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Comment by crispyambulance | Hacker News Reader

I saw the Netflix Fyre doc, and neither the festival nor the documentary struck me as a scam.

The festival seemed like it was a tragic project run spectacularly into the ground by a sociopath with serious psychological issues. I mean, if it were "a scam" there would have been a "take-the-money-and-run" attempt. A scam is an intentional deception in order to gain profit at someone else's expense-- this wasn't that.

Instead, things just crashed horribly around him, a lot of people got stiffed, the concert goers ended up at an expensive vacation from hell but the promoters didn't make money (though they did get some beach time with super-models before the horrific project-death-march started).

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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 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.

We 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

I think the word you're looking for is fraud. Securities fraud, mail fraud, wire fraud. How many counts, billions of dollars involved, etc.

Fyre 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.

McFarland raised money from investors using forged documents, that's Madoff level fraud

Are you kidding? It absolutely was a take the money and run. It was obvious weeks out that they were not going to be able to deliver on what they sold and instead of issuing refunds and cancelling the event, they took the money and ran, and continued to hire folks to build the thing without any money to pay them.

It was not that obvious to me. I think it was malicious, yes, and it was insane, true, but I can see how they could have thought that they would be able to make it. By make it I mean, charging enough money, and getting people to have an OK experience. Probably they thought people would just lie like they're use to do on instagram anyway.

Your comment doesn’t really contradict the parent’s point that they kept trying to put on the festival.

I can agree that they were greedy and criminally delusional, but I can also believe they really did believe they could deliver the event.

If it was just an elaborate get-rich scam from the get-go, they’d have wasted far less money trying to produce the event.

What. How did you watch it and NOT think it was a scam? He (Billy McFarland) literally lied to the investors. He lied to people who were paying for the event. Lies on top of lies. He WAS intentional deceptive. Not sure how you missed that aspect after watching it? Yeah, he MAY have had an actual dream of a real festival during it, but that doesn't negate the fact that he still deceived and lied to many people involved with the project.

The parent’s main point was they really did intend to put on a festival, rather than just disappear with the cash. Yes they deceived and lied to a lot of people; no one disputes that. But they still did seriously intend to run a festival, as ridiculous an idea as that was.

They advertised luxury accommodations, knowing full well that people would be placed in FEMA tents. That, along with many other facts the lied about or failed to disclose, qualifies it as a scam.

to me it sounds like a condensed story of Theranos on fast-forward - delusional main characters stretching their already unreasonably stretched "fake it until you make it" well into outright fraud territory.

There is probably some point, a kind of mental Rubicon, where, once crossed, they feel that there are only 2 possible outcomes - either prison or triumphal success and they just double down...

You make the excellent point that Billy McFarland presents as a sociopath. In his mind, he simply didn't believe it was possible for the Fyre Festival to fail.

Did anyone notice how dilated his pupils were in the Hulu documentary? Eerie...

It would have been a more believable documentary if they'd have covered the obviously rampant cocaine abuse of the people running the show. Like so many underground raves, they probably planned on bailing themselves out by dealing to the rich attendees, who came expecting to party on "Pablo Escobar's Island". I'll bet that plan came crashing down because there were some big shipments other than bottled water that they failed to release from customs by "taking one for the team".

https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/wd4ymw/can-you-tell-what-...

I think you might be on to something here...

Fodder for a third documentary!

I tend to err toward agreeing, except, and hulu covered this better, the keys to the Villas "went missing" and some towards the lack of a sufficient production company.

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