If the 90s had “it girls” and the noughties had “heiresses”, then the 2010s had “scammers”. These were influencers, celebrities, even random members of the public who the internet caught running dastardly, self-serving schemes, which ranged wildly from committing multimillion-dollar fraud to selling poorly written poems for three-figure sums on Etsy. It was people like Caroline Calloway, an influencer who went viral in 2019 for over-charging and under-delivering for a series of “creativity workshops” where attendees paid $165 for meagre care packages, homemade by Calloway; or people like Elizabeth Holmes who was indicted for fraud in 2018 for claiming her blood-testing company, Theranos, could detect diseases via only a few drops of blood.
They didn’t need to be major public figures or at the centre of an epic conspiracies – all that mattered was that someone deemed as marginally powerful was getting their comeuppance. The delight was in the downfall. Anyone who fit the bill, no matter how small, could easily go viral.
Few scammers were quite as notorious, Billy McFarland, the man behind April 2017’s Fyre Festival. The event was marketed as a luxury music festival in the Bahamas, which featured promotion from supermodels like Emily Ratajkowski and Gigi Hadid, promising expensive meals and high-end villas alongside A-list acts. Instead, the event was a world-class disaster, where attendees were met with catastrophic weather and housed in flimsy tents and mattresses strewn across the beach. The promised luxury meals, infamously, were a limited selection of cheese sandwiches. The world watched as rescue flights were chartered to help hundreds of rich twentysomethings escape what became a days-long global event. McFarland was sued for $100 million and was sentenced to six years in prison. The ordeal led to two documentaries both released in January 2019: Hulu’s Fyre Fraud and Netflix’s Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened, after which Fyre Festival became a shorthand for “disaster”.
The buzz for scammers quieted after the late 2010s. But in the last year, former some have emerged back into the zeitgeist. Last week, McFarland announced the return of his festival, Fyre Festival II, which will take place at Isla Mujeres in Quintana Roo, Mexico this May. Tickets are starting at $1,400 and go up to $1.1 million, where attendees will have the choice between “a 4-stateroom yacht or a luxurious 4-bedroom villa”, will get private air travel and behind-the-scenes access to events – none of which have yet to be announced. This new instalment of Fyre Festival is simply described as “an electrifying celebration of music, arts, cuisine, comedy, fashion, gaming, sports and treasure hunting” that will feature “unforgettable performances, immersive experiences, and an atmosphere that redefines creativity and culture”.
McFarland is trying to trade on the first Fyre Festival’s notoriety. He said that he and his organisers have a chance to “embrace the storm” this time around and that “a lot of [the talk about Fyre Festival] has been negative, but I think that most people, once they kind of get under the hood and study the plans and see the team behind Fyre II, they see the upside… And if it’s done well, I think Fyre has a chance to be this annual festival that really takes over the festival industry.” (A portion of the earnings from Fyre Festival II, he has said, will go towards paying off his debt from the first Fyre Festival, which is estimated at roughly $26 million.)
McFarland isn’t the only one who has re-entered the mainstream off the back of their scammer reputation. Potentially the most famous of the entire milieu was Anna Sorokin, known more widely as Anna Delvey, whose story of adopting a fake heiress identity and conning millions of dollars out of New York City’s art world was first immortalised in May 2018 in a viral article in New York Magazine and later became the basis of the 2022 Netflix series Inventing Anna. Delvey (the name she uses professionally) has begun to build a socialite’s career off her new fame through a number of creative projects, mostly from home where she remains under house arrest. She has appeared on the US version of Strictly, called Dancing With the Stars, where she danced on stage with her ankle monitor, receiving special permission under her house arrest rules. Though wrongly grouped with those who served prison time for their literal crimes, Calloway has also re-emerged, trading on the scammer label with a series of literary endeavours and selling scammer-related merch on her website (like “snake oil”), appearing in glossy magazines and newspapers on a regular basis since the summer of 2023.
The media has a lot to answer for. Delvey hosted a podcast interviewing celebrities from her home after getting out of prison hosted by Audioboom, McFarland has recently wrapped a documentary tracking his attempt to revive Fyre Festival with Ample Entertainment and Calloway has become a media darling, where her churn of literary projects have generated endless headlines and interviews for newspaper and magazines. But none of these things have proven to bring in droves of new fans – Delvey’s podcast was shelved, Calloway’s books haven’t turned into must-have bestsellers. They have, however, made for endless media and social media fodder.
We should be sceptical of our appetite for the great scammer revival. Their appeal was never rooted in their audacity or flashes of success, but far more in the schadenfreude of watching it all – finally – go wrong. It feels likely that our pleasure in watching them rise again will be limited if it doesn’t come with a titillating, mighty fall.
[See more: The rise of Gracie Abrams]
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