2017 fraudulent music festival
Fyre Festival was a fraudulent luxury music festival organized by Billy McFarland, an American businessman whose enterprises have been characterized by fraud, and the American rapper Ja Rule. It was originally created to promote the company's Fyre app for booking music talent. The festival was scheduled to take place on April 28–30 and May 5–7, 2017, on the Bahamian island of Great Exuma.
The original event was promoted on Instagram by social media influencers, actors, reality TV stars and models including Kendall Jenner, Bella Hadid, Hailey Baldwin, and Emily Ratajkowski, many of whom did not initially disclose they had been paid to do so. During the Fyre Festival's inaugural weekend, the event experienced problems related to security, food, accommodation, medical services, and artist relations, resulting in the festival being indefinitely postponed and eventually cancelled. Instead of the gourmet meals and luxury villas for which festival attendees had paid thousands of dollars, they allegedly received packaged sandwiches and were lodged in poorly furnished tents.
In March 2018, McFarland pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud to defraud investors and ticket holders, and a second count to defraud a ticket vendor (while out on bail). In October 2018, McFarland was sentenced to six years in prison and ordered to forfeit US$26 million. At least eight lawsuits were initiated against the organizers for defrauding ticket buyers, several seeking class action status, and one seeking more than $100 million in damages.
Two documentaries about the events of the festival were released in 2019: Hulu's "Fyre Fraud", and Netflix's "Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened".
Planning and organization.
The festival was organized by Billy McFarland and Ja Rule, to promote the Fyre music booking app. Ja Rule had come to know McFarland through regular visits to events McFarland hosted at his previous venture, Magnises. During a flight to the Bahamas, McFarland and Ja Rule's private plane touched down on a lightly populated island which they later discovered was Norman's Cay, the former private island of Carlos Lehder Rivas, a kingpin of the Medellín Cartel. McFarland then leased the island from the current owners, with the owners giving the strict condition that McFarland make no reference to Pablo Escobar (leader of the Medellín Cartel) in any marketing materials.
Promotional footage with hired supermodels was shot on Norman's Cay, and planning for the festival went ahead. On December 12, 2016, Kendall Jenner, Emily Ratajkowski, and other influencers paid by Fyre simultaneously posted to their Instagram feeds a video with a thumbnail consisting of an orange square and a logo made of stylized flames. The video showed Bella Hadid and other models represented by her agency running around a tropical beach. Text with the video promised "an immersive music festival ... two transformative weekends ... on the boundaries of the impossible". This was the beginning of the Fyre Festival's promotional campaign, during which McFarland himself claimed that the island had been owned by Pablo Escobar, a falsehood. The owners cancelled their arrangement with McFarland soon after.
When the event was kicked off of Norman's Cay, organizers only had four months before their inaugural festival on April 28–30. 
After several small islands that seemed like likely venues were turned down, and with only two months to go before the Fyre Festival, the Bahamian government gave McFarland a permit to use a site set aside for development at Roker Point () on Great Exuma, just north of Sandals Emerald Bay Resort. Material released on social media continued to promote the falsehood that the festival was being hosted on Pablo Escobar's private island, with maps of the site altered to make it appear as if Roker Point was an island unto itself.
In reality, the festival was in a remote parking lot north of a Sandals Resort and a nearby marina where locals' boats were stored. Furthermore, Great Exuma was not a private or remote island. Instead, the festival was scheduled to take place in an abandoned resort development. McFarland never announced the change; he just simply renamed the island "Fyre Cay". With no infrastructure and no villas, the team had just under two months to turn Roker Point into Fyre Cay.
An investor, fashion executive Carola Jain, reportedly arranged for Fyre to receive a $4 million loan, most of which was used to rent luxurious offices in Manhattan's Tribeca neighborhood. With no experience staging an event of the proposed festival's scale, McFarland began approaching companies that did, and was reportedly taken aback when informed the event would cost at least $50 million to stage in the time available, as he had promised. Furthermore, the more experienced consultants told them that in addition to the cost, an event of this magnitude would have needed an extra year to plan. McFarland and his associates at Fyre believed it would cost far less, and continued with their plans under that assumption. The organizers tried to do things themselves where possible; McFarland supposedly learned how to rent the stage by doing a Google Search.
In the days leading up to the festival, they cut expenses extensively, having learned that the luxury villas alone were going to cost $10 million, and targeted deposits for the bands, food, infrastructure, and staff.
Scheduled for two weekends in April and May 2017, the event sold day tickets at prices from US$ to US$, and VIP packages including airfare and luxury tent accommodation for US$. Customers were promised accommodation in "modern, eco-friendly, geodesic domes" and meals from celebrity chefs. The final advertised lineup was for 33 artists, including Pusha T, Tyga, Desiigner, Blink-182, Major Lazer, Disclosure, Migos, Rae Sremmurd, Kaytranada, Lil Yachty, Matoma, Klingande, Skepta, Claptone, Le Youth, Tensnake, , and Lee Burridge. In the days leading up to the festival, all of these acts pulled out. Additionally, organizers of the Fyre Festival planned their first event for April 28–30, the same weekend as the Exuma Regatta, a Bahamian sailing race series that utilized most of the island's hotels, vacation rentals and resources.
While the festival's promotional material kept claiming that the festival would be held on a remote private island that once belonged to drug trafficker Pablo Escobar, workers were busy preparing Roker Point for the festival, scattering sand over its rocks and improving a road to a nearby beach, where they built some cabanas and installed swing seats.
On the mainland, 5,000 tickets had been sold, and an air service was hired to charter festival-goers from Miami. A medical-services company and caterer were also hired, but the caterer withdrew a few weeks before the festival. With only two weeks to go, a new catering service with a $1 million total budget was hired, drastically reduced from the $6 million originally allocated to provide what was promised as "uniquely authentic island cuisine...local seafood, Bahamian-style sushi and even a pig roast".
In March 2017, Fyre also hired a veteran event producer, Yaron Lavi, who saw that it was impossible to hold the sort of event McFarland and Ja Rule envisioned at the site. He assumed they would postpone the event to November as they had been discussing, as they were not ready. However, when Fyre told him they would stage the event in the spring anyway, Lavi told them to abandon plans for temporary villas and instead erect tents, the only accommodation that could be delivered in the time remaining. Lavi advised Fyre to make this clear to those who had already bought tickets, as otherwise it would be damaging to their brand. He says the company assured him that an email was being prepared, but he was not sure if it was sent.
Comcast Ventures considered investing $25 million in the Fyre app, which McFarland apparently hoped would allow him to finance the festival, but declined days beforehand. Reportedly, McFarland had valued Fyre Media at $90 million, but was unable to provide sufficient proof of that when Comcast requested it.
Writing for "New York" magazine, one of the event organizers later noted that since at least mid-March there had been significant problems with the planning, and at one point it was suggested they reschedule the 2017 festival until 2018.
These plans, however, were revoked at the last minute with the decision to go on with the event as planned. "Let's just do it and be legends, man," one of the organizers is reported to have said.
After the Comcast deal fell through, McFarland obtained $3 million in temporary financing for Fyre through investor Ezra Birnbaum that required the company to repay at least US$500,000 of the loan within 16 days.
Fyre informed ticket-holders that the event would be "cashless (and cardless)", with purchases at the festival to be paid for with an RFID "FyreBand" linked to their credit card (despite warnings that such digital bracelets would be useless because of the poor Wi-Fi connection at the site). In order to raise quick cash for the event, and with under two weeks to go before the inaugural event, attendees were encouraged to load their FyreBands with thousands of dollars in advance, according to one lawsuit.
McFarland, who signed the email, suggested that attendees deposit $300–500 for every day they planned to attend. About $2 million from festival goers was taken for these bracelets, 40% of which, according to a lawsuit later filed by Birnbaum, was used by McFarland to pay off the short-term loan.
Festival events and attendee experiences.
Early in the morning of April 27, heavy rain fell on Great Exuma, soaking the open tents and mattresses piled out in the open air for guest arrivals later that day.
The first flights from Miami International Airport to Exuma International Airport, operated by Swift Air and Xtra Airways, landed at 6:20a.m. That afternoon, Blink-182 announced that it was withdrawing from the festival, stating in a Twitter post that: "We're not confident that we would have what we need to give you the quality of performances we always give our fans."
Initial arrivals were taken to an "impromptu beach party" at a beachside restaurant, where they were plied with alcohol and kept waiting for around six hours while frantic preparations at the festival site continued. McFarland had hired hundreds of local Bahamian workers to help build the site. Meanwhile, organizers had to renegotiate the guarantees they offered to the people who would be playing at the festival as costs spiraled out of control. Later arrivals were taken directly to the grounds by school bus where the true state of the festival's site became apparent: their accommodations were little more than scattered disaster relief tents with dirt floors, some with mattresses that were soaking wet as a result of the morning rain. Instead of the gourmet food promised, there was nothing more than inadequate and poor quality food such as cheese sandwiches served in foam containers.
Festival-goers were dropped off at the production bungalow where McFarland and his team were based so they could be registered, but after hours of waiting in vain, people rushed to claim their own tents. Although there were only about 500 people, there were not enough tents and beds for the guests. Attendees were unable to leave the festival for the nearby Sandals resorts as it was peak season, with almost every hotel on Great Exuma already fully booked for the annual Exuma Regatta. Around nightfall, a group of local musicians took to the stage and played for a few hours; this was the only performance to actually occur. In the early morning, it was announced that the festival would be postponed, and the attendees would be returned to Miami as soon as possible.
Reports from the festival mentioned various other problems, such as the mishandling or theft of guests' baggage, no lighting, an unfinished gravel lot, a lack of medical personnel and event staff, no cell phone or internet service, insufficient portable toilets, no running water, and heavy-handed security. As the festival had been promoted as a cashless event, many attendees lacked money for taxi fare or other expenses.
Many attendees were reportedly stranded, as flights to and from the island were cancelled after the Bahamian government issued an order that barred any planes from landing at the airport.
The first flight back to Miami boarded at 1:30a.m. on April 28, but was delayed for hours due to issues with the flight's manifest. It was cancelled after sunrise, leaving passengers locked in the Exuma Airport terminal with no access to food, water, or air conditioning; a passenger wrote