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First World Festival problems

You have to hand it to this guy McFarland. It takes some cahones to start another scam while waiting to resolve the Fyre Festival case.

Next week's sentencing hearing may not happen, however — because in the meantime, McFarland has been arrested again. On Tuesday, he was charged with starting another fraudulent company late last year and running it right up until he entered his guilty plea for Fyre Festival three months ago.
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In a complaint and affidavit released late Tuesday by U.S. Attorney's Office of the Southern District of New York, the government accuses McFarland of starting a company called NYC VIP Access, which purported to sell tickets to high-end events including the Met Gala and the Grammy Awards.
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https://www.npr.org/2018/06/13/619531283/government-accuses-disgraced-fyre-festival-founder-of-starting-another-sham-comp
 
The Fyre Festival fraudster is launching his latest thing, and it looks like a party on an island

Fresh off four years in prison, barred from ever serving as director of a public company, and buried beneath $26 million in victim paybacks, Billy McFarland, founder of the fraudulent Fyre Festival, wants to make a comeback.

“I was talking to somebody yesterday and they’re like, ‘You can crawl in a hole and die, or you can go and try to do something and just like not promise any results,’’’ McFarland said in a recent interview with NBC News.
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His new venture, PYRT (pronounced “Pirate”), launched on social media in October and is supposed to kick things off by hosting, yes, a remote island extravaganza — one that McFarland insists is not a festival. Featuring a slew of influencers and creators, the purported tropical experience will include virtual reality technology that the company says will allow users to participate and control what happens on the island in real time from home.

If that sounds familiar, some are already ringing the Fyre alarms. NBC News spoke to two of McFarland’s former associates who were wary that his new venture already shows similarities with his previous ones.

“Billy’s still Billy. He’s using different words, but he’s selling the same thing,” said Shiyuan Deng, a former product designer at Fyre Media, the company behind Fyre Festival. Deng resigned from Fyre Media shortly before it collapsed.
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catsmate said:
Sweet effing jeebus how stupid are people?
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Infinitely.

I saw one of the videos about the Fyre Festival. This guy was moving on to new grifting schemes even while he was on trial, and then still moving on them awaiting sentencing, then again while in jail. And even seeking journalists to embed with him as he worked on the new grifts. Calling journalists from jail with a cell phone - even though such phones were prohibited in that jail and he was calling - you know - journalists. The very people who make buck by exposing such things.

And it seemed to be working. This guy is one of those people who seems to have an almost infinite ability to get other people to excuse his actions. Like "Oh, sure it was a terrible thing to do! But that's just Billy! We all love him anyway!"

So he'll get investors, and scam them. And then get more investors. He struck me as the sort of person who can spend a lifetime undergoing perpetual legal prosecution and perpetual bankruptcy, while also living an intermittently luxurious lifestyle as he'll never be able to not find someone willing to fall for his schtick.
 
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catsmate said:
Sweet effing jeebus how stupid are people?
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'There Is a Sucker Born Every Minute"...PT Barnum might not have actually said it, but whoever said it, it's sure as hell true.
Ben Franklin's "A Fool and His Money Are Soon Parted" comes into play as well.
 
A event not too far from me has been in the news evoking memories of those winter wonderland-type shenanigans which generally involve a field at Christmas time, a tent or two and some rather iffy painted backgrounds, and not much else.

This particular experience was marketed* as a Willy Wonka-ish immersive adventure:

According to the Willy’s Chocolate Experience website, families were set to go an “enchanting” day out with “giant sweets, vibrant blooms, mysterious-looking sculptures, and magical surprises” where “dreams come to life”.
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Sadly, it was not to be.

visitors were instead confronted with a “mini-maze of random props, a candy station that dispersed one jelly bean, and a terrifying character that scared kids to tears”.
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https://news.stv.tv/west-central/pa...ad-taste-after-glasgow-willy-wonka-experience

https://news.stv.tv/west-central/willy-wonka-chocolate-experience-boss-truly-sorry-after-chaos

There's some interesting detail on Reddit regarding the organiser.

https://www.reddit.com/r/glasgow/comments/1az617i/update_willys_chocolate_experience/

* - The imagery to promote it would appear to have been AI-generated. See the website:

https://willyschocolateexperience.com/index.html
 
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Those pictures are profoundly sad - wow! I think the description that it looked like something you'd see at a parent-thrown birthday party rather than an actual organized and ticketed event is on the nose.

It's interesting that the actors were allegedly given a script to practice that implied some sets and effects that just weren't there the day of. That suggests to me that this was an execution failure - someone had a grand idea and just bit off more than they could chew, as opposed to like a cynical cash-grab that was never going to be better than this. I'm curious about where and how the failures happened. But I doubt there's going to be any inquiries and documentaries about a little event like this.
 
commandlinegamer said:
A event not too far from me has been in the news evoking memories of those winter wonderland-type shenanigans which generally involve a field at Christmas time, a tent or two and some rather iffy painted backgrounds, and not much else.

This particular experience was marketed* as a Willy Wonka-ish immersive adventure:



Sadly, it was not to be.



https://news.stv.tv/west-central/pa...ad-taste-after-glasgow-willy-wonka-experience

https://news.stv.tv/west-central/willy-wonka-chocolate-experience-boss-truly-sorry-after-chaos

There's some interesting detail on Reddit regarding the organiser.

https://www.reddit.com/r/glasgow/comments/1az617i/update_willys_chocolate_experience/

* - The imagery to promote it would appear to have been AI-generated. See the website:

https://willyschocolateexperience.com/index.html
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Yep. And the text describing the event and the rooms is also AI generated.
 
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