As many of you may know, the news of Soyoon’s (@/ddaengg) passing from cancer was announced back in late December of last year. It has recently come to the attention of those of us closely tied to her and in the general friend group with which she was involved, Soyoon is still alive. We wish this was a time that we could rejoice at the idea of regaining our friend back into our lives, but a lot more troubling information came to light in this situation that prevents us from doing so. Beyond the lie about her death, there are inconsistencies in her explanations that lead us to believe that her reasonings regarding her illness and her treatments are false or heavily altered. Arden, who many of you know as @/bwisou, is an accomplice in this, and did not only aid Soyoon in carrying out this lie, but has fabricated her own lies both directly related to this situation and in our own interactions with her as friends and mutuals, regarding her identity.
UPDATE: Following our post regarding the Arden/Soyoon situation, one of us has been contacted by someone who wishes to remain anonymous. This person is the original owner of the photos that Soyoon has posted and claimed as her own, and we regretfully announce that her identity had been falsified as well. The real owner of the photos wants none of her information released and we will strongly respect that. She wanted us to mention that if any of you think you happen to see the girl in these photos, do not approach her or think she is Soyoon because she is not.
As many of you may know, the news of Soyoon's (@/ddaengg) passing from cancer was announced back in late December of last year. It has recently come to the attention of those of us closely tied to her and in the general friend group with which she was involved, Soyoon is still alive. We wish this was a time that we could rejoice at the idea of regaining our friend back into our lives, but a lot more troubling information came to light in this situation that prevents us from doing so. Beyond the lie about her death, there are inconsistencies in her explanations that lead us to believe that her reasonings regarding her illness and her treatments are false or heavily altered. Arden, who many of you know as @/bwisou, is an accomplice in this, and did not only aid Soyoon in carrying out this lie, but has fabricated her own lies both directly related to this situation and in our own interactions with her as friends and mutuals, regarding her identity.
On March 9th, there were several people who noticed that Soyoon's twitter account had become active. Thinking that it may have been a family member or friend, a number of us reached out to the user and asked why the account was active again. Alex messaged Soyoon for clarification and Christine reached out to Arden to ask if she knew anything about it, only to receive no response from her, initially. A few hours later, Soyoon dm'd Alex and Christine on twitter explaining how she had suffered a herniation and had been in a coma until mid-late January. She continued to explain how breathing and recuperating had been her focus, and thus she was not able to contact anyone until then, except for Arden. She told Christine that Arden had known about her being alive since early February, but that both decided to keep it a secret. Additionally, it was explained that someone Soyoon had known well prior to her coma had stole her phone and contacted Arden on a different social media platform, acting as Soyoon's brother and announcing that she had passed, and later went on to make post for his "sister" on tumblr. While incredulous, but still somewhat believable, many of us started to question the authenticity of further descriptions of Soyoon's treatments and the timeline within which they took place.
As you can see, in Soyoon’s explanation [at first] she claims that she did not have the twitter app installed on her phone at the time. Later on, she went on to say that she did in fact have the app installed, which was why “he” was able to deactivate her twitter and tumblr in the first place. That is already one inconsistency.
It soon became evident that medical facts weren't adding up, and the things she was able to do within such small timeframes following high risk surgeries did not make sense. Soyoon had told Annie that she had begun her clinical trial in October/November of 2018. However, in her messages to Alex and Christine, she claimed that she had been accepted to and started another clinical trial in NYC as of February.
This isn’t how clinical trials work. In order for clinical trial participants to be approved, it usually takes 6 to 7 months. Additionally, if you go to the U.S.’ database for clinical trials, you can see that they were only recruiting participants in 2014 to 2016. Their status is now: “active, not recruiting”, meaning that she could have not possibly been approved for the trials in February 2019, 3 years after it had initially begun.
Secondly, Soyoon described her cancer a stage 4 glioblastoma, which would render the majority of her brain cancerous. However, as you can see in the screenshot, she said that her tumor was “FULLY” removed. If her tumor were to be truly “fully” removed, that would mean that the majority of her brain is gone. And even if that was not true, that would have meant that she would be physically and mentally impaired for a long time. The timestamps show that this message was sent on March 13, 2019 and she said she had recently undergone surgery two weeks ago (and two more procedures prior to that). So within those two weeks, she claimed to have regained her ability to walk and use her hands, be able to write coherent paragraphs with no grammar errors or typos, able to play the guitar, and ice skate with perfect balance.
Soyoon has poor prognosis but was miraculously able to be treated and stabilized within the span of 6 months. Her overall presentation of cancer is inconsistent with typical cases of glioblastoma multiforme. She also claimed to have traveled back and forth between New York and Korea shortly after her surgery, which is unlikely to be cleared by any doctor after undergoing such a high risk procedure due to high altitudes, air pressure, and so on.
In addition to this, Arden's messages also became suspicious in the way that they were not only failing to match up with aspects of the information Soyoon was giving, but contradicting her own posts that she had made in December in regards to attending Soyoon's funeral and claims of passing condolences directly onto the family of the deceased.
When Christine asked Soyoon to clarify the situation, she had mentioned that she had been unaware of such a post until recently, and sent the screenshots of Arden’s explanation from when she asked her directly about it.
She would be under a lot of grief and despair, understandably, however she disregards the fact that people would definitely have paid attention to her tags on her posts. She is the original poster who announced that Soyoon had passed away, and she mentions that she has connections with the family members and will pass along condolences directly.
In trying to explain her story about attending the funeral, she states that when she attended the funeral home, she saw the surname “Kim” and assumed it was Soyoon, though this is quite obviously one of the most common surnames in Korea, and it is a bit strange that she hadn’t confirmed.
This is not the first time that Arden has raised the suspicions of some of us who have built a friendship with her over the last couple of months to years since she has been active in the fandom. Amber had been told that Arden’s hometown was Chicago, but as time went on, she began to say that her hometown was actually Daegu. She first began to tell people of her Korean ethnicity and familiarity with the language privately, but in time it became evident that what she started to present herself as more publicly on her blog was different. ¼, ½, ¾ Korean, a Korean proficiency at a low/grade school level versus her now obvious fluency to the point that she can translate with ease and thoroughly describe the language.
This clarifies things a little, but still doesn’t explain why her statements changed over time from making her “less” to “more” Korean, so to speak.
The most noticeable occurrence has been her recurring tendencies to use the photos of other people as her kakaotalk/line icons, and more recently, as selfie/daily life posts on twitter, and claim that they are her. In 2017, Arden posted a series of selfie tags (1, 2, 3, 4). About a year or so ago on kakaotalk, Amber noticed that the photo Arden had recently changed her icon to did not quite resemble the few photos that she had seen of her in the past, but the image was small and not the clearest. When Amber asked if the photo was Arden and if she had gotten her hair cut/dyed, she got a confirmation that yes, it was her, and she had recently changed her hairstyle. This image was followed by several photos with a similar hairstyle and an unclear face. A few other close friends of Arden noticed this as well, but little was thought of it at the time until it came to Amber's attention later on that the pictures had actually been taken from an account on instagram (ah.hyeon), which did not belong to Arden.
Those of us who were close to Arden began to notice throughout the following months that she took longer to reply than usual, but with her being busy with pre-med in university and with internships, this was understandable. However, Amber and Annie in particular started noticing that Arden's frequent displays of interest in wanting to call, skype, and actually meet up in person would never be followed through with on her end. Concerts, theme parks, trips to other countries, etc. had been in the works between Arden and a number of her mutuals, but they never happened. It seemed that something always came up last minute, or the plans were disregarded on her side altogether. It was inconsiderate towards those who set aside specific time and funds in hopes that the meetings would be followed through with.
When Amber attended the Hamilton stops for the Love Yourself tour in September 2018, she caught wind that Arden had driven hours and crossed the border to attend the same show that she had the day prior, but did not communicate with Amber, who had at this point been a close friend of two years, that she was there. Arden had said that she would be/had attended the concert with a friend, but then told Alex that she had attended with her mom (who lives in a different state). Amber had not heard from Arden for almost three weeks prior to this, thus there was no indication to her directly that Arden had chosen to attend. Amber messaged her bluntly, making it known that she was aware they had attended the same show, to which Arden responded to the 3-week old messages as if nothing was wrong, said she hoped Amber had a nice time, and then proceeded to say that it was a mistake not to tell her, but that when she met her for the first time, she wanted to be a better version of herself. Between this and the general past that Amber had experienced with Arden bailing on plans and not replying to her messages while blatantly interacting with others elsewhere, she made the decision to call off their friendship, wishing for no grudges and no hard feelings. Arden then blocked Amber on all platforms and they have had no direct contact since.
This also brings up the topic of attending the Love Yourself concert in Hong Kong, as she had promised to send her mutuals pictures of Hong Kong Disneyland and of the concert while she was there. However, she never did and would change the topic whenever it was brought up. In recent weeks, she has been enthusiastic about the idea of meeting up with Christine when she moves to the west coast for school, but there is little reason for Christine to believe that this would actually play out and be followed through with in the end.
This is around the time that Arden's use of other people's photos she claimed as her own began to increase, this time from a different account (seosoosoo).
Since then she has moved onto using the pictures from a korean pizza restaurant's facebook, and most recently as you can see in the 3rd set of screenshots, photos with a dog in which she altered "her" hair colour in order to match up with her previous claim that she had dyed it purple, while the original owner of the photo is clearly someone else. She received many kind comments that she accepted gratefully from friends who were still unaware of the falsifying of her identity, or that were suspicious but didn't think much of it, much like Amber had nearly a year prior. The photos from seosoosoo in particular were posted from 2016-2018, and she is clearly a fully Korean woman, which is inconsistent with Arden’s claims to be only partially Korean and the photos she had initially posted of herself(?) in her first year or so on tumblr. The chat directly above shows Arden blatantly lying about this photo being of her. The majority of the times that she posts are unprovoked, and none of us pressured her to show us pictures of herself at any point in time.
Christine received a notification on April 3rd from Arden’s line account that she had updated her photo to the 2nd photo above. She proceeded to ask Arden if it was her, which she confirmed as being true. Karina, Christine, and Alicia then confronted her about them being stolen from instagram on April 7th.
She apparently “couldn’t recall” using someone else’s photos in the past, but we are clearly aware that this was not a “single isolated” incident, as we already had copious amounts of proof that she had done this many times before, and she was completely disregarding the blatant lie about the photo of the girl with the dog that she had posted on April 4th. Karina ended their conversation following Arden’s explanation, although Christine was not given the chance to reply to Arden’s messages, as she deleted her public twitter account immediately after sending them. Both Christine and Alicia reached out on line/kkt, where Arden apologised for leaving twitter and was willing to explain. Alicia was told that Arden would be stepping away from social media, and stopped her replies. When Christine had sent the following message, Arden read approximately 2 minutes later, but gave no response.
We understand social anxiety and not wanting to post your face on the internet, however she posted these photos at her own merit and was not forced to do so. She did not have to steal the identity of other people online and claim them as herself, time and time again. Some of her close friends and mutuals, some who wish to remain anonymous, confronted Arden and gave her more than enough chances to come clean, tell the truth and be forgiven. She chose to continue digging herself in a deeper hole, and guilt trip her mutuals into believing her.
In addition to her public twitter account, Arden has now deleted her private account, and Soyoon has followed suit with her own.
Initially we did not want to “expose” Arden or Soyoon because they were our friends, after all. It hurts and disappoints us to know that no matter how many chances we gave them to explain themselves, they would not confess or own up to their mistakes. Instead, they continued to lie and tried to block out those who were suspicious of them or pointed out their lies, and we felt that this was the only option they left us. Cancer and death are not topics to be taken lightly, or used for clout or pity. Many of us are going through a whirlwind of emotions and anxieties due to all of this coming to light. As a group of friends, mutuals, and acquaintances who have been close to one or both of these individuals, who all had to mourn the loss of a friend and who put our faith and trust into two people who always presented themselves as genuine and kind, we feel betrayed, hurt, angry, and sad. We feel as if we are experiencing loss again, not once but two times over. Soyoon and Arden have made it very difficult to determine what is truth and what is a lie, if Soyoon truly is alive or if she ever existed to begin with, if Soyoon and Arden are two different people, or one and the same.
It has been a rough couple of weeks for us all, and it took us a long time to compile the information above and inform many of those who we felt were close enough to the situation to know before we publicly shed light on this issue for many of you who may have also been friends, acquaintances, and followers of these individuals. We wanted to compile and post this information to put you all in the know, but also to spread awareness on how easily it is to be manipulated by others online that you thought you could trust. It is easy to make friends here with similar interests and quickly fall into a rhythm of trusting and loving one another. However, it is still the online world, and there should always be a guard kept up to some extent. Lying, guilt tripping, blaming others, inconsistent stories, breaking plans and promises, and ignoring general responsibilities of being a close friend are all signs to look out for. Arden and Soyoon are well-known for being incredibly nice, genuine, angelic people and it is so easy to refer back to these qualities when suspicion and your own anxiety gets the best of you. It is hard to end friendships, and even those of us who had let go or had been trying to move on found it difficult to rest easy with this situation still lingering in the air. This has been a big burden to carry, we have no hard feelings towards Soyoon or Arden, and ask that you please refrain from sending any negative messages to them. Posting this will be a form of release and closure for all of us, and will hopefully be a way for us to grow stronger in a moment where trust and faith seem so out of reach. We are deeply sorry to those who are shocked and understandably feel betrayed, confused, or overwhelmed by this information. Let this situation be a lesson for you and learn from our experiences.
Following our post regarding the Arden/Soyoon situation, one of us has been contacted by someone who wishes to remain anonymous. This person is the original owner of the photos that Soyoon has posted and claimed as her own, and we regretfully announce that her identity had been falsified as well. The real owner of the photos wants none of her information released and we will strongly respect that. She wanted us to mention that if any of you think you happen to see the girl in these photos, do not approach her or think she is Soyoon because she is not.
