#AlexFromTarget is nothing but a marketing stunt, according to a marketing company. The seemingly innocuous photo of a young man working at a Target retail chain that has become an overnight viral sensation was allegedly perpetuated by Breakr, a start-up from Los Angeles.

The attractive male teenager who works at Target quickly became an Internet sensation in a span just of days after a random girl, Abbie (@auscalum), posted his photo on Twitter. #AlexFromTarget photo shows the titular Alex bagging products in a plastic bag in what appears to be a mundane task from his job. It helped that Alex, a teenager from Texas whose full name is Alex Christopher LaBeouf, is also a good-looking kid, which perhaps prompted teen girls to retweet his photo even though he wasn’t a famous person.

If he wasn’t a celebrity then, he is now. Even Ellen DeGeneres wanted a picture taken with him.

But while the tween population online is going Twitter-crazy over this random bloke, a marketing company is claiming to be behind the whole phenomenon. Breakr, a company that “connects fans to their fandom,” is taking credit for the quick spread of the photo. Its CEO Dil-Domine Jacobe Leonares explained how the whole thing started in a lengthy post on LinkedIn.

“Yesterday, we had fun on Twitter with the hashtag #AlexFromTarget which ended up to be one of the most amazing social media experiments ever. We wanted to see how powerful the fangirl demographic was by taking a [sic] unknown good-looking kid and Target employee from Texas to overnight viral internet sensation,” Leonares wrote.

He went on to explain how Abbie (@auscalum) from the UK helped them with their experiment by posting the photo of Alex Lee (@acl163) on Twitter. Since then, the Internet worked its magic. The photo got retweeted so many times that it even spawned several memes and parodies. The hashtag became the #1 trending worldwide, and Alex’s Twitter account, which started with only over 2,000 followers, now has over 628,000.

But after both Abbie and Alex denied their involvement in the marketing plot, Leonares updated the post, saying neither Abbie nor Alex had been employed by Breakr. When Abbie tweeted the photo, they just jumped on with it and included the hashtag #AlexFromTarget, which he said was their idea.

My family and I have never heard of this company.

— Alex Lee (@acl163) November 5, 2014

Leonares insisted to CNET that Abbie knows about Breakr, although she was never employed by the company, saying, “Abbie was a follower of ours; she unfollowed two days after getting hate; she posted the picture and we jumped on it with the hashtag.”

“They told me to follow them, so I did; then they [direct-messaged] me so I unfollowed them,” Abbie explained, saying Breakr was “asking if they can handle my press, so I just unfollowed them.”

Leonares is still adamant that his company is behind it all even though both the main players of the viral photo, Alex and Abbie, the girl who posted it, both denied the company’s involvement.

“After the dust settles, there is a lesson to be made here; from bands, talent agencies, music labels and influencer marketing companies: if you can earn the love and respect from a global community such as the ‘Fangirl’ demographic – you can rally them together to drive awareness for any cause even if its [sic] to take a random kid from unknown to stardom over night,” Leonares continued on his LinkedIn post.