Controversial influencer Caroline Calloway claims she scammed her way into Cambridge

The American student who dubbed herself the ‘Gatsby of Cambridge’ gained a huge Instagram following by sharing details of her lavish lifestyle

Caroline Calloway pictured in 2019 (Getty Images)

Caroline Calloway, the American student who gained a huge Instagram following while documenting her opulent lifestyle at Cambridge University, has claimed that she lied on her application to the prestigious institution.

Calloway, 31, rose to notoriety in 2015 when she started dubbing herself the “Gatsby of Cambridge”, offering her Instagram followers a “fairytale” perspective of her time at Cambridge, where she introduced her friends and acquaintances as “characters”.

Off the back of her social media success, Calloway signed a $500,000 book deal for a memoir that was never published.

However, it now appears that Calloway should have not been given a place at Edmund’s College to study History of Art. In a new interview with Vanity Fair, she has claimed that she forged her application to the institution.

“I lied on my application,” she told the US magazine. “I forged my transcript when I got in.”

She told the magazine that she received a place to study History of Art at Cambridge on her third attempt, after receiving rejections from Harvard, Yale and Oxford. She had previously dropped out of New York University in 2013.

“I couldn’t live the rest of my life with an NYU email address,” she said.

Responding to claims that the former student lied to get into Cambridge, a spokesperson for St Edmund’s College told The Independent: “We cannot comment on individual students, however, we take statements like this very seriously.”

The Independent has contacted Calloway for direct comment.

She was first exposed as a “scammer” after her former best friend Natalie Beach wrote an article for The Cut, which claimed Calloway bought her followers and had not been the sole author of her infamous Instagram captions – Beach had.

Calloway has denied in the Vanity Fair interview that Beach had been extensively involved in curating her social media accounts. However, she said that Beach helped her ghost-write her book proposal.

She also revealed that she paid $4.99 for 40,000 followers in 2013 when she dropped out of New York University and got accepted into Cambridge.

Calloway’s commercial success began to wane as she was allegedly forced to pay back the advance, after failing to submit a draft of the book to publishers Flatiron.

In December 2018, she launched a “creativity workshop” in New York, with tickets priced at $165 (£133), to help fund this. Those who attended were promised handwritten letters, flower crowns made out of orchids and care packages.

Undercover Andrea Park, who attended the workshop, wrote an article for W magazine stating that it had taught her “nothing about creativity, but a lot about scamming”.

Following the publication of a condemning Twitter thread by writer Kayleigh Donaldson about the tour, Calloway cancelled her planned tour dates around the rest of the US, the UK and Europe.

After the fallout from the ensuing scandal, Calloway reinvented herself as a writer and deleted all her previous social media posts. She is releasing her debut memoir Scammer on 16 June.