Promo company Da Block 365 accused of using social media accounts of DMX, Game, Fat Joe & more to mislead customers.
By: Amanda Mester
Tags: Hip Hop, Spotify, Music Industry, Scam, Rap

7. Payments — usually to two separate CashApp accounts — of anywhere from $100 to thousands of dollars are requested. Often, the person on the receiving end of the DMs explains they don’t have the amount of money being requested. Almost always, the sender of the DMs is willing to take whatever they can get. Similarly, if the recipient doesn’t have CashApp, the sender abandons it and asks for money to be sent elsewhere. In the Jadakiss example below, it’s notable that the sender of the messages from his account is adamant the memo does not list the payment as being for goods and services…

8. Alleged victims are asked to submit a form, including the song of theirs which they want included on the promised project, as well as their full names and phone numbers. There are no contracts. (This “company” is so unprofessional, that forms sent from the Redman account spell his name as “Red Man.” You can see that in the previous report linked above.)

9. Some alleged victims are indeed placed on playlists or “mixed tapes”/mixtapes, but more often than not the playlists/mixtapes do not appear on official/verified accounts as promised but instead on dead playlists with hardly any followers, likes or plays.

The company is being accused of misleading victims into believing they are communicating directly with well-known, superstar rappers like Redman, The Game, Fat Joe, DMX as well as R&B singers like Tank. It’s clear many of the messages being sent to alleged victims are copied and pasted, so a DM one person gets from the Fat Joe account might exactly match a DM someone else got from the Dave East account, and so on. One can safely assume Da Block 365 is either providing these famous artists with the copy to send to prospective customers or, perhaps more likely, the company is the one doing all of the communicating. But they’re doing it in such a way as to appear as if it’s Fat Joe (or The Game, or Jadakiss, or Tank, etc.) sending the message and not a representative of him.

There are examples of recipients of these DMs asking the famous rapper to hop on Facetime or video chat to confirm their identity. Guess what? They don’t get a video chat. Instead, the verified account holders send messages like “I ain’t got time for all that.” It’s not unreasonable to think that these famous artists don’t have the time to communicate with thousands of accounts over DM. It is reasonable to think that allowing someone to impersonate you to convince folks to send you money is fraudulent.

Accusations against Da Block 365 also include deceptive marketing, inflated streaming numbers through the use of black-hat tools, doxxing, harassment and threats. In some cases, alleged victims who’ve gone public with accusations have had their money returned, presumably to buy their silence. In the Spotify section below, you can see one such example.

In my previous report — which you can read here, and which provides some essential backstory about how and when these accusations began garnering lots of steam — I attempted to provide a general overview of Da Block 365 and the alleged scam it’s operating.

I think it’s worth taking a closer look and what Da Block 365 is and does. A cursory look at its website makes it clear the company partners with established acts — primarily rappers — to present mixtapes which are in reality playlists on platforms like DatPiff and Soundcloud. Rappers who appear on their website under the “Artists” tab as “Artist [SIC] we are currently working with” include:

Benny the Butcher

Bow Wow

Busta Rhymes

Da Brat

Dave East

Fat Joe

Fetty Wap

The Game

Jadakiss

Juelz Santana

OT Genasis

Papoose

The “services” the company offers? Here’s what the webpage says: “If you are interested in one of these artists to host your next single or your next project or simply want your current material you have out shouted out on their social media platforms use the contact form or hit us up on Instagram @dablock365.”

Playlists “hosted” by these artists do appear on the company’s website, so it’s clear there is a product of some kind delivered. There’s a HUGE problem with that, though. These playlists live on Da Block 365’s Soundcloud. The company recently deleted its Soundcloud account, which means anyone who paid money to appear on its playlists now has nothing to show for it. That goes for folks who appeared on Soundcloud playlists already published (which have now completely vanished) and, in the case of the exchange below with the DMX account, playlists which haven’t even gone live yet. For the record, the person communicating with the DMX account below never got a response about the deleted Soundcloud.

On Da Block 365’s Spotify account, there are a few playlists. It’s worth mentioning the account has only 205 followers. Its playlist “hosted” by Jadakiss has only 70 likes. The “Benny the Butcher Playlist for Unsigned Artists” playlist has nine likes. The “Fat Joe Playlist for Unsigned Artists” has 11 likes. As reported in my previous piece, many of the unsigned artists who paid to be on these playlists were led to believe they were paying to appear on playlists hosted on the verified Spotify accounts of Fat Joe, Redman and others. More on Spotify later.

Elsewhere on the company’s website, there’s a tab that says “Register Your Music.” That page is absolutely empty. For a company touting what appears to be close relationships with megawatt talent, the manner in which it presents itself through its website is abysmal. But that’s a matter of personal taste and has no bearing whatsoever on whether the company is operating lawfully.

There have been times in which the accounts of these verified artists send rude, unprofessional and pushy DMs to prospective customers. Take a look at the example below from Shad Moss (fka Bow Wow and Lil Bow Wow).

For this chapter of my ongoing report, I will take a closer look at consumer laws and Spotify’s rules in an effort to provide some preliminary exploration of whether anything Da Block 365 is doing is illegal.