You may have heard that a company recently hosted a catastrophically bad event called 'Willys Chocolate Experience' that, among other things, blatantly violated the Willy Wonka brand's copyright and trademark protections - and somehow did not feature any chocolate. You may have also heard that this company exclusively used low-quality generative AI content to advertise the event online. All of this made the internet very angry.
What you might have additionally heard is that this company, House of Illuminati (HoI), consists entirely of one man and a slew of beleaguered, frustrated, event-specific contractors that he has not yet paid. Possibly, you've learned that he has a history running scams.
What you almost certainly haven't read is the extent of this man's history. This is one of those cases where I'm quite annoyed that journalists simply don't have the time to dig properly into stories. There's a very clear pattern here, and it's not the one that's being sensationalised.
How images like this fooled eight hundred people into buying tickets is beyond me.
In a small, tiny, miniscule amount of deference to basic journalistic integrity, I will not be directly naming this man - unlike every other outlet on the planet, apparently. Let's just keep it simple, and call the man who set up 'Willys Chocolate Experience'... Willy.
The entire internet knows of him - but not very much about him.
Overworked journalists and outraged 'Willys Chocolate Experience' customers have, perhaps understandably, dug back just far enough to learn that he fucked up running a charity and a fundraising event several years ago. They stopped there, figuring that was enough ammunition to say that Willy had a 'history of running scams'.
The truth is so much worse than that.
If that's true, you might ask, then why did Willy end up blatantly scamming some kids?
Well, he also seems to have a desperate, all-consuming need to 'get ahead' in life. This would have been entirely unremarkable if he'd sated the need by running a novelty-spatula drop-shipping business - kind of like that one tedious and over-eager 'side-hustle' guy you vaguely know from work who never stops talking about his 'passive income streams'.
Unfortunately, Willy took a different path.
This looks a lot like my first attempts at hosting a kid's birthday party, to be honest.
Now, my sympathies here are primarily with the attendees, the host venue's staff, and HoI's own contracted staff. Realising you're involved in (or have been hooked by) a total disaster of a scam is an awful experience. For the actors, in particular; having to desperately work to entertain a crowd of increasingly confused and upset children is one of life's great horrors.
But... while I was first skimming through the drama, something struck me about Willy's apology post (on the House of Illuminati's Facebook page): there is absolutely no weaselling. No justifications, or excuses. He doesn't throw anyone else under the bus. In fact, he says right at the start:
"It’s important for me to clarify that the organization [of] and decisions surrounding this event were solely my responsibility."
He goes on to stress that nobody else involved was responsible for the debacle, and that the "use of [their] faces" in media coverage could cause them undue harm. He also claims full responsibility for the dodgy finances of the charity non-profit he was previously involved with, explicitly distancing the founders of said non-profit from any wrongdoing.
Bare minimum from a sincere apology, sure - but this is not what typically happens when a scam artist hits the headlines. Where's the bluster? The deflection? The manoeuvring? The refusal to address particularly damning aspects, knowing full well that time will almost certainly sweep it all under the rug for them?
In the apology post, Willy also openly states how many event tickets were sold (roughly 850), and that he's "committed" to refunding them all.
Without any sense of the typical PR smarm and spin that usually accompanies these sorts of announcements, he also says:
"This is a difficult time for me, and I ask for your understanding and privacy. [...] I ask for a bit of time to process everything that has happened. My intention is to learn from this experience. Your support and understanding during this time mean the world to me."
In a prior post, he says that House of Illuminati (HoI) will not be hosting any further events going forward, and that (oh boy) he is Not Currently Staying At His Family's Home Address, Please Leave His Family Alone.
This doesn't paint the picture of a calm, conniving, serial scammer, does it? This reads like, at worst, a petty grifter in over his head - though admittedly, at the absolute best, he comes off as a clueless sucker with all the ill intent and cunning of a particularly smooth river rock.
What finally hooked me in, however, was the rough writing. The sometimes-difficult-to-parse phrasing. The missing words and spelling mistakes - all errors that read as very much human. And then I thought... shouldn't 'Willys Chocolate Event' pretty consistently have an apostrophe in it? Why isn't this 'AI bro' running his writing through ChatGPT for 'proofing/editing', like we typically expect to see in these situations?
So, I bothered to sit down and squirrel around in his writing and documentation for the non-profit he was previously involved in, as well as his policy manifesto from his brief political escapades. In these booklets, pamphlets, and other material, I saw the exact same non-AI pattern of rough phrasing and spelling mistakes.
Which was odd, because Willy was apparently deep enough into 'AI art' to have generated at least a dozen AI e-books. And... honestly, what was up with all these fake-seeming qualifications he claimed to have? Multiple doctorates?
I had to know what was going on. How does someone with an alleged background in scam-adjacent schemery run a clumsy event that rips off over eight hundred families... and come off looking like a gormless, unwitting accomplice to his own plot?
A deep dive into Willy's past (i.e., a very straightforward series of web searches set to exclude results from 2024) reveals something equal parts endearing and grim: someone who desperately wants to believe he is very good at many things, repeatedly finding out that he is not, in fact, terribly good at those things.
Willy graduated high school in the early 2000's, completing the typically expected courses with average-or-above marks. Shortly afterwards, he went to work at a fairly large company, making outgoing 'accounts receivable' calls - in other words, calling businesses that owed his employer money. Not fulfilling work, to say the least.
After just one year, he moved to a new, similarly brief role at a medium-sized telecom company where he managed a small team of cold-calling b2b salespeople.
He then spent another year at a different company doing menial market-research work, before flipping to yet another company and taking up what seems to be his longest-running job: three years of a different kind of b2b sales calls for various events and publications.
After leaving this final job, he took an extended break from the workforce in order to try for better, greater things.
In sum, Willy's early job history looks uninspiring, tedious, and actively unpleasant. There is a strong possibility that his inability to hold down long-term employment is a fault of his skillset. It is at this point that I must stress how much I am not trying to belittle Willy.
I can name dozens upon dozens of excellent, lovely people I personally know who have equally bland and unexciting work histories. The post-millennia economy has not been a pleasant experience for low- and medium-skilled workers, particularly those without tertiary qualifications. I myself have had a decade-long work history of uninspiring, demeaning jobs punctuated by year-long stretches of unemployment.
I am outlining Willy's straightforwardly unimpressive career to make one salient point: I don't think he enjoys, is suited for, or feels fairly treated by the modern office-drudgery economy. Every data point in his work history, social media presence, and extra-curricular work indicates that it has made him feel miserable and helpless - and has done so for at least a decade.
Fortunately for Willy, this is a condition he shares with a lot of people, so it would have been comparatively straightforward for him to directly share this with others. Instead, and very unfortunately for Willy, something about the ever-present sales mantra of "fake it 'till you make it" seems to have rubbed off on him.
I say this because the "greater things" that Willy tried for on his career break, roughly a decade ago, were... well, fake.
While he has scrubbed his personal YouTube channel, there exists another, older one, containing a video where Willy claims to be a "leading Life Coach and Doctor of Metaphysical Science".
The other videos on this channel are 'inspirational content' designed to funnel clicks through links that, back in 2014, sold some kind of self-help course.
Clear-cut, smoking gun, this is where it all began. After a string of boring, frustrating jobs (in an economy still struggling with the aftermath of a serious financial crisis), Willy lost his job, gave up, and decided "fuck it, I'm going to set up my own website and run a self-help scam." Right?
Right?
He started his hiatus legitimately enough, completing a wide range of free online classes (or 'diplomas') from a reputable online platform. Specifically, on business practices, online marketing, legal studies, and tech qualifications.
Then, he took a turn for the worse. Willy fell for the University of Sedona (UoS), a strange online degree-mill that offers courses almost exclusively in "Metaphysics" and other similar wonk material. This is where his above-mentioned 'Doctorate of Metaphysical Science' came from.
Specifically, while at UoS Willy earned three separate 'Doctorate' degrees in: Metaphysical Psychiatry, Theocentric Psychology, and Philosophy of Conscious Business Ethics. Oddly enough, he also claims to have earned a Master's in plain old Business Administration from UoS.
This may also have been when Willy became a member of ParaNexus, an 'international anomalous research non-profit'. Wonk central, no doubt.
Then, he appears to have stumbled ass-first into at least two other scams, and possibly three.
The 'possible' scam is the tried-and-true 'work from home' scam course format, which has persisted about as long as we've had the internet - and probably before that, too.
While I can find few concrete references Willy ever made to these courses, there are a slew of coincidences that make it strongly likely he encountered them and found them compelling. In particular, the name and format of his website and YouTube channel (Be Free Today), and how he talked about having a work ethic and taking opportunities, match the naming and cadence of these scams almost exactly.
In fact, he may have purchased at least one web domain directly from a then-decade-old 'work from home' scam-salesperson who was retiring and looking to sell their URL - although due to the nature of privately purchased domain names and incomplete web archives from more than a decade ago, this is very hard to verify with certainty.
However, the second scam is not ambiguous. In 2014, Willy was suckered by Bob Proctor and Mary Morrisey. I have no compunctions about naming Bob Proctor, because he is dead and a convicted scam artist. I have no compunctions about naming the still-alive Mary Morrisey, who is a convicted and admitted serial financial fraudster.
Bob and Mary ran 'The 11 Forgotten Laws,' a website with a format that anyone with a passing interest in self-help or online courses will recognise. It's one of those endlessly scrolling ones, interspersed with spurious recommendations from alleged past purchasers, designed to lead the reader past dozens of variations on exactly the same sales pitch:
"Buy our course now, while it's on sale for a limited time, and change your life. Or stay sad and miserable forever, loser."
Thank the Internet Archive for the Wayback Machine, because without them, these little nuggets of internet history would be lost to time as scam artists and fraudsters cover their tracks by deleting everything.
'The 11 Forgotten Laws' is a movement (and multi-level affiliate marketing scheme) based on the 'Laws of Attraction' - a pseudoscientific idea that you have to "be positive" to "attract" the kind of "positive energy" needed to succeed in life.
It's wonk nonsense. It's DVD box sets and endless paperbacks about believing in yourself, shifting the universe itself to your will through the power of positive thinking, giving lots of money to the nice affiliates that brought you into the program, and then also buying more stuff from the program itself.
The third scam Willy was tangled in was a 'consulting' organisation with a veneer of 'Asian mysticism' called Golden Inspiration. They also sold courses and products, and an affiliate scheme, based around the 'power of attraction'.
In his decade-old YouTube videos, 'Doctor Willy' hyped up (and linked to) more than his own website. In fact, he primarily used tracked affiliate links to direct traffic to the websites of these two scam companies. Willy wasn't running his own scam - he was suckered by at least three separate bastards.
Likely out a considerable amount of money after paying for three fake doctorates and an unknown amount of 'Laws of Attraction' content, he was at the bottom layer of two separate MLM pyramids, desperately grasping for video views and link clicks to on-board more suckers and make his money back - but scarcely reaching more than a dozen or two per video. Watching his videos now is deeply sad.
This was not the start of a scam career. Willy was a scam victim.
He then spent several years bouncing between at least three short-term 'marketing consultancy' positions. Doubtlessly, this was not the self-actualised comeback he had hoped for.
After this stint of job-hopping, he appeared to give up on that avenue entirely - turning, of all things, to setting up his own business consultancy company. It gained frighteningly little traction and was also seemingly abandoned, its only lasting legacy being a dead web domain and a Facebook Business page littered with the same kind of motivational quotes seen in his earlier 'Laws of Attraction' days.
There's another gap in his work history here, seemingly filled with another year or two of falling for various online courses. Some are exploitative, like Zenith Academics (run by a deeply shady banker-turned-psychotherapy-tutor), some baffling (the United States Army Medical Center for Excellence), and some almost certainly being outright grifts (the Skyclick Advance Learning Institute).
Then, after volunteering for a wide range of charities, Willy threw himself into being the CEO of a local foodbank charity (the non-profit he mentioned in his apology for the Willy Wonka disaster). As you might guess from its presence in his apology for an entirely unrelated debacle, his tenure there can best be described as 'dysfunctional'.
After a series of wrong-footed attempts by Willy to turn the charity into his own omni-capable vehicle for Helping Everyone With Everything, the charity was shuttered in 2022. Despite this being described by commentators as a 'scam' of his, I think the worst we can realistically accuse Willy of is a total lack of the needed skillset to run a charity - and a refusal to admit as much.
Highlights of his tenure include:
Phew, that's... a lot of hubris.
Willy also ran for local public office during the end-stages of the charity debacle. Well, he said he was running - he never ended up formally registering, despite soliciting donations for his campaign.
As before, I can't see ill-intent here. This looks less like a money-driven scam and more like a failure to actually secure any support. The fiddly requirements of the process seemed to get the better of his ideals - which, to his credit, were seemingly well-meaning and left-leaning.
His platform included (paraphrased): "stop criminalising petty drug possession, fill in the bloody potholes, set up a local and community-owned renewable energy company, and fund small businesses and post-imprisonment employment programs".
As you might expect, the details on how he was actually going to achieve any of those things remained vague.
The context, missing from every bit of coverage so far, is that the people who dribble out these books are usually victims of some kind of scam course - or at least advice from AI-themed media personalities - purporting to "teach them how to use little-known tricks to get rich using AI with no work!"
This is how the scam economy has always worked. Desperate people like Willy end up paying for grifters to 'teach' them how to use low-quality paid tools (like online generative AI services) to 'find loopholes in the economy nobody knows about and profit with no work or effort'. These victims pay up, often repeatedly, and everyone in the chain of grifts benefits except them. They're the suckers. We're just the bystanders, caught as collateral damage.
Willy almost certainly doesn't churn out his conspiracy-themed generative novellas (with titles like "Operation Innoculation") because he's a conspiracy nut or a crypto-Trumpian. He's (to all consistent outward appearances) a bleeding-heart left-leaning independent who took COVID precautions seriously during his charity work!
Unimaginative victims of scams, however, generally churn out exactly that type of e-book because their courses (or parasocial mentors) have told them 'conspiracy thrillers' is a hot market full of readers with low-enough standards to buy unedited generative slop and leave relatively forgiving reviews.
In actuality, this is not even a new scam format. In the years before, Amazon was instead filled with was stock image covers pasted on top of slop books that were ghost-written by underpaid writers in economically depressed countries. Now, it's generative slop made using products from big companies... that use underpaid workers in economically depressed countries to sift through their data and do tedious and unpleasant digital tasks.
This is why none of Willy's prior work ever made use of generative AI, despite him being consistently interested in computing technology for at least a decade (and taking tech qualification courses as recently as 2021). He wasn't an 'AI bro' operating from a perspective of disdain for artists or the common person.
Willy almost certainly fell into these techniques through yet another online course, scam, or charismatic media personality. Possibly multiple times, because there are many separate courses that cover using generative AI for e-book creation, marketing physical events with generative images, and many more techniques besides.
As with his YouTube channel, his faux degrees, his botched charity work, and his truncated attempt at local politics, Willy was almost certainly a victim when it came to his feckless use of generative AI. A hubristic and harmful victim, for sure - but a victim who (time and again) has utterly failed to meaningfully profit from his efforts.
It's people like this nasty 'consultant' who make a profit by selling these bad ideas to people hapless enough to actually try them.
Or this one.
Or this one.
Or this one.
Or this one.
Or this one.
Or this one.
Like most of his gullible ilk, Willy has succeeded in doing nothing but cluttering up the world with worthless, low-quality Stuff that basically nobody, including himself, actually wants or enjoys - all as a side effect of the profit-seeking lies sold by callous, malicious strangers.
I'm so fucking tired, people. I'm so, so fucking tired.
I do not like Willy, or any his various attempts at squeezing his way into wealth and notoriety. He is not a sad, wet, pathetic little meow-meow. He is a grown man with a family who has made a series of unethical decisions that have actively harmed people in the real, material world.
I also have sympathy for him, and disappointment on his behalf. He is genuinely upset that his clod-handed inexperience ruined the days of some eight-hundred children. I do not doubt that he wishes the event had been a delight for their sake, just as much as his own.
Ultimately, Willy is the victim of four or more serious and verifiable scams over the last decade that have all contributed to undermining his ability to function as a kind, honest, and rational person. Despite his best of intentions, this has resulted in an escalating trend of careless business behaviours that, if the trend continues, could kill someone.
I don't say that lightly.
This kind of hubristic carelessness, coupled with a complete inability to understand the limits of one's own abilities and the consequences of making mistakes? It's exactly the attitude behind so many of the large-scale event catastrophes we've seen over the past decade.
It hasn't been all that long since a number of attendees at a crypto festival were almost permanently blinded by stage lights because an ignorant and inexperienced crypto bro organiser bought medical-grade ultraviolet lights meant for sterilizing surfaces instead of weaker, festival-grade UV bulbs.
It's the sort of careless greed that drives people to generate and publish unedited and un-fact-checked content about, for example, foraging for mushrooms. Content that ends up giving potentially lethal advice.
It's the exact attitude that let Willy give such bad advice to people relying on his non-profit's food-bank services that he, allegedly, accidentally got at least one person's welfare payments cancelled.
I do not blame anyone Willy has harmed for being angry. Incandescently furious, even. But the internet's propensity to nominate a Main Character and get angry at them en-masse, forever branding them with a particular set of Bad Person traits (facilitated, of course, by the prevalence of gutter-quality sensationalist content churning for clicks) is actively harmful. Not knowing the full context robs us all of our ability to draw useful conclusions from these events.
There's a real and genuine lesson here about how influential and charismatic people are willing to lie, and the long-term damage that causes to disenfranchised and desperate people who haven't been able to disentangle their self worth from their net worth (in large part due to pervasive ideas that are baked into popular culture).
This lesson has, so far, been lost amidst the online outrage at someone who is, at worst, an unwitting and temporary face for the machine-mind horrors - themselves driven by heartless capital investment and lying bastards with more greed than goodwill.
Willy may seem like a heartless monster at first glance, but remember: was it Frankenstein's Monster, or Doctor Frankenstein himself, that was the real villain?
You know what? I think that's a contrived enough final sentence to warrant the inclusion of a generative AI image of Willy Wonka crossed with Dr Frankenstein. It's a horrible, unsettling image that could easily be seen as kinky or even borderline erotic. Please do not enjoy it. Or do, I'm not a cop.
Thank you for reading! One day, I will stop punishing the eyeballs of people who read to the end of my articles.
NB: I have attempted to be as precise and correct as possible about the exact order of events, and been careful about noting when certain actions or motivations are alleged, suspected, or just difficult to confirm. Unfortunately, much of the available data is either partially archived, second-hand, or sourced from Willy's own (sometimes contradictory) claims and published material.
While I am comfortable that there are no substantial errors in the four-thousand-and-some words above, and that the conclusions I've drawn are reasonably supported by publicly available material, there are doubtless some inaccuracies in the details - particularly when it comes to complex events like "the contentious multi-year operations of a local non-profit that barely made the local news". I also did not dredge through any of his several twitter accounts for literally anything, so I'm sure there's something vaguely relevant I've missed in there somewhere.
My goal is to dredge up a modicum of contextual sympathy for someone who has, unwittingly, recently become A Public Figure. As such, in a final nod to what remains of my largely atrophied 'Journalistic Integrity,' if you want to correct a mistake, ask me about the validity of my sources, or provide new ones, you can bother me at rhetoricalism@gmail.com.
What you might have additionally heard is that this company, House of Illuminati (HoI), consists entirely of one man and a slew of beleaguered, frustrated, event-specific contractors that he has not yet paid. Possibly, you've learned that he has a history running scams.
What you almost certainly haven't read is the extent of this man's history. This is one of those cases where I'm quite annoyed that journalists simply don't have the time to dig properly into stories. There's a very clear pattern here, and it's not the one that's being sensationalised.
How images like this fooled eight hundred people into buying tickets is beyond me.
In a small, tiny, miniscule amount of deference to basic journalistic integrity, I will not be directly naming this man - unlike every other outlet on the planet, apparently. Let's just keep it simple, and call the man who set up 'Willys Chocolate Experience'... Willy.
The entire internet knows of him - but not very much about him.
Overworked journalists and outraged 'Willys Chocolate Experience' customers have, perhaps understandably, dug back just far enough to learn that he fucked up running a charity and a fundraising event several years ago. They stopped there, figuring that was enough ammunition to say that Willy had a 'history of running scams'.
The truth is so much worse than that.
Working Backwards From The Apology
Contrary to the prevailing narrative, I'm not going to say that Willy is a techbro, a career scam artist, or even particularly malicious. As far as I can tell, he's the prototypical example of 'just some average guy trying to hustle'. He loves his family, enjoys self-improvement and wants to give that skill to others, and genuinely cares about his community. Importantly, judging by his extensive and sometimes daft social media use, he is not charismatic or sly enough to fake those things.If that's true, you might ask, then why did Willy end up blatantly scamming some kids?
Well, he also seems to have a desperate, all-consuming need to 'get ahead' in life. This would have been entirely unremarkable if he'd sated the need by running a novelty-spatula drop-shipping business - kind of like that one tedious and over-eager 'side-hustle' guy you vaguely know from work who never stops talking about his 'passive income streams'.
Unfortunately, Willy took a different path.
This looks a lot like my first attempts at hosting a kid's birthday party, to be honest.
Now, my sympathies here are primarily with the attendees, the host venue's staff, and HoI's own contracted staff. Realising you're involved in (or have been hooked by) a total disaster of a scam is an awful experience. For the actors, in particular; having to desperately work to entertain a crowd of increasingly confused and upset children is one of life's great horrors.
But... while I was first skimming through the drama, something struck me about Willy's apology post (on the House of Illuminati's Facebook page): there is absolutely no weaselling. No justifications, or excuses. He doesn't throw anyone else under the bus. In fact, he says right at the start:
"It’s important for me to clarify that the organization [of] and decisions surrounding this event were solely my responsibility."
He goes on to stress that nobody else involved was responsible for the debacle, and that the "use of [their] faces" in media coverage could cause them undue harm. He also claims full responsibility for the dodgy finances of the charity non-profit he was previously involved with, explicitly distancing the founders of said non-profit from any wrongdoing.
Bare minimum from a sincere apology, sure - but this is not what typically happens when a scam artist hits the headlines. Where's the bluster? The deflection? The manoeuvring? The refusal to address particularly damning aspects, knowing full well that time will almost certainly sweep it all under the rug for them?
In the apology post, Willy also openly states how many event tickets were sold (roughly 850), and that he's "committed" to refunding them all.
Without any sense of the typical PR smarm and spin that usually accompanies these sorts of announcements, he also says:
"This is a difficult time for me, and I ask for your understanding and privacy. [...] I ask for a bit of time to process everything that has happened. My intention is to learn from this experience. Your support and understanding during this time mean the world to me."
In a prior post, he says that House of Illuminati (HoI) will not be hosting any further events going forward, and that (oh boy) he is Not Currently Staying At His Family's Home Address, Please Leave His Family Alone.
This doesn't paint the picture of a calm, conniving, serial scammer, does it? This reads like, at worst, a petty grifter in over his head - though admittedly, at the absolute best, he comes off as a clueless sucker with all the ill intent and cunning of a particularly smooth river rock.
What finally hooked me in, however, was the rough writing. The sometimes-difficult-to-parse phrasing. The missing words and spelling mistakes - all errors that read as very much human. And then I thought... shouldn't 'Willys Chocolate Event' pretty consistently have an apostrophe in it? Why isn't this 'AI bro' running his writing through ChatGPT for 'proofing/editing', like we typically expect to see in these situations?
So, I bothered to sit down and squirrel around in his writing and documentation for the non-profit he was previously involved in, as well as his policy manifesto from his brief political escapades. In these booklets, pamphlets, and other material, I saw the exact same non-AI pattern of rough phrasing and spelling mistakes.
Which was odd, because Willy was apparently deep enough into 'AI art' to have generated at least a dozen AI e-books. And... honestly, what was up with all these fake-seeming qualifications he claimed to have? Multiple doctorates?
I had to know what was going on. How does someone with an alleged background in scam-adjacent schemery run a clumsy event that rips off over eight hundred families... and come off looking like a gormless, unwitting accomplice to his own plot?
A deep dive into Willy's past (i.e., a very straightforward series of web searches set to exclude results from 2024) reveals something equal parts endearing and grim: someone who desperately wants to believe he is very good at many things, repeatedly finding out that he is not, in fact, terribly good at those things.
Willy's Total Lack of a Chocolate Factory or Candy Empire
While I maintain that Willy's legal name and identity don't need to be spread around, I've come to feel that a close look at his working history is crucial to understanding how he ended up running a chocolate-free, Wonka-themed flop event in 2024.Willy graduated high school in the early 2000's, completing the typically expected courses with average-or-above marks. Shortly afterwards, he went to work at a fairly large company, making outgoing 'accounts receivable' calls - in other words, calling businesses that owed his employer money. Not fulfilling work, to say the least.
After just one year, he moved to a new, similarly brief role at a medium-sized telecom company where he managed a small team of cold-calling b2b salespeople.
He then spent another year at a different company doing menial market-research work, before flipping to yet another company and taking up what seems to be his longest-running job: three years of a different kind of b2b sales calls for various events and publications.
After leaving this final job, he took an extended break from the workforce in order to try for better, greater things.
In sum, Willy's early job history looks uninspiring, tedious, and actively unpleasant. There is a strong possibility that his inability to hold down long-term employment is a fault of his skillset. It is at this point that I must stress how much I am not trying to belittle Willy.
I can name dozens upon dozens of excellent, lovely people I personally know who have equally bland and unexciting work histories. The post-millennia economy has not been a pleasant experience for low- and medium-skilled workers, particularly those without tertiary qualifications. I myself have had a decade-long work history of uninspiring, demeaning jobs punctuated by year-long stretches of unemployment.
I am outlining Willy's straightforwardly unimpressive career to make one salient point: I don't think he enjoys, is suited for, or feels fairly treated by the modern office-drudgery economy. Every data point in his work history, social media presence, and extra-curricular work indicates that it has made him feel miserable and helpless - and has done so for at least a decade.
Fortunately for Willy, this is a condition he shares with a lot of people, so it would have been comparatively straightforward for him to directly share this with others. Instead, and very unfortunately for Willy, something about the ever-present sales mantra of "fake it 'till you make it" seems to have rubbed off on him.
I say this because the "greater things" that Willy tried for on his career break, roughly a decade ago, were... well, fake.
While he has scrubbed his personal YouTube channel, there exists another, older one, containing a video where Willy claims to be a "leading Life Coach and Doctor of Metaphysical Science".
The other videos on this channel are 'inspirational content' designed to funnel clicks through links that, back in 2014, sold some kind of self-help course.
Clear-cut, smoking gun, this is where it all began. After a string of boring, frustrating jobs (in an economy still struggling with the aftermath of a serious financial crisis), Willy lost his job, gave up, and decided "fuck it, I'm going to set up my own website and run a self-help scam." Right?
Right?
Sympathy For The Wonk(a)
It turns out that, in 2014, the recently jobless Willy was the victim of a great number of wonks and scam artists.He started his hiatus legitimately enough, completing a wide range of free online classes (or 'diplomas') from a reputable online platform. Specifically, on business practices, online marketing, legal studies, and tech qualifications.
Then, he took a turn for the worse. Willy fell for the University of Sedona (UoS), a strange online degree-mill that offers courses almost exclusively in "Metaphysics" and other similar wonk material. This is where his above-mentioned 'Doctorate of Metaphysical Science' came from.
Specifically, while at UoS Willy earned three separate 'Doctorate' degrees in: Metaphysical Psychiatry, Theocentric Psychology, and Philosophy of Conscious Business Ethics. Oddly enough, he also claims to have earned a Master's in plain old Business Administration from UoS.
This may also have been when Willy became a member of ParaNexus, an 'international anomalous research non-profit'. Wonk central, no doubt.
Then, he appears to have stumbled ass-first into at least two other scams, and possibly three.
The 'possible' scam is the tried-and-true 'work from home' scam course format, which has persisted about as long as we've had the internet - and probably before that, too.
While I can find few concrete references Willy ever made to these courses, there are a slew of coincidences that make it strongly likely he encountered them and found them compelling. In particular, the name and format of his website and YouTube channel (Be Free Today), and how he talked about having a work ethic and taking opportunities, match the naming and cadence of these scams almost exactly.
In fact, he may have purchased at least one web domain directly from a then-decade-old 'work from home' scam-salesperson who was retiring and looking to sell their URL - although due to the nature of privately purchased domain names and incomplete web archives from more than a decade ago, this is very hard to verify with certainty.
However, the second scam is not ambiguous. In 2014, Willy was suckered by Bob Proctor and Mary Morrisey. I have no compunctions about naming Bob Proctor, because he is dead and a convicted scam artist. I have no compunctions about naming the still-alive Mary Morrisey, who is a convicted and admitted serial financial fraudster.
Bob and Mary ran 'The 11 Forgotten Laws,' a website with a format that anyone with a passing interest in self-help or online courses will recognise. It's one of those endlessly scrolling ones, interspersed with spurious recommendations from alleged past purchasers, designed to lead the reader past dozens of variations on exactly the same sales pitch:
"Buy our course now, while it's on sale for a limited time, and change your life. Or stay sad and miserable forever, loser."
Thank the Internet Archive for the Wayback Machine, because without them, these little nuggets of internet history would be lost to time as scam artists and fraudsters cover their tracks by deleting everything.
'The 11 Forgotten Laws' is a movement (and multi-level affiliate marketing scheme) based on the 'Laws of Attraction' - a pseudoscientific idea that you have to "be positive" to "attract" the kind of "positive energy" needed to succeed in life.
It's wonk nonsense. It's DVD box sets and endless paperbacks about believing in yourself, shifting the universe itself to your will through the power of positive thinking, giving lots of money to the nice affiliates that brought you into the program, and then also buying more stuff from the program itself.
The third scam Willy was tangled in was a 'consulting' organisation with a veneer of 'Asian mysticism' called Golden Inspiration. They also sold courses and products, and an affiliate scheme, based around the 'power of attraction'.
In his decade-old YouTube videos, 'Doctor Willy' hyped up (and linked to) more than his own website. In fact, he primarily used tracked affiliate links to direct traffic to the websites of these two scam companies. Willy wasn't running his own scam - he was suckered by at least three separate bastards.
Likely out a considerable amount of money after paying for three fake doctorates and an unknown amount of 'Laws of Attraction' content, he was at the bottom layer of two separate MLM pyramids, desperately grasping for video views and link clicks to on-board more suckers and make his money back - but scarcely reaching more than a dozen or two per video. Watching his videos now is deeply sad.
This was not the start of a scam career. Willy was a scam victim.
Don't Call It A Comeback
After several years of not-very-much happening online, Willy finally put aside his online self-help grift and made his way back to the workforce.He then spent several years bouncing between at least three short-term 'marketing consultancy' positions. Doubtlessly, this was not the self-actualised comeback he had hoped for.
After this stint of job-hopping, he appeared to give up on that avenue entirely - turning, of all things, to setting up his own business consultancy company. It gained frighteningly little traction and was also seemingly abandoned, its only lasting legacy being a dead web domain and a Facebook Business page littered with the same kind of motivational quotes seen in his earlier 'Laws of Attraction' days.
There's another gap in his work history here, seemingly filled with another year or two of falling for various online courses. Some are exploitative, like Zenith Academics (run by a deeply shady banker-turned-psychotherapy-tutor), some baffling (the United States Army Medical Center for Excellence), and some almost certainly being outright grifts (the Skyclick Advance Learning Institute).
Then, after volunteering for a wide range of charities, Willy threw himself into being the CEO of a local foodbank charity (the non-profit he mentioned in his apology for the Willy Wonka disaster). As you might guess from its presence in his apology for an entirely unrelated debacle, his tenure there can best be described as 'dysfunctional'.
After a series of wrong-footed attempts by Willy to turn the charity into his own omni-capable vehicle for Helping Everyone With Everything, the charity was shuttered in 2022. Despite this being described by commentators as a 'scam' of his, I think the worst we can realistically accuse Willy of is a total lack of the needed skillset to run a charity - and a refusal to admit as much.
Highlights of his tenure include:
- Attempting to set up a high-profile fundraising gala that, despite claims, did not secure any actual guests, donors, or even the stated venue.
- Overstating that various small business donors were 'fully partnered' with the charity, instead of just one-time donors.
- Rapidly expanding the charity's stated services to include “humanitarian aid”, “quarantine”, “distance education”, and “personal development” (per some actual in-depth reporting, some of this advice was so bad it caused actual harm).
- Ultimately, being so loose with accounting that roughly one-sixth of the non-profit's income (seemingly taken as salary, which is normal enough) was at least temporarily unaccounted for (formally investigated without any charges made).
Phew, that's... a lot of hubris.
Willy also ran for local public office during the end-stages of the charity debacle. Well, he said he was running - he never ended up formally registering, despite soliciting donations for his campaign.
As before, I can't see ill-intent here. This looks less like a money-driven scam and more like a failure to actually secure any support. The fiddly requirements of the process seemed to get the better of his ideals - which, to his credit, were seemingly well-meaning and left-leaning.
His platform included (paraphrased): "stop criminalising petty drug possession, fill in the bloody potholes, set up a local and community-owned renewable energy company, and fund small businesses and post-imprisonment employment programs".
As you might expect, the details on how he was actually going to achieve any of those things remained vague.
Let's Get Really Wonky
Much ado has been made about Willy's charity debacle, but an equal-or-greater amount of derision has been directed at his catalogue of generative AI e-books on Amazon. This, it appears, is something that can't be argued around: selling undisclosed generative AI slop online is a scam of the kind only scam artists do in order to scam money from people.The context, missing from every bit of coverage so far, is that the people who dribble out these books are usually victims of some kind of scam course - or at least advice from AI-themed media personalities - purporting to "teach them how to use little-known tricks to get rich using AI with no work!"
This is how the scam economy has always worked. Desperate people like Willy end up paying for grifters to 'teach' them how to use low-quality paid tools (like online generative AI services) to 'find loopholes in the economy nobody knows about and profit with no work or effort'. These victims pay up, often repeatedly, and everyone in the chain of grifts benefits except them. They're the suckers. We're just the bystanders, caught as collateral damage.
Willy almost certainly doesn't churn out his conspiracy-themed generative novellas (with titles like "Operation Innoculation") because he's a conspiracy nut or a crypto-Trumpian. He's (to all consistent outward appearances) a bleeding-heart left-leaning independent who took COVID precautions seriously during his charity work!
Unimaginative victims of scams, however, generally churn out exactly that type of e-book because their courses (or parasocial mentors) have told them 'conspiracy thrillers' is a hot market full of readers with low-enough standards to buy unedited generative slop and leave relatively forgiving reviews.
In actuality, this is not even a new scam format. In the years before, Amazon was instead filled with was stock image covers pasted on top of slop books that were ghost-written by underpaid writers in economically depressed countries. Now, it's generative slop made using products from big companies... that use underpaid workers in economically depressed countries to sift through their data and do tedious and unpleasant digital tasks.
This is why none of Willy's prior work ever made use of generative AI, despite him being consistently interested in computing technology for at least a decade (and taking tech qualification courses as recently as 2021). He wasn't an 'AI bro' operating from a perspective of disdain for artists or the common person.
Willy almost certainly fell into these techniques through yet another online course, scam, or charismatic media personality. Possibly multiple times, because there are many separate courses that cover using generative AI for e-book creation, marketing physical events with generative images, and many more techniques besides.
As with his YouTube channel, his faux degrees, his botched charity work, and his truncated attempt at local politics, Willy was almost certainly a victim when it came to his feckless use of generative AI. A hubristic and harmful victim, for sure - but a victim who (time and again) has utterly failed to meaningfully profit from his efforts.
It's people like this nasty 'consultant' who make a profit by selling these bad ideas to people hapless enough to actually try them.
Or this one.
Or this one.
Or this one.
Or this one.
Or this one.
Or this one.
Like most of his gullible ilk, Willy has succeeded in doing nothing but cluttering up the world with worthless, low-quality Stuff that basically nobody, including himself, actually wants or enjoys - all as a side effect of the profit-seeking lies sold by callous, malicious strangers.
I'm so fucking tired, people. I'm so, so fucking tired.
Sympathy 2, Electric Boogaloo
If you want to take "protect scam victims" seriously, you have to consider that some scams are designed to shape their victims' entire worldview over time - all the better to eke money out of them. You have to be prepared to act in the best interests of people that, due to being actively and persistently scammed, are incredibly unpleasant and even dangerous.I do not like Willy, or any his various attempts at squeezing his way into wealth and notoriety. He is not a sad, wet, pathetic little meow-meow. He is a grown man with a family who has made a series of unethical decisions that have actively harmed people in the real, material world.
I also have sympathy for him, and disappointment on his behalf. He is genuinely upset that his clod-handed inexperience ruined the days of some eight-hundred children. I do not doubt that he wishes the event had been a delight for their sake, just as much as his own.
Ultimately, Willy is the victim of four or more serious and verifiable scams over the last decade that have all contributed to undermining his ability to function as a kind, honest, and rational person. Despite his best of intentions, this has resulted in an escalating trend of careless business behaviours that, if the trend continues, could kill someone.
I don't say that lightly.
This kind of hubristic carelessness, coupled with a complete inability to understand the limits of one's own abilities and the consequences of making mistakes? It's exactly the attitude behind so many of the large-scale event catastrophes we've seen over the past decade.
It hasn't been all that long since a number of attendees at a crypto festival were almost permanently blinded by stage lights because an ignorant and inexperienced crypto bro organiser bought medical-grade ultraviolet lights meant for sterilizing surfaces instead of weaker, festival-grade UV bulbs.
It's the sort of careless greed that drives people to generate and publish unedited and un-fact-checked content about, for example, foraging for mushrooms. Content that ends up giving potentially lethal advice.
It's the exact attitude that let Willy give such bad advice to people relying on his non-profit's food-bank services that he, allegedly, accidentally got at least one person's welfare payments cancelled.
I do not blame anyone Willy has harmed for being angry. Incandescently furious, even. But the internet's propensity to nominate a Main Character and get angry at them en-masse, forever branding them with a particular set of Bad Person traits (facilitated, of course, by the prevalence of gutter-quality sensationalist content churning for clicks) is actively harmful. Not knowing the full context robs us all of our ability to draw useful conclusions from these events.
There's a real and genuine lesson here about how influential and charismatic people are willing to lie, and the long-term damage that causes to disenfranchised and desperate people who haven't been able to disentangle their self worth from their net worth (in large part due to pervasive ideas that are baked into popular culture).
This lesson has, so far, been lost amidst the online outrage at someone who is, at worst, an unwitting and temporary face for the machine-mind horrors - themselves driven by heartless capital investment and lying bastards with more greed than goodwill.
Willy may seem like a heartless monster at first glance, but remember: was it Frankenstein's Monster, or Doctor Frankenstein himself, that was the real villain?
You know what? I think that's a contrived enough final sentence to warrant the inclusion of a generative AI image of Willy Wonka crossed with Dr Frankenstein. It's a horrible, unsettling image that could easily be seen as kinky or even borderline erotic. Please do not enjoy it. Or do, I'm not a cop.
Thank you for reading! One day, I will stop punishing the eyeballs of people who read to the end of my articles.
NB: I have attempted to be as precise and correct as possible about the exact order of events, and been careful about noting when certain actions or motivations are alleged, suspected, or just difficult to confirm. Unfortunately, much of the available data is either partially archived, second-hand, or sourced from Willy's own (sometimes contradictory) claims and published material.
While I am comfortable that there are no substantial errors in the four-thousand-and-some words above, and that the conclusions I've drawn are reasonably supported by publicly available material, there are doubtless some inaccuracies in the details - particularly when it comes to complex events like "the contentious multi-year operations of a local non-profit that barely made the local news". I also did not dredge through any of his several twitter accounts for literally anything, so I'm sure there's something vaguely relevant I've missed in there somewhere.
My goal is to dredge up a modicum of contextual sympathy for someone who has, unwittingly, recently become A Public Figure. As such, in a final nod to what remains of my largely atrophied 'Journalistic Integrity,' if you want to correct a mistake, ask me about the validity of my sources, or provide new ones, you can bother me at rhetoricalism@gmail.com.