Con man launches Fyre Festival 2 with absurd $8,000 tickets and no line-up or location

The con man creator of Fyre Festival has launched a second version of his disastrous event and is charging up to a whopping $7,999 per ticket.

Billy McFarland, 31, hit headlines in 2017 after his ‘luxury’ music festival which promised a VIP experience on the island of Great Exuma in the Bahamas turned out to be a sham.

The fraudster’s tagline “on the boundaries of impossibility” proved all too real when the festival collapsed, failing to provide even basic accommodation or food for its all-star guests.

READ MORE: Harry and Meghan ‘as appealing a commercial proposition as Fyre Festival 2.0’

Despite serving four years in the slammer, including two stints in solitary confinement, McFarland is back for round two and announced that tickets for Fyre Festival II were live on Monday.

He spent his time having a hard think in the clink, writing a 50-page plan, sourcing the best investors to apparently “make the impossible happen”, he revealed across social media.

Up until Tuesday (August 22), no exact date had been set for the event, with a rather ambiguous “targeted for end of 2024” plastered on the website.

Now, the festival may (or may not) take place on December 6, 2024, in the vague location of somewhere in “the Caribbean”. The date is however “subject to change”.

And currently, there is no inkling towards who will be playing in the line-up.

The first 100 tickets are currently up for grabs for $499 (£390), with later releases costing up to $7,999 (£6,300).

FYRE Festival II is LIVE

in bio pic.twitter.com/3LMEhCUVaC

— Billy McFarland (@pyrtbilly)

So what exactly are people paying for?

As of Tuesday afternoon, the website read: “The Fyre Festival Pre-Sale Fyre Pass gets you 1 ticket to Fyre Festival II, as well as immediate VIP access to Fyre Events, Experiences, and Community.”

The VIP Pass grants extra access to Fyre lead-up events and Fyre pop-ups, whatever they might be.

McFarland was just 25 years old when his first event took place on April 28, 2017.

The “once in a lifetime” luxury event in the Bahamas managed to get backing from top models Bella Hadid, Emily Ratajkowski and Kendall Jenner.

But disaster struck when excited festival goers arrived for the two-week event, after purchasing tickets for as much as £77,000.

There was no electricity, nor running water and dinner consisted of two slices of bread and some plastic cheese.

It was more “Lord of the Flies than Coachella”, according to a lawsuit filed by a guest.

McFarland was sentenced to six years in prison after he admitted defrauding investors of $26million (£20.4m) for the 2017 music festival – but was released early on March 30, 2022.

The New Yorker’s antics were captured in Netflix’s 2019 documentary Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened, which closely followed the event’s collapse.

Source: Celebrities - dailystar.co.uk