Bluestone, for her part, went on to serve as an executive producer on the Netflix documentary “Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened.” But she was also convinced that the festival blowup was only one particularly egregious example in a larger pattern of online hucksterism. Thanks to her early sense of suspicion, Bluestone was quickly out with the first reported story on the overhyped event masterminded by the notorious con man Billy McFarland, who is now serving a six-year sentence in federal prison for fraud. “The site was offering $250,000 ticket packages with yachts and private chefs, yet it looked like it had been designed in a high-school coding class.”īluestone smelled a scam, and soon enough her intuition proved correct as attendees - who had paid exorbitant amounts of money for the privilege of mingling with social media celebrities and taking in a Blink-182 set - arrived at the festival site only to find that they had been marooned at what turned out to be a modern-day Potemkin village whose bare-bones accommodations included disaster-relief tents and cheese sandwiches. “What I found there made no sense,” Bluestone, 32, recounts in her first book, Hype: How Scammers, Grifters, and Con Artists Are Taking Over the Internet ― and Why We’re Following. She clicked through to the website to see what the fuss was all about. It was 2017, and Bluestone, working as a journalist at Vice, had only been peripherally aware of the now-infamous music festival - fraudulently billed as an elite getaway on a Bahamian island and promoted by scores of influencers - until she noticed on Instagram that a former high school classmate was going. It took Gabrielle Bluestone just a few minutes to conclude that the heavily-hyped Fyre Festival was not what it claimed to be.

Hype book gabrielle bluestone