M. Shadows admitted to Rock Feed that he and the rest of Avenged Sevenfold were in on the ‘hacking’ regarding the fake announcement about the band’s canceled festival appearances. Shadows explained from the very beginning how they managed to pull off the so-called hacking:
“Our management has two guys that run it. There’s Mark Wakefield and Beno [David Benveniste]. And we work really closely with this girl Samantha. So Samantha wasn’t even going to tell them because we knew that everyone would say ‘no.’ I said, ‘Don’t tell anyone.’ […] So we kept it secret. And we just did it. And I said, ‘Samantha, all you know is we got hacked, and we are trying to fix it.’ She’s, like, ‘Are you serious?’ And I’m, like, ‘That’s what we’re doing.'”
Shadows wanted to keep the fake announcement they created using AI to show everyone where the world was heading with augmented reality a secret; he recalled the day everyone found out:
“The day that it went down, I was in Mexico, and I’m watching this go down. And my phone is blowing up. Harlacher, Wimmer, Beno, Mark… And it’s my voice. And people are calling them, going, ‘You guys are so lame for letting the band….’ And then Mark said, ‘What are you talking about?’
The whole plan all along was I would go on Twitter [and deny it]… And it worked. And then, as people went back, they were, like, ‘Oh, it is AI’ Because once the knee-jerk reaction [was out of the way], you go back and listen, and you go, ‘Oh…'”
Back in February, Shadows stuck to their initial plan, tweeted and denied the false rumor and the voice recording; he wrote:
“Yikes! This is NOT TRUE. We are still playing. Getting to the bottom of this.”
You can watch the interview below and read the tweet.
