The Fyre music festival and its well-publicised failure are widely seen as a mixture of incompetence and fraud, embodied in Billy McFarland, its chief architect. People paid thousands of dollars for what was advertised as a luxury music festival but they were served simple cheese sandwiches and the entertainment was cancelled. McFarland spent almost four years in prison for fraud.
But now McFarland is out and promoting Fyre Festival II. He claims that he has already sold 100 tickets at the early bird price of £499. Why would anyone give the Fyre Festival a second chance? Research shows that people's mental shortcuts can give them confidence in someone who has let them down before.
Prices for Fyre Festival II range from US$1,400 and $1.1 million (£1,050 and £824,000). Nothing specific has yet been offered, other than an indefinite location (a private island off the Caribbean coast of Mexico), some activities including scuba diving with McFarland himself, and an approximate date (April, 2025).
McFarland's former business partner Andy King has said that Fyre Festival II raises "a lot of red flags.". Yet even King, who lost US$1 million on the original Fyre Festival, admitted he met McFarland for Fyre Festival II talks before becoming wary.
There is little research on this topic, but I found some help in The Big Con, written in 1940 by David Maurer, a professor of linguistics who dedicated his career to studying the language and culture of those leading a criminal lifestyle, i.