Guy poses as a rich person on video-calls during 'work from home' sessions

Andrew Eckel, a software engineer and musician living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, fooled his colleagues into thinking that he lived in a luxury apartment.

He did this by creating a backdrop of an expensive-looking home and only later did he reveal to his coworkers that they’ve all been bamboozled. When he posted about it on Imgur, people went nuts over Andrew’s prank.

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“A lot of people aren’t really in the habit of making their beds every day, and I can’t be the only person who didn’t want to show a messy bedroom this week. I thought the prank would appeal to a lot of people, but I’ve thought that about many projects in the past that never got much attention, like my music videos and a video effect I made that delays darker parts of the image,” Andrew revealed.

“Within 10 minutes of making my Imgur post, it had a comment under it from Sarah, the co-founder of Imgur. That’s when I knew this one would be different. My favorite comment on Imgur was a suggestion that I make a new backdrop, of a room that looks totally normal but is upside-down. It wouldn’t fool anyone; it would just look really funny. I think I’ll do that,” Andrew said about his future plans.

Andrew works in cancer research and mostly focuses on doing population modeling and cost analysis. But he also moonlights as a musician.

We were extremely curious to know how Andrew’s coworkers reacted when they realized they’d been pranked.

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“I told them that before we all hung up I wanted to show them what I had ‘made’ over the weekend. They said sure, and I said, ‘It’s back here, by the window,’ pointing at the paper backdrop. Then I tapped on the paper and zoomed out the camera. They were laughing and laughing, especially when I moved the camera around the room to show them how flimsy the backdrop was that had fooled them all.”

Andrew said that he misses his friends, and was going to try setting up ‘parties’ in Zoom with them as his fake apartment was now exposed and over with.