There’s a viral grassroots effort to buy Spirit Airlines. They report that 512,347 people have pledged $437 million to acquire the airline that’s headed for liquidation, and they have a goal of raising $1.75 billion.
But this is just randos listing amounts of money on a web form, none of this money has actually been raised and there’s nothing binding about any of this. They also have no published strategy for how they’d run the money-losing airline any differently.
It turns out that people who would sign up to spend their money trying to resurrect Spirit Airlines are good targets for scammers. The organizer of this ‘people’s purchase of Spirit’ reports that fraudsters are tricking people who just want to sign up for this campaign into giving them money, by redirecting them to fake websites.
Hi, everyone. Hunter Peterson, potential future CEO of Spirit Airlines here. Very big, important, urgent announcement.
If you see the domains Let’s Buy Spirit or LetsBuySpiritAir.org, not .com, .org, those are scammers. They’re trying to take money. They are not associated with me. I don’t own those.
I need all of you to amplify this. All those media outlets that are trying to reach out, trying to get an interview, yeah, you’re not getting that from me right now. Report on this. This is important.
There is someone out there trying to take money. It ain’t me. It ain’t anyone associated with this. So do your job and amplify the thing that’s actually important of someone who’s trying to take money from us. I see you. [F-] you. Do what’s right. Return the money.
The video drops an F-bomb towards the end so is not safe for work:
Giving money to scammers is one way to lose it quickly. Spending that money to buy Spirit, without even a plan to run it differently, is another way to lose it quickly. I’m not sure that one is actually worse than the other in final effect.
There’s a sucker born every minute and in this case over 512K of them.
What a way to run a scam! Since Spirit Airlines itself was a scam (fewer amenities were provided while travelers were tricked into paying more than they intended), those who are fans of the now defunct airline are likely to send money to “save it”. P. T. Barnum was right when he said “there’s a sucker born every minute’.