It’s Peak Season For Chronic Party Crashers

BY JULIA MUNSLOW AND LAURA MA

An elite squad of interlopers have turned showing up uninvited into an art form

Paul Gee was searching for a holiday party in a New Jersey banquet hall when a staff member stopped him and asked if he knew where he was supposed to be.

“The company event?” Gee replied. Once the 31year-old event host and entertainer found the right room, he scoped the scene, then beelined for the DJ. “Hey bro, let me see that real quick,” said Gee, reaching for the mic. “Oh yeah, get it, c’mon!” Gee shouted to the crowd.

But Gee wasn’t booked to host the event—he was just crashing the party.

It’s high season for people like Gee, part of an elite group of gate-crashers who have turned showing up uninvited into an art form. The basic playbook is the same: Dress the part, act confidently, conduct a little advance research, and don’t cause a disturbance.

Like any good game of luck and chance, favored tactics vary. Some prefer to sneak onto the

list beforehand, while others waltz through the front door with aplomb. The lucky ones snag a departing guest’s nametag, and the most brazen ask staff for an escort to the affair. Many claim crashing is easier than it looks—and that they almost never get caught.

About 14% of Americans say they’ve successfully attended a party or event without the host’s permission, while 4% say they’ve tried and failed, according to a December YouGov survey.

Roughly 6% of Americans say they are interested in crashing a party at some point. Most of the rest think it’s wrong. (It is.) And some might think it’s irresponsible to highlight tricks of the trade in a large publication. (Also probably true.)

Gee, who lives in Brooklyn, N.Y., started crashing parties out of curiosity, and has chronicled his escapades on social media. “When I leave, I hug people, I give business cards out,” he said.

Sometimes, Gee scores party favors, like a bottle of vanilla extract from a gathering in 2022. His biggest trophy is a $600 cash tip from a particularly pleased father at a bar mitzvah, after Gee sang Katy Perry’s “Firework” for a couple dozen teens.

Jaime Kornick, 38, crashed parties for about a year straight in San Francisco in the early 2010s and documented it on her blog. The design researcher, who now lives in San Diego, estimates she averaged about three events a week, more than 150 in a year. “Why go out to a bar and be in that scene if you can go to a company party and learn, network and grow, and have sponsored free food and drinks?” Kornick said.

In July 2012, she grabbed a blank nametag and walked into a party at a museum. Over the next year, she crashed events, including ones hosted by some of the biggest names in tech. Before arriving, she’d read up on the company. Inside, she’d steer conversations away from herself.

Often, staff were more wor-ried about the food or the photo booth than a polite young woman who dressed the part, Kornick said. “People don’t push back as much as you think they might.”

Through her repeated gatecrashing, she met other regular infiltrators who sent one another event details, passwords and registration forms for parties in the Bay Area.

“It’s kind of like fight club,” she said. “You don’t say you’re crashing.”

Eventually, Kornick brought a saxophonist to a corporate event (attendees asked for an encore) and a photographer to a bachelor auction (women lined up for photos).

Etiquette expert Tami Claytor said it’s never appropriate to attend an event without an invitation.

“It’s in my opinion a pretty narcissistic point of view that you crashing this party is going to make it better,” Claytor said. “It goes back to the host, who put so much time and effort into creating this event for specific people.”

Daulton O’Neill, an entrepreneur and event promoter in Dallas, has a simple rule to determine whether you can show up uninvited: If at least 60% of the people will be happy you’re there, then you’ve got a green light to gate-crash.

Last year, the 30-year-old slipped into his former employer’s holiday party and tracked down the Liquid-Agents Healthcare CEO, Sheldon Arora.

“Hey man, I’m drinking on your tab tonight,” O’Neill told Arora, who laughed and told him to have fun.

Arora said he has no problem with former employees crashing his party, though he noted every company has a finite amount of resources to celebrate its staff.

“When they’re telling other people how much fun they had, why they came back, it makes the current employees want to stay here,” Arora said.

“I get emotional about not seeing friends I haven’t seen in a while, and it would’ve taken me a full two years to coordinate calendars with people’s girlfriends, babysitting, getting sick,” said O’Neill, who’s crashed parties and corporate conferences.

Private security can help prevent gate-crashing, but is expensive.

Experts say that depending on the event and type of security, it can cost from $25 to $150 per guard per hour. “Most of the time the motivation is like, hey, I just want to get into this cool party,” said Steven Hersem, a global corporate security expert. “But as security professionals, we always think that you have to at least anticipate the worst-case scenario.”

And sometimes, accidents happen.

Real-estate agent Omar Ortega, 43, didn’t recognize anyone at the Coldwell Banker Realty party in December in Austin, but assumed the strangers were younger agents from other offices.

After 30 minutes, Ortega started to feel out of place. Everyone else was in cocktail attire, while he was wearing “a cardigan sweater, like Mr. Rogers.”

He left, looked back and saw several screens—with the logo of a different company. “I really was mortified,” Ortega said. “It made sense that people were looking at me like, ‘OK, who is this old man at our party?’” Ortega eventually joined the right party at another lounge in the same stadium.

In the San Francisco party circuit, Kornick became so infamous that some companies started asking her to crash their events and document it for her blog.

Getting the invite killed some of the thrill. “I’m like, ‘Wait,” she said. “This isn’t exactly the purpose of crashing.”