She goes on the run with her friend Daniel (Yousef Abu-Taleb) after her parents' mysterious religion is revealed to be The Order, a blood-harvesting operation that wants her "trait positive" blood.

After discovering YouTube in 2005, Beckett, then a doctor, came up with the idea for a series of staged video blogs presented as though they were real, and set out to create Lonelygirl15 with Flinders, a filmmaker.

As the series gained popularity, viewers began to question its authenticity, and users of the Lonelygirl15.com forum soon found proof that it was fake after messaging Bree on Myspace and tracing her IP address to the offices of Creative Artists Agency, where Amanda Goodfried worked.

Bree Avery (lonelygirl15), a homeschooled 16-year-old girl, begins posting video blogs on YouTube about her mundane daily life and her interests, such as science and her purple monkey puppet, P-Monkey.

[7] Beckett met Ramesh "Mesh" Flinders, a screenwriter and filmmaker from Marin County, California,[8] during a birthday party at The Gaslite, a karaoke bar in Santa Monica, in April 2006.

Together, they came up with the character of Bree, a quirky, homeschooled 16-year-old "girl next door" belonging to a strange religion who would post daily vlogs, occasionally with her best friend, Daniel, until one day she disappeared.

[11] Grant Steinfeld, a software engineer from San Francisco, was also brought on to help distribute the videos and create a dummy website for the series, though he soon dropped out of the project.

[7] Using space and resources provided by the nonprofit organization Film Independent, Flinders, Beckett, and Goodfried held a casting call in Los Angeles, which they posted on Craigslist as The Children of Anchor Cove.

[9][12] After graduating from the New York Film Academy, then-19-year-old actress Jessica Lee Rose moved to Los Angeles to start her acting career.

"[7] Yousef Abu-Taleb, who had moved from Virginia to Los Angeles the year before his audition and was working as a server at Red Lobster, was cast as Daniel because of his "dorky", "unpretentious" look.

[8] In order to maintain Rose and Abu-Taleb's anonymity, both were given enough money by the show's creators to avoid having to work in public, and they stayed in their houses for three months until the series was exposed as a hoax.

[6] In early January 2007, American Idol runner-up Katharine McPhee, whose debut album was being released later that month, guest starred in an episode of the series ("Truth or Dare") after her management team reached out to the show's creators.

[6] After it was revealed that the series was a hoax, the storyline went on to grow more complex and include more characters, with four to five episodes being posted to YouTube, Revver, Myspace, and the show's website per week.

[9] In October 2006, Lonelygirl15 partnered with the United Nations to make an advertisement for its Millennium Campaign's "Stand Up" anti-poverty project, in which Bree spoke to viewers about poverty and what could be done to stop it.

"[23] Lonelygirl15 later became the first web series to include product placement when its creators signed a five-figure deal with Hershey's for Bree to chew Ice Breakers Sours gum in an episode in March 2007.

[34] Discussions about the potential hoax took place in the forums on Lonelygirl15.com, which some users noticed had already been registered as a domain name by an anonymous buyer two weeks prior to Bree joining YouTube.

[10] EQAL's second Lonelygirl15 spinoff, LG15: The Resistance, premiered in September 2008, with 10-minute-long episodes being released weekly on YouTube, MySpaceTV, imeem, Veoh, and Hulu.

[21] Powell wrote in an email regarding the relaunch that the two hoped "to bring the show to a whole new audience while utilizing technologies that weren’t available 10 years ago to create new storytelling experiences.

"[31] Speaking of the relaunch, Rose shared that a Snapchat channel for Daniel, a Facebook page, and an interactive website would all be involved, and clues about the series would appear in all three.

[14][18] Also in 2007, Virginia Heffernan wrote for The New York Times that there was "widespread animus" and "hostility" towards Lonelygirl15 due to the series growing "too big for its britches".

[44] For NBC News, Helen A.S. Popkin called Bree "the unofficial face of Web 2.0", and wrote that the success of Lonelygirl15 "was arguably a driving factor behind Google's $1.65 billion purchase of YouTube, as well as MySpace's addition of short-form video to its social networking site.

"[31] In 2016, The Verge's Sean O'Kane wrote that "the craziest thing about Lonelygirl15 is how prescient it was", as "Bree's vlogs don't look all that different from what you find on YouTube today.

"[15] For New York, Adam Sternbergh described Lonelygirl15 as "the birth of WikiTV", which he defined as "a television show created by a broad community of participants and built not of sequential, hour-long episodes, but of two-minute interconnected parcels" wherein the storyline is "both linear...and expansive" and "anyone can join in.

[50] In Time's 2006 edition of their Person of the Year issue, which focused on user-generated content online, Lev Grossman wrote, "Of course, in the post-Lonelygirl15 era, there's always that question mark: How authentic are these faces on the computer screen?

"[51] For Eureka Street, Marisa Pintado wrote that the exposure of Lonelygirl15 as a hoax was "perhaps the moment that [the YouTube] community lost its innocence", adding that it "prompted many to ask why we are still so trusting of what we find on the Internet.

"[7] Mashable's Tricia Gilbride wrote that "Lonelygirl15's legacy is the currency of uncertainty", calling the series "the first long con of the internet's attention economy -- the kind digital fame-seekers take for granted these days.