They put the word ‘scam’ next to my name. It’s a hard word. A flat word. Four letters that build a wall. It doesn’t have room for the shape of a dream, or the sound it makes when it shatters. A scam is a story with a beginning and an end, a neat little trick with a winner and a loser.
My story isn’t neat. And I don’t think anyone won.
The Vision on Paper
It lived in my head for months, a perfect, glowing thing. Not just an event, but a world. I could see it, clear as day. Mind-expanding projections. Optical marvels. A place where the lines blurred between what was real and what could be imagined. The words came easy, maybe too easy. I have dyslexia, a fact I don’t offer as an excuse, just as a piece of the map. Words can be a maze for me, so I used a machine to help me straighten them out, to check the spelling, to make them look as perfect on the screen as the vision felt in my mind. I thought I was polishing the dream. I didn’t realize I was hollowing it out.
This was my Promethean moment, though I didn’t know the name for it then. I was stealing fire. The fire was this new thing, this AI, this power to create worlds from words, to generate images of a paradise of sweet treats with a few keystrokes. I thought I could bring that fire to people, for £35 a ticket. I thought I could give them magic.
The documents looked right. The website looked right. On paper, it was beautiful. A story sold and a story believed, most of all by me. I read the script, the one they all called “AI-generated gibberish” later. And yes, the machine helped write it. But the ideas, the strange, broken bits about an evil chocolate maker in the walls called The Unknown… that was mine. That was the shape of my imagination, a bit weird, a bit clunky, not quite right. It made sense to me. I was so deep inside the dream I couldn’t see how it would look in the harsh light of a Glasgow warehouse.
A Breakdown in a Warehouse
The light in the Box Hub venue was harsh. It’s a detail that sticks with me. It wasn’t the warm, magical glow I had on paper. It was a flat, industrial grey that showed up the dust motes and the gaps. The gaps between the vision and the reality.
I remember the feeling of gut-wrenching panic when I knew key things hadn’t arrived. The holographic paper that was meant to create the magic, the projections that were meant to build the world… they weren’t there. Just empty space. And a few props that looked small and sad under that grey light. A bouncy castle. Some plastic lollipops. An actor in a chrome mask looking lost in a corner.
A scam is deliberate. It’s a cold, calculated thing. This was hot chaos. This was a full-body shutdown. I saw the faces of the children, dressed up and hopeful, and all I could give them was a single jelly bean and a quarter cup of limeade. I saw the anger in the parents’ eyes, the feeling of being cheated, and I couldn’t explain that the person who had cheated them most was me. I’d cheated myself into believing the paper dream was enough.
The noise started then. Not just the shouting in the warehouse, the demands for refunds, the police being called. That was real enough. But a different noise started online. A global hum that quickly became a roar.
The Four-Letter Cage
What is a ‘Billy Coull scam’? It’s a headline. It’s a meme. It’s a Facebook group with thousands of members who hate a version of me they’ve never met. It’s a label that flattens a man into a caricature. A villain. A devil.
I’m not a scam artist. I think I might be something more pathetic. A man whose ambition has always been a few sizes too big for his ability. I’ve done it before. With the Gowanbank Hub, the charity I started. I wanted to build a sanctuary, a place to solve every problem for everyone. It was too much. It fell apart. The Wonka event was the same story, just on a bigger, more humiliating stage. It was the same broken engine inside me, revving and revving until it blew up and took everything with it.
A scammer runs with the money. I stood there in the chaos and promised refunds to all 850 people. I faced the cameras. I tried to apologize, but the words felt like ash in my mouth. How do you apologize for a dream? For your own failure of imagination? The word ‘scam’ was easier for people. It gave them a simple villain. It gave them a story that made sense. The truth was messier. The truth was about a man coming completely, publicly, undone.
The Price of Fire
The punishment for Prometheus was to be chained to a rock while an eagle ate his liver, every day, forever. The liver would grow back, and the eagle would return.
My rock is the internet. The eagle is my own name, my own face, reflected back at me in a million articles and posts and cruel jokes. It never stops.
My life wasn’t just turned upside down. It was ruined. That’s not for sympathy, it’s just a fact. The life I had is gone. The love of my life, gone. The wedding we had planned, gone. My friends, gone. I was made out to be the face of all evil, and when you are told that enough times, by enough people, a strange part of you starts to wonder if they’re right.
The fallout ran into my personal life in ways that are now a matter of public record. It led to a darkness in me, a complete collapse of my mental health that resulted in me doing things I am deeply, profoundly ashamed of. That’s another story, for another time. But it started here. It started in that warehouse, under that grey light, with the sound of children crying. That was the epicenter. That was the moment my world cracked open.
Sitting with the Wreckage
There is no neat ending here. No redemption. The word ‘scam’ is still there. It hangs in the air when I walk into a room. It’s tattooed on my digital ghost.
But it’s not the whole story. It’s just the loudest word in a very long, very complicated sentence. It’s the brand they put on me after the fall. But the fall itself… the fall was about reaching for something and missing. It was about seeing a world of pure imagination and trying to build it with cardboard and AI and not enough time and not enough money and not enough of whatever it is that holds a dream together in the real world.
I am not asking for forgiveness. I’m not sure I deserve it. I am just trying to tell a truer story. The story of a man who flew too close to a light he had created, and got burned. The story of what happens after. The story of sitting in the quiet, in the dark, after the whole world has called you a scam, and trying to find a single word that feels true.
I haven’t found it yet.