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.