equipment she does, and I don’t have my own professional Instagram Husband.

Aggie’s Master Tribe course announcement on Instagram

BUT! Even with that reality… I have been playing at this Instagram game for a while. I know the tricks, I know the deep dark secrets. I’ve done the pods, I’ve played the Follow/Unfollow game, and I know all about the growth methods most of these 500k+ follower girls do. I also know that this particular Instagram Star did a lot of those same techniques. I saw her name on the lists of Giveaways. I saw her in the same pod circles as many of my friends, I knew she was doing the same things we all were. But was she going to be honest about it? Was she going to tell me which giveaways to do? Which filters to use? Tell us why she dropped 50k followers in one day? Which hotels to reach out to? How honest was this girl about to be?

So yes. I invested $500 into my curiosity.

The Master Tribe Course

Through an online learning platform called Teachable, this course could be accessed anywhere with WiFi. There were no live webinars, just hopping on when it was convenient for you. Aggie organized the class into 12, week-long modules. Each module went live on Monday, included six 5 to 11-minute videos, and had specific topics — everything from writing an Instagram bio to editing videos, to pitching companies. Alongside the Teachable course, there was a private Instagram Account with photos posted to go along with each shared video to allow for open discussion about the video topics.

All of this was very straight forward. Topics were outlined in a course description before you even paid for the class. You knew what the 12 topics were before you were required to pay; nice, right? The course description also included reasoning behind the steep $500 price: “[I] wanted to keep the course reasonably small & manageable so I can make sure I can be reachable to students. Second of all, humans don’t value things they get for free. Naturally, we care more about things we had to work hard for.”

The course description also said: “The course consists of 12 weeks and will be released week by week from September 17th until mid December. This is to ensure the highest accountability & meet any questions you might have along the way!”

The course description also included a note about being unsatisfied with the course: anyone who was unhappy could drop the course for a FULL refund within the first week of the course.

So quick jump in timeline to everything kicking off. The first videos were posted. We learned all about Aggie’s back story, tid bits she had never shared on stories and in her posts. A Facebook Group was created by a member, and then a Slack Channel. And on top of that, I was put into three different Instagram Group Chats with members! I was bonding and meeting women that felt so inspired. We were all ready to grow together and learn from the best…

The Course Timeline and Dropouts

…until the end of the week one.

Week 1 kicked off with her intro, some book recommendations, and a challenge. The challenge was to get someone else to sign up for the course. She would be providing affiliate links for every single student and wanted us to influence someone else to take the class. The confusion spread rapidly. The Instagram Course straight up seemed like a pyramid scheme. How could we ask our own followers to purchase a $500 Instagram Course that we had barely started ourselves?

Discussions in slack all came to the same conclusion: there was no way to sell the course. “I personally don’t want to advertise [the course] because I haven’t even finished the course, so I can’t give any valuable input whether it was really worth it or not. I also don’t use her presets, so I can’t promote something I have no experience with. Even with my sales experience, it’s still difficult to sell something I know nothing about.”

But honestly, I’m sitting here 13 weeks after I watched the challenge video and I still haven’t received an Affiliate Link.

On top of the challenge, the “reasonably small” group was 500 members large. 500 eager students that wanted to become Instagram stars.

500 students that didn’t believe they were getting the information or attention that they had paid for. They thought the challenge was a joke and some strange way for Aggie to get more money out of us. Facebook Threads and Slack Channels were filled with an angry mob of women infuriated by what was being taught.

Polls went up… for example this one, and mannnn were the happy customers far and few in-between.