The World's Luckiest Homeless Girl

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Flack
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The World's Luckiest Homeless Girl

Post by Flack »

After watching hundreds of vanlife videos, YouTube has begun recommending "carlife" videos to me. To a computer-driven algorithm, videos about people living in vans must seem similar to videos about people living in cars. In reality they are very different. Most (not all) vanlifers have made a conscious lifestyle decision and chose to live in a van in the name of freedom and adventure. Most (not all) carlifers are people who, after suffering one or more life altering events, have resorted to living out of their car. There are exceptions in both groups and I have no scientific data to back these statistics up. All I can go by are the videos I see on YouTube.

A couple of weeks ago, YouTube recommended I watch a new video created by a young woman named Ari. In the video -- her first ever uploaded to YouTube -- Ari discusses her current living situation with her phone. Ari, who looks like a cross between Britney Spears and Sandra Bullock, explains that although it's the week of her birthday, she has no family or friends to celebrate with. She's been living in her car for seven months now and suffering from depression. She hints that there's a story behind her current situation but says she's saving that for another video. Ari gives a quick tour of her car ("here's my roll of toilet paper, here's my bed") before wrapping things up.

The video, uploaded three weeks ago, currently has 1.5 million views.



Over the past 21 days Ari has uploaded 28 videos, many of them "shorts" -- video clips approximately 30 seconds in length. In one video, Ari shares her "car life tips." In another, she responds to YouTube comments and answers questions from viewers. When I watched Ari's first video, she had 300 followers. Three weeks later, she has nearly 80k.

"Whatcha doin', watermelons?" (By the third video, she has her own catchphrase.) In most of her videos Ari comes off as bubbly -- at times, like when she lip-syncs to her favorite songs, she's almost silly. But it's not all fun and games. In two videos, Ari discusses the circumstances that got her to this point. Her mom spent time in and out of prison; her dad is selfish and self-centered. To escape an abusive relationship in Arkansas, she moved to California to move in with her father, who lives with his parents. Because the house was so large Ari was able to live in the house in secret. Eventually she began to earn her keep by doing chores and paying rent, but as the evil grandmother developed dementia, Ari was kicked to the curb.

If that story sounds a bit like a movie script to you, you're not alone. A lot of the comments on Ari's videos accuse her of being "fake." The comments range from the relatively innocuous ("homeless people don't look like that") to wild conspiracy theories (several people claim she isn't really driving in her car, but rather posing in front of a green screen, which is... kooky). Whatever it is, there's something to her videos

Two days ago Ari posted her biggest updates to date. In a single video, Ari announced she was quitting her full time job, looking to purchase a van, and has been asked to be a participant on Netflix's Squid Games reality show, based on the series of the same name. There's a lot to unpack here. First, Ari says she's quitting her job to "do YouTube full time." She's been on YouTube for three weeks, nowhere near long enough to have received any money from them. Second, in the video Ari is seen looking for a new van at the Mercedes dealership in Beverly Hills. We're talking about a $65k-$70k van, not to mention the money required to convert it into a livable vehicle. And then there's her story about being asked to participate in a reality television show. I checked the website and while the show is currently casting, they require all contestants to hold a valid passport -- something that without a permanent address is difficult to acquire in most states. Are casting directors currently combing new YouTube accounts in search of contestants for their shows? Simply throwing the term "reality television" into this whole thing raises even more red flags.

Ari, for her part, bats her eyelashes innocently. When she hit 20k followers she asked in a video, "is this normal?" In her trip to Beverly Hills, she struggles to come up with the word "parking garage." In her latest video she talks about "learning how to use parking meters" and what it was like to use one for the first time. At a hotel, she is surprised by miniature bars of soap. At the dealership, she is confused by an elevator and ends up on the same floor she started on. Nobody who lives on the streets for a year is this innocent.

If you believe Ari -- and to be sure, many people do not -- she is one of the luckiest people on the planet. Two days after announcing she plans to become a full-time YouTuber, she randomly met a "guy who works on the production side of filming" for YouTube who has promised to help her channel and "get her merch going," which will include t-shirts imprinted with her watermelon catchphrase on them. According to her, the number of job offers, housing offers, and auditions won't stop coming in. Three weeks ago Ari was spending her days and nights in her car; in all of her recent videos she talks about heading to Starbucks (the one where she discovered how parking meters work) and editing her videos.



Ari credits all her success to God. There's a lot of religious stuff about walking with the lord. She prays for people.

01. Ari is pulling a scam. Ari previously added her CashApp link to the descriptions of her videos, but has since removed it. That's... odd.

02. Ari isn't real. This person is an actress, and someone else is footing the bill for this.

03. Ari is the luckiest homeless person on earth. Three weeks after starting a YouTube channel, a random girl is making enough money from her videos to quit her job and go looking for vans at a Mercedes-Benz dealership in Beverly Hills.

Ari's videos all end in the same fashion, with her blowing kisses to the camera and saying "I love you, watermelons!" For being new to the game, Ari knows a lot about social media marketing and what sells -- which, right now, is her.
"I failed a savings throw and now I am back."

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Flack
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Re: The World's Luckiest Homeless Girl

Post by Flack »

I'm adding a fourth option:

04. Ari is a real person who was quickly picked up and "sponsored" by someone.
"I failed a savings throw and now I am back."

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Flack
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Re: The World's Luckiest Homeless Girl

Post by Flack »

On the other end of the spectrum is Jared333, another fellow who lives in his car in California and streams on YouTube. Jared is convinced that, among other things, all banks will stop printing money in 2024, which is why we should all switch to Bitcoin. Jared's magnum opus is a thirteen minute video titled "Little caesers Pizza Live Wowee Good Food," in which Jared eats multiple slices of pizza and belches loudly after guzzling Pepsi out of a two-liter bottle. In the background, Jared's companion carries on a conversation with her dog for the entire 13 minutes, providing a child-like voice for the dog's dialog. During the video, someone in chat informs Jared that a time traveler informed him California is going to fall into the ocean after experiencing a 10.0 earthquake this September. "Huh, I didn't know that," says Jared before belching again.

Jared's video currently has 28 views. In fact, all of his videos, except for four, have 30 views or less. Those four have one thing in common -- each one mentions Ari's channel by name in the title. His most popular video, "allinwithari jarred333 foundation invite you to audition in a movie starring ariana grande" has 1k views. Compare that to his much more thought provoking video, "witch one is more likely to attack you dogman or bigfoot?", which only has 4 views -- two of which were from dogman and bigfoot.

"I failed a savings throw and now I am back."

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AArdvark
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Re: The World's Luckiest Homeless Girl

Post by AArdvark »

Ari is a scam. Congrats to her for picking up zillions of views, though. Not really different from any other reality shows unless she starts denying everything and the quality of the video content goes to shit.

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Flack
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Re: The World's Luckiest Homeless Girl

Post by Flack »

A group of Reddit investigators figured out Ari's real name and found her rap sheet...

"I failed a savings throw and now I am back."

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AArdvark
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Re: The World's Luckiest Homeless Girl

Post by AArdvark »

What a scammer. Hopefully she'll 'fess up and keep on making more videos

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