RESCENE’s Breakout Year Hits a Scam Scare, Four Days Before Its Biggest Comeback Yet

As the viral girl group readies its fourth mini-album “PULSE,” its agency is fighting off a far less welcome kind of attention a scammer posing as staff to extract money from business partners.

For a group that spent most of 2024 and 2025 fighting for attention in one of K-pop’s most saturated rookie classes, RESCENE‘s 2026 has been a study in momentum right up until this week, when that momentum collided with something uglier: someone impersonating agency staff to squeeze money out of business partners, just four days before the group’s next release.

The Warning

On October 29, The Muze Entertainment, the agency behind five-member girl group RESCENE, issued a public statement warning that an impersonator posing as a member of its management support team had been contacting paper suppliers, making financial demands and extracting improper gains under the agency’s name.

“We have confirmed, through multiple reports, that there have been cases of individuals impersonating The Muze Entertainment staff,” the agency said. “This person is not employed by our company and has no affiliation with us whatsoever. Our staff and executives use only official email accounts for business purposes, and under no circumstances do we ever make financial demands.”

The agency confirmed it is pursuing legal action, including filing criminal charges, against the individual. “If you receive a similar request, please do not comply under any circumstances, and report it immediately to the police or relevant authorities,” it said.

The full statement, released in the agency’s name:

Hello, this is The Muze Entertainment.

Through multiple reports, we have confirmed cases of individuals impersonating The Muze Entertainment staff.

We have identified a situation in which someone introduced themselves as a member of our management support team and contacted multiple paper-industry companies, making financial demands and taking improper gains.

We would like to clarify that this individual is not employed by our company and has no affiliation with us whatsoever. Our staff and executives use only official email accounts for business purposes and never make financial demands under any circumstances. Please be mindful of this to avoid being harmed by impersonation.

We are currently pursuing legal action against this individual, including filing charges. If you receive a similar request, please do not comply under any circumstances and report it immediately to the police or relevant authorities.

Thank you.

The specific targeting of “paper-industry companies” (제지업체) suggests the scheme may have been tied to merchandise, packaging, or album-production vendors the kind of supplier relationships that sit just outside public view but are essential to how a comeback actually gets made. It’s a reminder that K-pop’s business machinery, not just its fandoms, has become a target: earlier this month, a separate agency representative was investigated for allegedly forging appearance-guarantee documents to defraud event companies planning overseas fan meetings, with damages reportedly reaching into the billions of won chosun.com. As K-pop’s commercial footprint grows, so does the surface area for this kind of impersonation fraud.

The Group Riding an Unlikely Wave

The timing stings because RESCENE has spent this year becoming one of the genre’s most compelling underdog stories. The quintet Woni, Liv, Minami, May, and Zena debuted in March 2024 under The Muze Entertainment, a then-newly formed agency with none of the backing of Korea’s “Big Four” labels. Their introduction leaned into an unusual sensory concept, built around reviving a “scene” through “scent” koreatimes.co.kr.

For roughly a year and a half, that concept found an audience but not yet a breakout. Then came the meme. Earlier this year, member Minami’s unscripted, exuberant shout of “Geoje, yaho!” (거제, 야호) a reference to her hometown of Geoje during a YouTube video spread rapidly online, turning into one of the year’s most replicated K-pop internet moments. The clip’s contagious energy did something increasingly rare in an algorithm-saturated content landscape: it sent the group’s earlier single “Love Attack,” from their debut mini-album Scenedrome, surging back up real-time music charts, culminating in it reaching No. 1 on Melon’s Top 100 a “chart resurgence” (역주행) success story that Korean media has compared to K-pop’s most legendary belated hits.

The timing mattered. “Geoje, yaho” wasn’t just a funny soundbite it converted casual meme engagement into actual music consumption, the exact pipeline every K-pop act chases and few achieve. It turned RESCENE, almost overnight, from a promising rookie act into one of 2026’s most talked-about “resurgence” girl groups, a term Korean fans use for songs or acts that find explosive popularity well after their original release joining a lineage of belated hits that periodically reshuffle the genre’s charts outside the usual comeback-cycle machinery.

A Comeback Built on Momentum

That wave is exactly what RESCENE is now trying to convert into a sustained comeback. The group will release its fourth mini-album, PULSE, on November 3, its first physical release since November 2025’s Lip Bomb, which moved over 101,000 copies in its first week a career best. PULSE features five tracks, led by the title song “With,” alongside “Finest Thing,” “Inside Out,” “MEME,” and “Dragon,” and was produced with past contributions from EJAE, the songwriter-producer behind some of K-pop’s biggest recent vocal records seoulvibes.net.

According to the group’s own description, PULSE is conceived around the idea of a heartbeat “the moment when a song offered to you returns as a voice that lifts me up again” tracking how a dream once held alone becomes real upon meeting fans, and how the shared “pulse” of a live stage carries into each member’s everyday life sports.khan.co.kr. Notably, one of the five tracks is literally titled “MEME” a detail that reads almost like the group winking at its own breakout story, embracing rather than running from the internet moment that made it a name.

Why the Timing Matters

There’s a particular cruelty to viral fraud scares landing exactly when an act has the most to protect. RESCENE spent nearly two years building credibility the hard way as a small-agency act without a major label’s safety net, relying on music and an authentic, unscripted fan moment to cut through an oversaturated fifth-generation girl-group field. A fraud scheme invoking the agency’s name, even one with zero connection to the group’s creative side, risks muddying that hard-won credibility at the exact moment the group needs clean, positive attention pointed at its new release.

To its credit, The Muze Entertainment’s response was fast, specific, and transparent naming the exact method (impersonating management support staff), the target (paper-industry vendors), and the agency’s concrete countermeasure (legal action already underway), rather than issuing a vague caution. That kind of clarity matters in an industry where fans and partners alike are increasingly asked to verify who, exactly, they’re really talking to.

With PULSE dropping November 3, the real test for RESCENE now is whether its hard-earned 2026 momentum built on an authentic viral moment and genuine chart resurgence can outrun a news cycle built on someone else’s fraud. Given how decisively the group converted one unscripted shout into a career-defining year, it’s a bet worth watching.