More On: scams
The Bored Ape Yacht Club Discord was hacked, and MAYC #8662 was stolen. '
Lori Loughlin’s request to serve sentence at California prison approved
Scammer impersonates Rolling Stone Ron Wood for online romance grift
Scammer posing as Small Business Administration to steal personal info
Top Hollywood psychic Tammy Adams refutes accusations of million-dollar scam
At the height of Beatlemania in 1964, the Beetles arrived to screaming fans at the Buenos Aires airport. But the moptops weren’t the British pop group — just four guys from Florida. An Argentine impresario had booked the look-alike band when he saw them at a Miami club. Known as the Ardells, Tom, Vic, Bill …
At the height of Beatlemania in 1964, the Beetles arrived to screaming fans at the Buenos Aires airport. But the moptops weren’t the British pop group — just four guys from Florida.
An Argentine impresario had booked the look-alike band when he saw them at a Miami club. Known as the Ardells, Tom, Vic, Bill and Dave bore such an uncanny resemblance to John, Paul, George and Ringo that they often went by the name of “The American Beetles” or just “The Beetles.” Rudy Duclos, the promoter from Argentina, felt he could get away with selling the band as the real thing to star-struck fans in South America.
“We wore our hair the same, we dressed the same, we wore suits. It was pretty good,” said Bill Ande, the Ardells’ lead guitarist told the BBC last week.
There was so much interest in the group, rival TV stations in Buenos Aires bid for the band’s live appearances, with one broadcaster enlisting a group of thugs to carry the band members out of the airport and spirit them to the TV station as soon as they’d arrived
“When we got off the plane, they took us to a TV station,” where “[our] drummer was kidnapped by a different station and they went through a whole thing to get him back,” said Ande.
But when the band finally appeared on live TV, Argentine fans saw through the ambitious deception, a story chronicled in “The Day that the Beatles Came to Argentina,” a 2017 Argentine documentary. The real Beatles were in London at the time.
After the fiasco, a headline in one local paper read “The Beetles are not the Beatles.” The confusion was “lamentable for all of us,” the article said.
