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Fyre Festival was a scam from the perspective that they were selling something they had no means of fulfilling. This became evident early on, and rather than r
by bduerst 8y ago
Fyre Festival was a scam from the perspective that they were selling something they had no means of fulfilling. This became evident early on, and rather than refund/notify customers, the Fyre team intentionally hid information and pushed attendees to load more money onto a vaporware payment system that didn't exist.
Even in the Netflix doc, it was shown that the founder, Billy McFarland, was raising festival funding under falsified information. The fact that he went on to scam the Fyre account list with fake tickets later just shows that he was scamming from the start.
- stickfigure 8y agoWe just need more granularity in the term "scam", like we have with manslaughter. There's something like this going on: Bernie Madoff : First Degree Murder :: Billy McFarland : Negligent Homicide
- adventurer 8y agoI think the word you're looking for is fraud. Securities fraud, mail fraud, wire fraud. How many counts, billions of dollars involved, etc.
- krferriter 8y agoFyre was definitely a scam. McFarland was lying to investors, employees, and customers. He ignored professional advisors, and refused to cancel the event when it was clear a few weeks before hand that the products and services he had sold to people were not real. He accepted money for things that he had no way of fulfilling. That's a scam. Madoff may have done more scamming involving more money, but both were scams. McFarland was using later customers money to try to fulfill promises made to the earlier customers. And that isn't even starting to consider the real wire fraud he was committing the whole time behind the scenes, and the later fraud after he was out on bail.
- wp381640 8y agoMcFarland raised money from investors using forged documents, that's Madoff level fraud