The Frye Festival Scam

Most of you probably haven’t heard of the Frye Festival. I hadn’t heard about it either until last week when the stories came out that it was a scam. You should read this story and this story to learn the details. There are important lessons here for consumers and for investors. This was a very basic scam. What makes it a bit different is that the tools of social media were used to promote the scam. It also shows that the celebrities and “influencers” who are popular on these social media web sites will promote almost anything for money. The myth of social media is that people are letting us in to their personal likes, dislikes, and lifestyles. In fact, many of them simply are promoting goods and services because they’re paid to.

This was not a model-filled private cay that was owned by Pablo Escobar. This was a development lot covered in gravel with a few tractors scattered around. There was not enough space to build all the tents and green rooms they would need. There was not a long, beautiful beach populated by swimming pigs. There were, however, a lot of sand flies that left me looking like I had smallpox. Still, I had hope.

My job as a talent producer was to coordinate travel and on-site logistics with the artists who would be performing: Blink 182, Major Lazer, Disclosure, among others, had already signed on. I would be working with an 11-person team and a few of the festival executives. The production team was all new hires and, before we arrived, we were led to believe things had been in motion for a while. But nothing had been done. Festival vendors weren’t in place, no stage had been rented, transportation had not been arranged. Frankly, we were standing on an empty gravel pit and no one had any idea how we were going to build a festival village from scratch.