The corporation behind Warwick Scenes

Who is behind Warwick’s largest gossip page? It might not be who you think.

“What happens when the person who runs @warwickscenes graduates?” one student submitted to the Warwick gossip page with over 9,000 followers.

Despite their presentation as student-run side projects, Warwick Scenes and many other ‘Scenes’ pages are in fact part of a network of Instagram pages across the nation, all run by a company called Two Dot Seven One Eight Tech Limited.

Among the accounts in the network are: @warwickscenes, @nottsfess, @uoy.confessions, @lancasterscenes, @brightonmemes, @leicesterscenes, @exetermemes, @becketbanter, @glasjokes, and @uomfess, all of which link to the Grapevine app.

Since the pages present themselves as local campus communities, students may assume moderation is handled by fellow students familiar with university life and inside jokes.

When students are submitting to Grapevine’s services, they are granting the company a “worldwide, irrevocable, perpetual” licence to use and distribute their content

However, it is unclear how moderation decisions are made across the network, who ultimately reviews submissions, and how they manage to do this successfully without an awareness of the specifics of each university’s culture.

It is unknown whether individual accounts have student admin teams that simply feed into the network or if these accounts were initially student run before being acquired by the company.

When The Boar reached out to Warwick Scenes seeking clarification on these points, the Instagram account did not reply.

The company, Two Dot Seven One Eight Tech Limited, is registered in Reading with Companies House, with Mr Jack George Wilson and Mr Alexander Brian Reynolds as directors. According to Jack George Wilson’s LinkedIn profile, he is a graduate of the University of York.

The corporate nature of this network is spelt out by the app’s privacy policy and terms of service. When students are submitting to Grapevine’s services, they are granting the company a “worldwide, irrevocable, perpetual” licence to use and distribute their content.

I’ve never had any communication with Warwick Scenes, they always seemed quite corporate to me

The Warwick Tea

The terms also include an arbitration clause and class action waiver, limiting users’ ability to pursue collective legal action. Additionally, the data retention policy is sufficiently vague to cause concern, as deleted content “may linger temporarily on our systems for legal, operational, security, or archival reasons”.

When The Boar reached out to Warwick Tea (@thewarwicktea), with questions about their relationship to Warwick Scenes, an admin shared: “I’ve never had any communication with Warwick Scenes, they always seemed quite corporate to me.

“They seemed to appear a couple years ago right when I started and then gave up, and then came back, but I’ve never felt much of a competition since their stuff seems to be very delayed in terms of submissions coming out, plus they’ll happily post AI generated ones, and maybe the Tea feels like more of a community… I’ve never heard anyone actually mention Warwick Scenes in real life.”

Two Dot Seven One Eight Tech is currently in the midst of dissolution following a Gazette notice. The question of what will happen to all this student data is not clear if the company dissolves.

These gossip pages appear to be isolated, student-run, and independent, and students across the UK treat them as such […] Yet many do so without awareness that they are sharing with a single company run by non-students

On 12 May 2026, the company received its first Gazette Notice on Companies House, a public warning companies receive for failing to submit the proper paperwork to prove that they are still in operation.

The warning notes that: “the Company will be struck off the register and dissolved not less than 2 months from the date shown above (12/05/2026).”

Many of these gossip pages appear to be isolated, student-run, and independent, and students across the UK treat them as such, regularly submitting personal information, screenshots, and confessions to these accounts.

Yet many do so without awareness that they are sharing with a single company run by non-students.

The accounts utilise a Google Form link for submission on their Instagram page, alongside a link to the company’s ‘Grapevine’ app. Two Dot Seven One Eight Tech Limited is listed on the App Store as its developer.

An admin from Warwick Tea told The Boar that, in terms of running their account, “I have a Google doc, and I paste the submissions into a Microsoft PowerPoint template, cutting anything that’s too specific, harmful, or brain rotted. And then I read it through a couple times to make sure it’s all okay, find a good song, and post.”

Grapevine and its network of accounts continue to collect submissions, email addresses, and user data, feeding content into a single commercial network whose ownership and data practices remain opaque to the students submitting to it.

These gossip pages are immensely popular at university, with Warwick especially developing a niche for satire and gossip accounts on Instagram. But the question of who is behind some of our trusted accounts raises the question of ethical gossip consumption.