YACHT are the L.A.-based electronic pop duo of Jona Bechtolt and Claire L. Evans. Besides being in a creative partnership, the band are also in a romantic relationship. Yesterday, they posted on Facebook that a private sex tape that they’d made together had been hacked from their computer and uploaded – and in response, they decided to sell the video themselves for $5 a pop.

“Due to a series of technological missteps and one morally abject person, a video that we made privately has been released to the public,” they wrote, “We have commenced legal proceedings against the aforementioned person, but now that it could potentially circulate, we feel like it’s important for you to know what happened and why.”

Later, they explained their decision to sell the tape on fuck.teamyacht.com: “We’ve been researching sex tapes. It shouldn’t have come as any surprise that Pamela Anderson never saw a dime from the tape she filmed with Tommy Lee, and Paris Hilton lost a court battle with the man who leaked their private video. We’re not as savvy as the Kardashians, but something occurred to us this morning: we could try and distribute the video directly to you ourselves... if you feel like you 100% have to see this tape, don’t stream it on some tube site, or download a torrent. Instead, we beg of you to download the video, Louis C.K.-style, directly from us.”

Despite a positive response from their fans on social media, some people are expressing doubts about the story. For starters, YACHT have always been very meta: they pepper their interviews with false stories and half-truths, and have used marketing stunts like releasing self-help manifestos, faxing fans artwork and releasing videos only during Uber surge price periods.

More importantly, the sex tape itself doesn’t seem to exist. Twitter users have said that any attempt to buy the tape leads to a 404 page, with the only people claiming to have seen it being friends with the band. And as Michelle Lhooq at Thump writes, the timeline of their story detailed in their two posts doesn’t seem to add up. Jezebel, meanwhile, say they’ve received a tip that the story is a hoax to promote their new video.

Whether it’s real or not, the story raises interesting questions – about privacy, about how to reclaim agency during online privacy invasions, about people’s willingness to pay for a sex tape from a band but not for their music. But when revenge porn is a real problem that affects real people, it would also be fairly dodgy to fake it for a PR stunt.

Update 10/05: Jezebel have confirmed that the story is false, citing an internal email within their parent company Gawker Media. “In the days leading up to the video’s release, we’re going to pretend we were hacked, share and delete confessional social media posts on the subject of our privacy, then try to ‘get out in front of it’ and sell the sex tape, fake a server crash, etc.”, YACHT’s Claire L. Evans said in an internal email seen by Jezebel. We’ve reached out to YACHT’s publicist for comment.