I first thought these were bids for lots of items, like... cases of the item. Am I mistaken that these are actually bids on a single, quantity=1, item?
It's actually impressive if they're auctioning off failed-festival merch at Supreme prices.
I sort of wonder if someone is trolling them with a credit card that's going to be invalid before the auction ends. Who bids $500 for a single hat you can reproduce on any custom hat site?
That doesn't preclude other punishments, no? Fraudulent auction bids are presumably fairly illegal, so criminal persecution is presumably also a possibility.
The sale goes to the number 1 bidder at some bid increment higher than the number 2 bidder's maximum bid. The current price shown is that amount, not the number 1 bidder's maximum bid. It implements a modified Vickrey auction using an autobidder.
Oh no, what are they going to do? Go find some random poor fool you stole the card from and kick their door in? I'm sure the credit card thieves are quaking in their boots.
US police at all levels are an impotent force against online crime. Once in a while they catch some guy and then they parade it around but the likelihood of that is microscopic.
I just assumed it was rich influencer fashion types who were keen to own a piece of infamy and had the disposal wealth to not over think it and just bid on homepage items.
“Hey is that hat from Fyre festival?” “Yeah it’s real, I got it online for $500”
Trademarks require active use, so seems the answer would be no. Copyright requires the logo/design of the merch to be sufficiently creative, a court would ultimately have to decide that, but I doubt it.
But even if it is copyrighted, who owns the rights now? The U.S. Marshals Service?
Depends who owns the trademarks now. They would be an asset that whoever managed the bankruptcy would be able to sell on. That person may well want to use them to make some money back.
Ive seen one of the documentaries about this festival. IMO, I dont think the perpetrators set out to defraud anyone. I think they were just completely inept at what they were doing. They(Billy McFarland) got in over their head and realized way too late that they were. I suppose the case can be made that they did realize early enough that they could have called it off before the dumpster fyre that it was happened. Not doing so seems solid grounds for a fraud case. I think that it is also possible that if he had admitted failure there is a chance he could have salvaged the event and had it later.
That said I don't think it was an intent to defraud people or else they would not have even tried to put the event together. Why would all of this merch have been created if they just wanted to bilk investors and festival attendees? This is hubris and ignorance more than fraud.
Watch the Netflix documentary, and pay close attention to what he does after his failed festival. Either he's a scammer or Netflix is, as he seems to be running a new business where he sells tickets to events he doesn't have tickets for, and for which he has no way of getting them, and then ghosts the buyers.
I think he didn't really set out to defraud anyone, but he has an incredible ego and sense of entitlement, and he got used to living a jetsetting lifestyle and didn't want to downgrade, so he defrauded people (in his newer business, after the festival). Given how naturally he did it, I'd be surprised if he hadn't been running ticket scams on and off for years.
What the Netflix documentary leaves out, significantly, is the involvement of the "fuckjerry" advertising/PR agency people in both promoting the festival and then later contributing to the documentary itself.
I remember this being a controversy when the documentaries came out. I ended up watching the Hulu one when it came out, and was underwhelmed having already seen the Netflix one (which was quite well done). I suspect that this "controversy" was simply an attempt to get publicity for the Hulu doc (it succeeded on me, at least).
It's not surprising at all that a PR/advertising agency would have a lot of footage from the event they were attempting to promote.
I only saw the Hulu one, and I didn't remember it being very kind to fuckjerry. According to Wikipedia, Jerry Productions (aka fuckjerry) was the Netflix one. Kinda glad I didn't see it now.
Oh thanks. Honestly I've always confused the two so thanks for clarifying which one was made by them. I've only seen that one to be honest.
I also know one of the two also did a paid interview with Billy McFaland so it was another instance of him profiting off this. The other declining to have him due to principle. I again forget which.
Agreed, I was disappointed that I watched the one supporting that media company.
I'm pretty sure I saw evidence or at least rumor that fuckjerry knew it was going to be a colossal fuck up and continued along with it just for money and the making of movie.
Yeah this basically matches with my impression. You can watch maybe 3/4 of the netflix doc and believe it's plausible they didn't intend to defraud anyone, and then you witness the behavior in the last 1/4 and it's clear there was intentional, serious criminal fraud.
That is the one I saw. I kinda think that he knew he was screwed and leaned in to the persona he thought he now had curated. Its one of those things where he knew he was going to jail(or really was that oblivious) and just decided to burn it down and try the persona...
From what I understand, Making a Murderer is basically one big lie-by-omission so my faith in other Netflix funded documentaries to value truth over sensation is quite low.
That entire article is citing the now-defamed prosecuting attorney Ken kratz. He was caught sending inappropriate texts to minors shortly after the show aired, as well as lying/hiding about some evidence from the case. I wouldn't put too much credence in him.
You should watch both documentaries. It's weird how they have entirely different people in them, and they spin things slightly differently.
I do think McFarland was a scam artist. His past history of scams shows he's one of these hustle culture people who commits outright fraud, and he deserves more jail time than he got.
Billy McFarland was arrested for selling fake tickets to Coachella, Burning Man, The Met Gala, and The Superbowl while he was out on bail for his Fyre-related charges. That is not ineptitude.
Getting in over your head and then lying about how badly you've fucked up is the standard fraud.
The median fund manager sending fake statements isn't cynically trying to fleece people, he's desperately trying to earn their money back before anyone notices.
I largely agree with you, though I think they were both fraudsters and in over their head. McFarland seemed to buy in too much to the "fake it 'til you make it" startup ethos and desperately wanted to be a part of that.
The Hulu documentary, especially, gave me the impression that McFarland just wanted to be successful and though he could turn it around at the last minute. What I liked most about that one is that we've all had situations where we overstated our prowess, or put off a project that we committed to doing, etc. and then realized way too late that everything would have to go perfectly for us not to fail. It was that, but on a larger scale and impacting significantly more people. (Not at all to excuse what McFarland, JaRule, etc. were doing.)
This, exactly. I think the Theranos scheme was somewhat similar, albeit not as far along the "fraud" spectrum as Fyre. I have the impression that most successful startups involve someone overstating what they've got already done, in order to rally a bunch of people around the imagined upcoming success. In some cases, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If the people around McFarland had somehow pulled it off, we might be seeing his picture on business magazines.
Of course, none of this means McFarland was in any way innocent. But the difference between "scam artist" and "successful startup entrepreneur", while not at all illusionary, might be one more of degree than kind.
Billy McFarland has a long history of exploiting the benefit of the doubt. It would be self-destructive for society to continue extending it without taking that into account.
Billy, is a serial con artist, with a history fraudulent schemes. He continued to offend after release. This is standard con artist behavior.
Sometimes with these people you really do wonder if they believe their own lies. I think he had a pretty good idea how it was gonna go.
> Why would all of this merch have been created if they just wanted to bilk investors and festival attendees?
What was he supposed to do say? "we're not gonna do merch, because this things fake" Other people were involved. It would be suspicious not to. They might have told themselves that there's a chance it would work, but that doesn't mean they weren't setting out to defraud. You don't get to finance your moonshot with lies to investers. Not these kinds of lies, at least. Maybe some of the main guys behind Enron thought it would work, but they still engaged in blatantly illegal transactions.
MacFarland is a con man and FuckJerry is a slimy ad agency. Both of them create reality distortion fields for a living, so be skeptical of your impressions if you only watched one of the two competing docs.
It was very very clear intent to defraud and it took place before the festival was a failure.
He falsified bank and brokerage statements to make it look like he had millions of dollars in the bank, and falsified transaction data, in order to defraud investors.
Go read the Federal indictment. This was intentional fraud all the way through.
> I think they were just completely inept at what they were doing
Setting aside what others are saying about other examples of more obvious fraud, we must, at some point, believe that a reasonable person[1] would notice the misadventure and do something about it.
If we require intent to charge, I don't quite get how the court fulfills any definition of justice. There's a clear, material list of damages here caused by individuals. Who gives a shit if they hurt people through abusing power via ineptitude rather than via malice?
Oh man these are collector’s items. I’d love to have one of the hats. Not $500 want, but I’d probably have spent double the price of the hat on them. Maybe $50-60 or something.
Ill sit here and explain that the whole process can be faked. (Just for laughs)
Joe is in the business of selling large amounts of dubious goods and services. Jim makes a lot of money from his bar but on the side he does dubious business with Joe. One day Joe gives Jim a painting he made. It is one hell of a horrible work! Joe explains that Jim is no longer buying dubious goods, he gets those for free now! With the painting. More buddies join the network and paintings change hands frequently. Then one day Joe invites the buddy network to a public auction. Everyone bids on the paintings knowing exactly which dubious goods they represent. Slowly but steadily outsiders join in on the bidding. The price of the dubious goods goes though the roof! Jim goes to Joe and complaints about how expensive his services have become. Joe answers: But you have 100 paintings of mine? Why not just sell some of them for uhhh market value? I give you 2 million for the stack. Everyone lives happily ever after.
You can't just throw art in the mix there. One can absolutely see collectibles as ridiculous while placing great value on art. One can also understand why people value collectibles, and also think it ridiculous. They're empty.
I find this idea curious; what's different with collecting art than other collecting? As an outsider it appears to be "unique collection syndrome" no different than any other, where the artistic value is present in reproductions and is almost none of the price of buying an original.
Jog on, Socrates. Prices in the art world are presently distorted because of astonishing levels of wealth concentration. But basically yes, reproductions are perfectly fine - although an actual high-fidelity reproduction will set you back quite a bit. My comment really wasn't directed to the Renoirs or the Van Goghs, though. I was thinking more of the many artists you'd never even hear of whose paintings sell for multiple thousand $'s in any of your local art galleries (assuming you live in a large-ish city) and aren't well-known enough to even give rise to reproductions.
> Prices in the art world are presently distorted because of astonishing levels of wealth concentration.
I’ve heard two different art dealers on different continents (SF and London) both insist independently that the primary reason for high art prices is that art is a great way to bribe the owner, or to launder money, or both. (Similar to former politicians being paid millions for a “speech” in a foreign country).
I think I'm still missing the gap: hats have value and art has value. Collectors collect certain hats and certain art in a way that is disconnected from their underlying value; it seems like grand-op was legitimate to mention art then, in reference to the common phenomenon of art collection?
Look I'm sure you mean well but this feigned-ignorance-leading-question schtick is literally thousands of years old and is basically just annoying. Try making an argument instead of baiting someone else into a bad one. Anyone past age 25 has long since made the realization that you can Socrates the distinction between any two categories all day. Wittgenstein & family resemblances happened, get with the last century of philosophical discourse please.
I think the parent actually agrees with you and so do I. Art has value in and of itself in that it conveys an emotion, idea, or context. It can also have value through artistry; how difficult it was to create or how novel it is. That value exists whether the work is one of one or whether it is one of two hundred million. A collectible meanwhile does not have much inherent value (like the hat) and derives most of its value from being rare. If it wasn't rare, it would be substantially less valuable and potentially irrelevant. As you point out, those things are not mutually exclusive and you can certainly have art that is also a collectible.
Imagine trying to explain to people how your cheap hat from a meme scam festival that nobody will remember in five years is a piece of art. They would - at most - nod tolerantly as you bring up Duchamp, their eyes presumably then drifting over to your extensive & expensive funko pop collection.
I suspect I would care little about “people” who “nod tolerantly” about DuChamp. Hopefully I never meet them, but if I’m forced to, I’d feel compelled to point out they were condescending assholes without the money to fund a truly opulent Funco Pop collection :)
So you're in charge of what is and isn't art, huh? That seems like quite the burden for you. Was it always just you, or was there some kind of committee that you staged a hostile takeover of?
That's easy in this particular case - the U.S. Marshalls are selling it, and presumably they're not lying about it. Maybe the U.S. police is that corrupt, but I think somebody would find out sooner or later (they would need to make them somewhere, a large order of custom Fyre-branded hats by the U.S. Marshalls is not an everyday thing), and that would be an obvious case of fraud then.
On the other hand yeah, members of the U.S. services tried to steal the Silk road bitcoin too, so who knows.
My work is having a “clear the office out before the move” auction - I can try for a few macMinis for about $200 total, or help fund a police department for Fyre swag, single item.
I also think that most of these “lots” are just for one item.
However, I think that the bids are probably mostly earnest.
As streetware a lot of this could probably be considered collector’s items among the hype beast crowd. The prices seem to be in a range similar to supreme and similar.
Normally auction houses require pre-registration and demonstration of payment ability and signing a contract promising to pay. They verify ID by taking credit card details. If they're thinking of ducking out on large amounts they're taking a large risk; it's probably worth sending a $500 tab (plus storage charges and administration) to collections ... plus they have your credit card info.
My fear isn’t fake bids so much as an enterprising con-artist who buys one legit item and then uses the receipt from the US Marshals as provenance to later sell “legitimate” Fyre hats or shirts for $85-100 several times over.
So I happen to know a bit of that world. I’m a collector of memorabilia of failed capitalist endeavors. The point others have made is very true about merch being hard to authenticate when you could just recreate on any custom T shirt / hat / mug site. But for some companies, Enron, Pets.com, and a couple others, merch still commands a high price (not Fyre level though). Personally I prefer to seek more rare and “inside baseball” artefacts but in some cases merch is the best I can do (or an autographed book).
My dad still has a ton of Netscape, Novell, and mp3.com branded gear from when he worked there in the 90s. The last time I went home I saw it just laying around in the garage with his bootleg cassettes and my childhood beach toys.
Now some of it makes an awesome talk piece at the office, or at least it did when we still had one. :)
These prices are insane! And the weird thing is that the site's showing multiple (in some cases dozens) of bids for items like single perfectly ordinary, even boring looking T shirts for over $100 dollars. Who'd be bidding at these prices and why? (Note: I have absolutely no knowledge of what the Fyre festival is/was or its relevance to anything, but even then, what makes it momentous enough for these prices?)
For some context: fyre festival was supposed to be a high end luxury all-inclusive festival. Essentially everything in the planning -- aside perhaps from the advertising -- went poorly to the extreme. In the end all that managed to actually get arranged was the flight to the island location. Once there people more or less found themselves stranded in a tent camp with no food and too few mattresses instead of the luxury festival they were promised.
There's a couple documentaries on the whole thing which I can recommend watching, it's almost impressive how monumentally poor everything got planned. The whole thing of course strikes a chord with the ironic-fashion crowd.
I was wondering that too. I'm glad, although I'm guessing it won't be that much compared to how much they defrauded people. I'm guessing everyone might get like $50 back for a $1k ticket?
The people who bought the tickets are likely not the victims it's going to, or at least I hope not. Watch the Hulu documentary if you want more context.
I've seen both documentaries. I know that one women who owned the restaurant and provided a bunch of workers did have a gofundme that helped get back a lot of what she lost.
One of a few possible places. If the festival has fines they can not pay. It goes towards that any leftover would be credited back to the people who were fined. If it is just seized material that was abandoned or seized in the act of criminality then back into the treasury or the marshals general funds.
It's been pointed out that there are identical items with very different bids.
Maybe someone with knowledge of game theory or mechanism design or whatever can tell me: What's the "right" way (or ways?) to auction off multiple identical items? Top k bids win?
It is most certainly Wikipedia's fault that their style guide requires –, Unicode EN DASH U+2013, rather than -, Unicode HYPHEN-MINUS U+002D out of some misguided desire for typographical "correctness". That is 100% Wikipedia's choice, and it ruins their URLs, for no good reason.
I wonder at what point the logo and other IP goes up for sale.
Also, if those caps get major media attention, I can see them going for thousands of dollars to a celebrity (someone like Kanye West). I’d bet wearing the cap alone would generate several articles and other press coverage.
> Fyre Media, an app that ostensibly allows customers to book performing artists for private events, and the Fyre Festival was intended to be an extension of that brand.
This would be more surprising to me if I hadn't seen the guys who make Cards Against Humanity get a bunch of money thrown at them to dig a hole a few years back.
If it's anything like bankruptcy in the UK, it will go to the subset of the "victims" who have the best lawyers.
Fees for Lawyers and accountants dealing with the bankruptcy will be deducted first. Any money owed to banks will be paid next. If there is any left, it will go to pay any taxes owed to the government or the local authorities. Eventually whatever is left will be divided proportionally between whoever is left owed money, but this will probably be a tiny fraction of the amount they are owed, if anything at all.
It's actually impressive if they're auctioning off failed-festival merch at Supreme prices.