Earlier this week, VShojo, a virtual anchor agency that claimed to be "artist-first", was caught in a public opinion storm.Its leading anchor, Ironmouse, accused the company of owing her "a large sum of money" and did not donate more than $515,000 she raised for the Immune Deficiency Foundation.Now, with its anchors leaving on a large scale (there are no virtual anchors on VShojo's list), the company's CEO admitted that he had misappropriated the funds in an attempt to keep the company running.
On July 24, VShojo issued a statement on the official account of X platform, and CEO Justin Ignacio admitted that he "bad management has caused the company to fall into its current situation."He also confirmed that VShojo has faced financial difficulties in recent months - despite raising "about $11 million" to implement the concept of "artist-first", the company eventually ran out of funds.Ignacio said that "part of the funds are related to artist activities" and said he "was learned later" that the money was used in charity projects.He went on to say, “We tried to raise more investment funds to cover costs, and based on the information we had at the time, I firmly believe that we were able to successfully raise funds and pay for all the fees. But our fundraising attempt failed.”
However, users of the X platform pointed out that Ignacio publicly recognized Ironmouse's charity live broadcast many times at that time, so he accused him of not "knowing later" the incident, but knew it well throughout the process of VShojo's trouble.In response to the matter, the live broadcast platform has removed the "GunRun" global expression designed specifically for Ignacio.
Ignacio confirmed that "VShojo is about to close", and some former artists believe that this means that the confidentiality agreement they signed has expired.Several virtual anchors have alleged that the company has a "predatory contract" and that they have owed their peripheral products revenue and sponsorship funds "years ago".
After learning that the donations he raised were not donated to the Immunodeficiency Foundation, Ironmouse launched its own fundraising campaign on the Tiltify platform.As of press time, the event raised more than $1.25 million in just three days.
