Social Media Fraud: Fyre Festival

Want to hang out with supermodels on the beach? That's the dream that Billy McFarland sold in 2017 when he advertised Fyre Festival, an outdoor music concert in the Bahamas. Attendees were promised beautiful beaches, live music, comfy villas, gourmet meals, and supermodels around every corner. Instead, they got a gravel parking lot, soggy tents, cheese sandwiches, and no music. And no supermodels, either.

What went wrong with Fyre Festival? In this episode, we look at Billy McFarland's delusion through the lens of social media, and how it played a leading role in the misleading people into the fraud that was Fyre Festival.

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• 20:57 (Cont.) Social Media Fraud: Fyre Festival

Transcript

Social Media Fraud: Fyre Festival

Welcome to How Hacks Happen. This is Michele Bousquet, your resident scam spotter. 

This episode is the first in a series on a topic I’ve been wanting to tackle for a long time, and that’s fraud happening right in front of you, right on your phone. The fraud of which I speak is the rampant lies on social media, lies designed to fool you into buying a dream that doesn’t exist.

These aren’t your run-of-the-mill scams, where you send away money and get nothing in return. These scams are more sophisticated, where you’re sold a beautiful dream that turns out to be a cheap backdrop for a photo shoot. 

This series unpacks why these social media lies are so convincing, and why people still fall for them, even after so many of these con artists have been exposed.

Don’t get me wrong, I use social media all the time. I just try to be aware of how much it’s changed over the years from a way to connect with others, putting up pictures and finding our long-lost friends, into outright lies saying, “Look how beautiful my life is. This is what I want you to see. Aren’t I the coolest? Don’t you wish you were me?”

From face filters that can make you look like a supermodel to photo shoots in a fake private jet, or expensive vacations that secretly put influencers into crippling debt, much of the content on social media is not as it seems. Lots of it is designed to induce Fear of Missing Out, otherwise known as FOMO.

Maybe you can tell, I do not like this side of social media at all. Sure, I’m more inclined to post photos where my hair isn’t a complete mess, but I’m not going to pretend my life is all Gucci and Porsche and a deluxe trip to Greece or something. 

This series looks at how social media has changed over the past 20 years, and how it’s led to scams and fraud on a massive scale. Each episode will cover a different incident, starting with this episode on Fyre Festival of 2017, which one might say was the tipping point for this sort of FOMO fraud. 

There have already been two detailed documentaries about the fraud of Fyre Festival, one on Netflix and one on Hulu, and they cover the facts pretty well. But I wanted to look at Fyre Festival from the perspective of social media, and the role that our unhealthy relationship with it played in this particular dumpster fire. 

One of the things that made the Fyre Festival fraud special was that the person who perpetrated it didn’t think he was doing anything wrong, despite all the evidence in front of him. He didn’t even consider that he was lying. Even after being convicted of fraud, he still doesn’t believe it. 

So, how do we spot a fraud like this, before it gets us in the wallet, even when the con man is 100% convinced he’s telling the truth?

Everybody loves a music festival, right? Dancing on the grass with a frozen daiquiri in hand, laughing with your friends on a beautiful sunny day, vibing to the tunes, eating great food. Here in New Orleans, we have tons of music festivals, and they’re amazing. We’ve got Jazz Fest and Essence, each of which draws over half a million people. And then there’s French Quarter Fest, Voodoo Fest, Crescent City Blues & BBQ Fest, the list goes on and on. 

This isn’t an ad for New Orleans festivals, because believe me, we already have enough people coming to them. But pretty much everyone I know has worked at one of these festivals, whether as an organizer, or building sound stages, or as a food or drink server, or managing parking, or any number of other jobs. I’ve worked at Jazz Fest myself plenty of times, doing everything from helping performers get ready backstage to picking up trash around the grounds.

And the sheer amount of time, energy, money, and people that it takes to make these festivals happen at all, is astounding. Especially outdoor festivals, where they have to run lines for electricity and water, set up stages with lighting, drop in dozens of porta potties and trash buckets, and set up food stalls and ticket booths, and find places for the performers to stay, and a zillion other details that you take for granted at an indoor concert venue. Even things like, what are you gonna do if it starts raining? What if someone passes out and needs medical attention? Things that we take for granted if we’re just a regular attendee. The organizers work hard to give you that magical moment of dancing on the grass in the sunshine with your friends. 

So when Fyre Festival popped up on Instagram in 2017, promising a luxury experience on an island in the Bahamas, making it look like you could frolic on the beach with supermodels while listening to some of the hottest bands, the world paid attention. 

And those ads, they were kind of insane. Like, 10 supermodels on a boat, doing shots with a bunch of regular dudes, then splashing around in their adorable little bikinis, then hanging out at a big bonfire on the beach. The message was clear: buy a ticket to Fyre Festival, and this could be you, right here, sitting between two famous supermodels, sipping on a margarita, snapping selfies with them. What a great experience! And best of all, you could give your friends the most serious FOMO ever by posting the pictures to Instagram. Finally, you would get to be the beautiful person with the beautiful life. Pretty slick, huh?

Except it wasn’t really true. Fyre Festival never actually happened. Well, it kind of did. I mean, hundreds of people did fly into the Bahamas in April of 2017 for Fyre Festival, but when they got there, they found a muddy gravel pit with soggy tents for accommodations, no music, no food, and certainly no supermodels. There were plenty of selfies, just not the kind they thought they were going to have. 

The failure of Fyre Festival–and the fact that so many people bought into the hype–is actually a picture-perfect example of the damage that a false reality on social media can cause.

To understand how Fyre Festival came to be in the first place, and why so many people fell for it, we begin at the beginning, with a charismatic young man named Billy McFarland.

Billy grew up in New York and New Jersey. And in 2013, Billy is 22 years old, living in New York City, and he really wants to launch a business, something cool that will appeal to people his own age, the generation we know as Millennials. 

Billy knows that everybody his age is hyper aware of looking cool on Instagram, and having a high social status. Like, the kind of status you might get from having an American Express Black Card, which Amex gives out only by invitation, to its wealthiest clients.

So Billy gets this idea: he gets a big piece of thin, black metal, and cuts it up into credit-card sized pieces. Then he takes the magnetic strip off his debit card, and puts it on the metal piece, and voila! He has a heavy, black card that makes a nice clanking noise when you tap it on a countertop. He does a few test runs with it at some local stores, and this cool black card attracts attention everywhere he goes. 

And from this, Magnises is born. Magnises is a club that anyone could join for $250/year. You get the cool black card, plus you can go to exclusive parties at the Magnises party house, and wine tastings and dinners, and get deals on designer fashions and tickets to Broadway shows like Hamilton. 

Now, Billy’s got one really big thing going for him: enthusiasm. And that enthusiasm gives him a kind of charisma. People are drawn to his boundless positivity and confidence and energy, and Magnises starts gaining members.

And of course, Magnises is always posting like mad on Instagram. The parties at the clubhouse provide free booze, and the atmosphere is lit. Billy famously said, “Here’s to living like movie stars and partying like rock stars,” and to him, that’s what it’s all about. “Look what a great time we’re having! You, too, can be cool like us, if you join Magnises.”

And Magnises does pretty well, eventually getting a few thousand members. Billy even raises over a million dollars in funding for the business. Moneywise, Magnises isn’t profitable yet, but investors aren’t worried about it, as long as the members keep growing, and Billy keeps charisma-ing. And people who joined Magnises, they say it’s pretty fun, and they get good value out of it.

Then Billy gets another idea. He wants to create an app where people can book famous bands or singers or even celebrities directly, without having to find their agent and jump through a bunch of hoops. 

The app is called Fyre, with a Y. It sounds like a great idea, right? Like, if you really want 50 Cent to come sing “party like it’s your birthday” at your daughter’s birthday party, why not? Billy hires application developers to create the Fyre app, and eventually the application is released. But it doesn’t really take off. They don’t have enough users. 

So Billy and this rapper he’s hooked up with, Ja Rule, they get this idea. While they’re traveling together in the Bahamas, they find this private island, and they decide they’re going to hold an elite music festival there to promote the Fyre app. It’s going to have top music acts and chef-prepared food and all the beautiful people. It’s going to be awesome! 

Never mind that neither of them has ever put on a music festival. They’re gonna do it! Yeah! 

Hang on a minute. How is Billy partying in the Bahamas when his companies aren’t making any money? Hmm. Could it be the investment money he got for the Fyre app? I mean, he got a $4M loan, and even though he spent a bunch of it on fancy offices in Manhattan, there was probably at least enough left over for a schwanky vacation with Ja Rule. He could have used the money for app development or advertising or set some aside for future growth of the company, but Nah, who needs that, when you can live like a movie star and party like a rockstar, right now?

Remember who we’re talking about here. Mr. FOMO himself, Billy McFarland, posting all the Insta pics about his fabulous life. There’s Billy on a jet ski, and there’s Billy and Ja drinking on the beach. And there’s the fabulous tale of the two of them flying in a little plane, landing on a gorgeous, unspoiled island that was the old stomping grounds for drug lord Pablo Escobar. 

Is the story actually true? Who knows! But it makes for some super-sexy Instagram. And ultimately, that’s all that matters, right?

Now, I’m not saying that the failure of Fyre Festival was inevitable. But besides the fact that Billy McFarland had no idea of how to put on an outdoor festival, I believe he thought he was living inside an Instagram post, where everyone is beautiful, anything is possible.

And even if he had gotten super lucky with all the planning, Billy made some very serious mistakes right from the start, mistakes that came out of either extreme entitlement, or extreme delusion, or stupidity. Or maybe all three. 

Billy and Ja Rule are actually able to get permission to use that awesome private island for the festival. It’s called Norman’s Cay, and apparently it used to belong to a friend of Pablo Escobar. 

The first Instagram lie that Billy tells is that he bought the island, which he hadn’t. Okay, a little fib, whatever. The actual owner either doesn’t see this or doesn’t care, and he tells Billy he can use Norman’s Cay for Fyre Fest, but under the strict condition that they never mention Pablo Escabar in promotion of the festival, ever.

It’s on! Billy and Ja Rule start planning the festival, and it’s full speed ahead. That’s when they hire an ad agency to create that infamous supermodel video. They spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to fly everyone out, pay a camera crew, rent a yacht and helicopters, and get food and alcohol and everything else you need to party with supermodels on a remote island in the Bahamas. 

And the video goes viral. Everybody’s talking about Fyre Festival. The promotion is a success! Tickets sell out in 48 hours. They’re living the Instagram dream.

But, this is where Billy makes his first giant mistake. That very first video contains the words “on the island once owned by Pablo Escobar,” in big letters, right there on the screen. Which was not only a false claim, but it breaks that one rule that the owner gave Billy!

The owner sees the video and he is not amused. The deal is off. What I’d like to know is, what did Billy think was going to happen? Was the owner just gonna go, “Haha, good one” and let it slide? Sorry, Billy, you forgot to check whether the island’s owner lives in your sunshiny Instagram fantasy. Spoiler alert: He doesn’t.

And just like that, 45 days before people are set to arrive, there is no venue for Fyre Fest.

The team scrambles to find another venue, and they find one. It isn’t really an island, it’s more like a giant disused gravel parking lot next to a Sandals resort, but it is in the Bahamas. They make up some doctored pictures to make it look like an island, and post those on Instagram. Oh well, if the music is good and the supermodels show up, it will still be okay. Yeah. Instagram!

Another misstep was in the overall planning itself. Billy hires experts to advise his team on how to put together the festival, and every single one of them tells him that they need at least a year of planning. But this doesn’t fit in Billy’s Instagram fantasy bubble, so Billy, he fires them. There, he fixed it!

It’s 30 days out, and this is right around the time the actual fraud starts to happen. Until now, Billy has maybe wasted a bunch of money on jet skis and booze, and he’s delusional about how much it costs to fly in porta potties and build housing, but nothing you could really label concretely as fraud. Misguided and kind of stupid, yeah, but technically, not illegal.

As the date gets closer, they’re running out of time and money, but Billy keeps assuring everyone that everything will be fine. In reality, it’s not fine. There are workers out in the heat for 18 hours a day, putting up platforms and tents, but they don’t get paid, because there’s no money. He gets some of his staff to put expenses on their private credit cards, after lying about a $25M investment that’s supposed to come in any day now. 

To get another $800K, Billy tells an investor, in writing, that he had already paid millions to a bunch of artists to perform at the festival. Billy has crossed the line into fraud. 

Oh, and to celebrate the $800K investment, Billy goes jet skiing. Ah, the Instagram life, where there’s unlimited money and life is wonderful. Look at me, the organizer of Fyre Fest, on a jet ski! Everything is fine! Everything is fine.

But everything is not fine. The bands hear that the festival is a mess, plus they haven’t gotten paid, and they cancel. A Twitter account called FyreFestivalFraud pops up and starts showing pictures of the unfinished site, and Billy threatens to sue any employee who sends them photos. These things are not part of the Instagram fantasy, and denying their existence is the solution! Away, bad reality! Off with their heads! Oh, look, it’s time to go out on the jet ski again.

Then the people show up, and that’s when the poo-poo really hits the fan.

Those cute little villas on the website? Those turned into small tents that were all soggy from a big rainstorm earlier that day, and in each one was an even soggier mattress. It’s a Lord of the Flies free-for-all, with people fighting for tents and climbing over luggage and drinking themselves into a stupor. 

With no music, and sad cheese sandwiches for lunch, and surprise, surprise, not a single supermodel in sight, the festival itself is officially cancelled after one day. Everybody goes home, and that’s that.

There were other missteps, but those were some of the big ones that landed Billy in jail for fraud. He’s supposed to refund all the ticket money, but so far, no one has gotten their money back.

But now Billy is out of jail, and he’s planning Fyre Festival 2. Did this man learn anything from his mistakes? I do not think so. I think he’s still obsessed with his image, with looking like the coolest guy on earth.

The thing is, after that initial promotional video with the supermodels, Billy did look like the coolest guy on earth. But then he lost the island, and to admit that to the world would have made him a loser. “No, no loser in my Instagram bubble! Losers bad!” In reality, that would have been the perfect moment to say “Oops, no festival this year, we’ll try it again next year.” No shame if he did that. But he didn’t. 

In his mind, Billy had to keep the lie going to justify the original video with the supermodels, and to justify him taking off on a jet ski whenever he felt like it. In that sense, Billy is as much a victim of Instagram as he was a perpetrator. He needed to feel like he actually was living the Instagram life, all the time. 

Imagine feeling that you need millions of people to envy you, before you can be happy. That, my friends, is maybe the saddest thing about this entire story. Oh, and I forgot to mention, Billy McFarland went to jail for fraud, but he’s out now, and is planning Fyre Festival 2. Good luck, Billy.

As for how you could avoid getting fooled by something like Fyre Festival, it’s the same old moral: if it looks too good to be true, it probably is. If they had read any of the numerous articles that came out about it ahead of time, or even just typed in “fyre festival scam” in a search bar, they would have learned a thing or two. But hindsight is 20/20, and those Instagram pics and videos were just...chef’s kiss.

Did we learn anything today? Looking at Fyre Festival again certainly gave me a perspective on social media’s role in selling an impossible dream. 

Maybe this has given you a new lens for looking at Instagram. Enjoy the pretty pictures, but don’t be fooled by the hype. As you’ll find out in later episodes, not everyone who claims to be richer or smarter than you, is actually rich or smart at all.

Until next time, this is Michele Bousquet signing off from How Hacks Happen.