They promised hundreds of aspirants to find love, in vain. Youtuber couple Sophie Fantasy and Greg Inside, best known for being the parents of young Internet stars Swan and Neo, were sentenced to five years in prison, including an eighteen-month suspended sentence and a fine of 100,000 euros for fraud in an organized gang, abuse of weakness and moral harassment, reports Progress this Monday.
Gaëlle Burlot and Grégory Thonet, their real names, were tried for having defrauded, between the years 2010 and 2014, 340 people who subscribed to an offer from the Eurochallenges marriage agency. The latter, founded by the family of Grégory Thonet, promised to organize romantic encounters between French men and women based in Eastern Europe, Africa or Asia.
But the latter have never been entitled to these meetings billed several thousand euros. Some customers denounce, moreover, having been under significant pressure to pay the sums due to the company, as reported by a survey by Vanity Fair.
Agency employees also sentenced
As part of this case, the brothers of Grégory Thonet, Roland and Pierre-Alexis, also at the head of Eurochallenges, were respectively sentenced to four years in prison, including two years suspended and a fine of 10,000 euros, and three years in prison, including 18 months suspended.
Anne-Marie Muser, mother of Grégory Thonet and founder of the agency, was sentenced to five years in prison, three of which were suspended, and a fine of 20,000 euros.
The Thonet siblings, manager Anne-Marie Muser and Gaëlle Burlot are also subject to a permanent ban on managing and carrying out an activity related to marriage brokerage, specifies Le Progrès. Nine other people, formerly employees of Eurochallenges, were also given suspended sentences ranging from three to eighteen months in prison.
Gaëlle Burlot and Grégory Thonet are best known for their content on YouTube, and in particular for the management and their appearances on the channels of their two sons, Swan and Néo, two young stars of the video platform, who have 6 million subscribers. and hundreds of thousands of views with each new publication.
On his personal channel, Gaëlle Burlot was more discreet at the end of 2022, due to the judgment of the case then revealed by the press. Last December, alongside her husband, she had denounced, facing the camera, “rumors” and “heaps of lies” relayed by “journalists and haters ».