Festivals, experiences, and conventions can be incredible when managed well. There’s nothing quite like sharing an epic moment with a crowd of like-minded fans! But sometimes, things don’t go as planned or worse, were cons from the very start. From music festivals where the bands just didn’t show up, to events whose false advertising backfired badly, let's explore some live events that exposed huge scams, awful behavior, and ended in huge disasters!
The Failed Willy's Chocolate Experience
When you think of Willy Wonka, what comes to mind? The beloved children’s book? One of the whimsical film adaptations? There are a bunch of kids in Scotland who probably think of betrayal and broken promises because of The Willy’s Chocolate Experience.
In 2024, a company called House of Illuminati, run by Billy Coull, decided to cash in on two recent trends; the popularity of the new Wonka movie, and free AI image-generating software. The company rented out a warehouse in Glasgow, Scotland and put together material promoting their magical-sounding Willy’s Chocolate Experience, an unlicensed event based on Charlie and The Chocolate Factory.
The event’s website promised kids would have an unforgettable time,
boasting bright AI artwork of candy covered landscapes. With hindsight, the warning signs are obvious. You should never attend an event that uses many AI-generated images in their promotional material! If they had something to show you, they’d show you.After paying £35 a little over $43 ticketholders arrived to discover a truly heartbreaking sight. Rather than giant lollypops, colorful gumdrops, and charming candycanes, attendees were greeted by a grey, miserable, barely decorated warehouse. It was nothing like what their promotional imagery had promised.
Somehow, it got even worse. House of Illuminati did hire actual actors, like the jolly Oompa Loompa. However, they were given almost nothing to work with. According to one actor, they were handed scripts composed of Ai-generated gibberish that made no sense, but were expected to read anyway. How bad could it be? Here's a paragraph:
“… One of my most cherished creations, the Anti-Graffiti Gobstopper. A marvel of confectionery science designed to aid, oh, not just any soul, but the tireless guardians of cleanliness, our beloved mums and yes, dads too, but especially mums, from the endless scourge of dirty socks strewn about by youthful adventurers.”
Despite the shame, many of the actors decided to stick it out in order to try and brighten the kids’ day as much as possible. Though maybe not all of them should have stayed. One actor had to play a made-up character called the Unknown, who was an evil chocolate maker, that lived in the walls. Anyway, here’s what kids thought of the Unknown:
The event was a massive scam and an obvious case of misleading advertising, to the extent that parents even called the police to the scene. The backlash was so bad that attendees were refunded, and Billy Coull scrubbed all his online data and claimed the event ruined his life. Billy was also found to have published 17 AI-generated books, including vaccine denial books. Clearly, the tech is not being used by our best and brightest!
The Disastrous Woodstock 99
When you hear Woodstock, what comes to mind? Hippies? Peace and love? For some, it’s pillars of fire and rivers of poop. To understand why, though, we need to go back in time. The original 1969 Woodstock festival brought together some of the decade’s biggest musicians in the name of peace, and to protest the Vietnam War. The festival was revived twice; once in 1994, which suffered from intense mud and for a final time in 1999.
Woodstock, 1969 by Simon Sheets In order to prevent the muddy mistake of 94, organizers picked the "perfect" new spot for their hippy festival; a former military base. The venue was chosen due to how dry and arid it was. Of course, the reason it was so dry is because the location was hot, with almost no shade. Not the best choice for an entirely outdoor festival, right?While there were public fountains at the event, lines quickly ballooned to insane proportions. To make matters worse, vendors quickly took advantage of the heat and jacked up their prices. A single bottle of water skyrocketed from $4 to $12, that’s over 20 bucks today.
How Woodstock '99 Went Off the Rails by Weird History Those kids had already spent a lot of money on tickets, around $160, close to $300 today and in return the festival was continuing to rinse them for their own profit! That was when tensions began to rise in the crowd and they weren’t helped by the bathroom situation. The public toilets were backed up and unusable after a single day.
The paltry medical staff were quickly swamped as over a thousand ticketholders were treated for heat exhaustion. Attendees went from shouting Kid Rock’s name to chanting water in unison. That probably sounds hard to believe, but people really were excited to see Kid Rock, once. During Limp Bizkit’s set, singer Fred Durst colorfully encouraged the 400,000-odd crowd to let their anger out, lighting the proverbial fuse.The crowd finally exploded into violence when organizers cut Fatboy Slim’s set short, probably because it was turning into an peace and love fest in the crowd. Vigilantes smashed the water pipes leading to the fountains. Water was now readily gushing out for everyone to enjoy, but it wouldn’t stop.Soon, the water geyser turned the previously stone-dry field into a thick, muddy bog, the exact thing the venue was supposed to prevent. They also let performers know they were upset by pelting them with those expensive bottles, just look at all that flying plastic in the footage below!
Wyclef Jean Does Not Care At Woodstock 99 by catatonicyouths Still, it could’ve been worse, singer Sheryl Crow claims she had poop thrown at her while on stage. And she’s probably right. The mud that was now everywhere was contaminated with human waste. Yes, you read that right, the brown stuff everyone was enjoying was in fact a fetid cocktail of mud and human excrement from compromised toilets.
By day three the tired, thirsty, feces-caked crowd finally turned their anger towards the festival itself. Stages that couldn’t be smashed were burned to the ground. When the dust settled, Woodstock 99 had claimed three lives and caused hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages.In the aftermath, the organizes were sued for negligence, a lawsuit that would go on for over 10 years! They did try to bring Woodstock back in 2019 for the 50th anniversary, but the scandal hangover from Woodstock 99, plus a legal battle costing tens of millions of dollars with key backers made sure Woodstock died in 99. So much for Peace and Love.
Bishop Sycamore High School Scandal
On August 21st 2021, one televised football game would reach unseen levels of destruction: IMG versus Bishop Sycamore. By the end of the grueling game, IMG humiliated their opponents, winning by a devastating 58 to zero. If you’re wondering how such a dramatic loss is even possible, it’s simple: Bishop Sycamore wasn’t a real High School.
Bishop Sycamore, as a learning institution, didn’t exist. It was the brainchild of coach Roy Johnson. His whole life, Roy had dreamt of coaching high school football. Sadly, the man kept him from pursuing that dream, just because he lacked credentials, skills, or the ability to teach.Roy cooked up a peculiar plan: he would start his own High School, but instead of teaching silly things like math, science, or English, his students would play football all day, every day. Shockingly, that plan worked. Despite having no curriculum, teachers, or even permanent grounds, Roy was able to recruit a number of desperate young men to his newly christened
Bishop Sycamore High which, in a beautiful turn of fate, was abbreviated to BS High.
Roy cut costs and scammed everyone around him wherever he could. In the documentary BS High, which is a crazy watch, he recounts how he would phone a grocery store in the morning and place an order for a dozen roast chickens. He’d then wait all day and swoop in just before closing time and buy the then heavily-discounted chickens to feed his team.
For accommodation, Roy maxed out several credit cards paying for students to stay in a hotel all the while, their parents thinking they were attending a normal high school. It all paid off, however, because after months of grueling training Roy wrangled a game with the prestigious IMG, and it turned out he’d produced the worst team to ever touch grass.Bishop Sycamore were so bad, that even the professional commentators began speculating mid-match as to whether the game was a mistake. To be fair to the players; they were coached by a psychopath who stole their most formative years as part of a personal vision quest.You might not be surprised to learn this, but it turns out Roy had financial troubles and was in debt. Shortly after the IMG game, Roy stepped down as coach of his own fake football team and in 2023 filed for bankruptcy. Still, if there’s one thing that story has taught us, it’s that you can’t keep an American dreamer (well, schemer) down.
Tumblr's Failed Convention: Dashcon
While it’s past its heyday now, in 2014 Tumblr was hot. The social media website boasted around 34 million active users who generated 100 million posts in the first quarter of that year alone. Half those posts were Sherlock fanfiction, but that still counts! Capitalizing on the site’s popularity, some fans decided to put together Tumble-Con in its honor.
However, it turned out the convention was not sanctioned by Tumblr itself, so it was quickly renamed to Dashcon. The July con would feature panels, meet and greets, podcast recordings, and a performance by a Tumblr-popular band called Steam Powered Giraffe.
An early ill-omen for the convention was the fact that, a full year in advance, the organizers put out requests for volunteers. If you worked 20 hours for the convention for free, you’d get your ticket reimbursed. Still, they estimated some 5000 people would turn up, so they put down a partial down-payment at Illinois’ Renaissance Schaumburg Convention Centre Hotel, agreeing to pay off the rest of the bill with door sales revenue.July 11th rolled around and the first day of DashCon was a horrible failure. They had expected somewhere between 3000 and 7000 attendees. They got just 350. When barely anyone turned up, in line with their policy, the Renaissance demanded the rest of the money they were owed be paid for upfront, or they’d close the convention down.So the organizers turned to their attendees, asked for the extra $17,000 they needed to keep DashCon going. Miraculously, frustrated attendees pitched in and raised the requested amount. However, that was only the beginning of the troubles. As attendees soon found out, shockingly little was actually on offer at the convention.One key attraction they boasted was the ball pit. While you might imagine a club or disco room filled with colorful balls, the reality is so much sadder. It looked like it could fit two adults, if they even could stomach the indignity of entering in the first place. To make matters worse, numerous events and panels were just cancelled.The popular podcast Welcome to Nightvale assembled at DashCon, only to discover the organizers not only hadn’t booked rooms for them, but couldn’t afford to pay them at all. Frustrated, the crew rightly cancelled their performance. However, attendees weren’t told that until after they’d waited hours for the show, leading to the iconic heckle in the footage below.
DashCon Disaster -- Welcome to Night Vale Walks Out & More by The Geekiary Other guests would also pull out, including podcast The Baker Street Babes and Steam Powered Giraffe. In compensation for the cancellations, attendees were told to claim an extra hour in the ball pit! As you can imagine, attendees weren’t comforted. Organizers had to formally apologies for the convention being such a catastrophe, it was branded as a total scam, and it quickly became the most meme’d event of 2014.
Fyre Festival Flop
Back in 2017, Fyre Festival took the internet by storm and not in a good way. The event was advertised as luxury island music festival in the Bahamas, which would take place on an island once owned by criminal kingpin Pablo Escobar! It was created by musician Ja Rule and someone named Billy Macfarland. The final advertised lineup for Fyre Fest included artists like Pusha T, Blink 182, Lil Yachty, and many more.
While tickets weren’t cheap by any means, they were also suspiciously not cheap for something marketing itself as a luxury holiday festival. $1500 would cover your flight, accommodation, meals, and tickets. A VIP package for $12,780 included four tickets, yacht access, and accommodation in rustic tented spaces. Sounds nice and the island in the promo certainly is beautiful albeit, just full of beautiful people like supermodels and Instagram stars.
Announcing Fyre Festival by Fyre Festival Though as it turns out, the island featured in the promotional material isn’t where the festival ended up taking place. That is because the actual owners of the Bahamian island didn’t want that fact it was once owned by Pablo Escobar dragged up. But Pablo’s name was all over the promotional material, so that deal fell through!
Many ticketholders never even discovered that fact, as some flights to the new location, Great Exuma island, were cancelled the night before due to poor weather. As it turns out, they were the lucky ones, as another last-minute cancellation came from the festival caterers, because the festival organizers refused to pay their costs!Despite that being a major issue which would usually shut down any other event of that scale, the organizers figured they could still go ahead. But even that wasn’t the worst of it. They hadn’t factored in the custom’s wait on all the equipment they were shipping into the island, so all their trailers for toilets, showers, and water stations, wouldn’t get to the island in time. The items they did manage to get there, Billy hadn’t paid his tax on.Why? The organizers had blown the majority of their budget months before on yachts, supermodels and Instagram sponsored posts, one report claimed $1.2 million alone went towards the services of Bella Hadid, Shanina Shaik and Haily Bieber, who were just some of the many models featured in the festival’s advertisements.And so, with no money to pay for anything else, the first kids started arriving on the island and it took them all of 10 seconds to realize they’d been scammed good. The fancy-sounding rustic tents advertised turned out to be disaster relief tents, for instance. The kids immediately noticed some of those tents didn’t have beds in them, and there was no water at the water stations.
They were then told the tents didn’t have reservations on them, so it was a free for all! And that luxury food and fine dining they were promised? With no caterers, instead the organizers had to rely on any islander who would help them, and so the guests were served was plain cheese sandwich. And no water.It's important to remember that some attendees paid over $12,000 to be there. Furthermore, when it became clear the event was shaping up to be a disaster, every single artist pulled out. And yet, the organizers still tried to continue with it. It wasn’t until Bahamian authorities stepped in after Billy failed to pay tax on more of the imported items he’d littered the area with, and shut the festival down after less than a day. Not long after the failed fest, Ja Rule denied any culpability for the event, instead shunting the responsibility onto Billy. For his part in defrauding investors and lying while he was under investigation, Billy was sentenced to 6 years in prison. While he’s now out, he owes investors, ticketholders, and vendors $26 million, and his earnings will theoretically be garnished until it’s all paid back.
Cleveland Balloonfest' 86
Let’s head back to the 1980’s, when the city of Cleveland was in a rough shape. It was facing a declining population and a terrible public image as somewhere dirty and depressing, having endured the brutal nickname of the "mistake on the lake" since the 1930s.
In 1986, city officials decided the best way to put Cleveland on the map was balloons. The previous year, Disneyland earned the record for the largest simultaneous balloon launch, releasing a million balloons into the air. Partnering with non-Profit United Way, the city of Cleveland decided to put that smug mouse in his place.
Over the course of several days, thousands of Cleve-landians gathered beneath a two-story tall container made from mesh and scaffolding. There, they inflated balloon after balloon, until a towering mountain of 1.5 million colorful latex orbs hovered over the city. On September 27th, the city ecstatically watched as
they released those balloons into the air, setting a world record in the process.Unfortunately for Cleveland, time moves forward and perfect moments cannot linger forever. The thing is, while a lot of thought had been put into releasing the balloons, it turned out absolutely no thought had been put into what would happen after. Many of the popped and destroyed balloons littered the streets and waterways of Cleveland, causing disarray and multiple traffic accidents.The drifting balloons also caused major trouble at the nearby Burke Lakefront Airport, forcing it to close down. Considering most balloons take upwards of two years to biodegrade, they weren’t an easy cleanup. Worse still, thousands of balloons drifted downwards onto the nearby Lake Erie. And that is the point where it turned from farce to tragedy.The day of the event, two fisherman Raymond Broderick and Bernard Sulzer went missing. When the coastguard search for someone presumably tossed overboard, what do you think they look for? Usually, the first thing you spot is their head, bobbing in the water. But could you tell a human being bobbing in the water from a balloon? Sadly, amongst the balloons, the coastguard were unable to find the missing fisherman and their bodies washed ashore some days later.
While there’s no way of knowing whether the men would have been found if not for the balloons, one of the wives of the deceased sued United Way, and the case was settled on undisclosed terms. Several other lawsuits levied against the city ranged from everything to reckless endangerment to the permeant injury of horses, costing it a multiple million dollar figure! If you want to explore further, we have a whole article about the
Balloonfest '86 disaster.
Confurence, The Furry Convention
If you aren’t familiar with Furries, these are people who enjoy and sometimes make costumes based on anthropomorphized animals which is essentially animals with human characteristics. Like walking on two legs, talking, going into debt as one of those suits costs roughly $10,000. While Furry conventions have actually been around since the late 1980s, as this footage below from 1989’s ConFurence 0 proves, only one of the following cons has been truly dangerous.
First Furry Convention: Confurence Zero, 1989 (Reupload) by Prancing Skiltaire In 2014, AnthroCon was held in Hyatt Regency O’Hare hotel in Chicago. Furries flocked to the event to share art, appreciate each other’s costumes, enjoy a furry DJ set. However, not long into the convention, guests began complaining of head and stomach aches and it wasn’t just all the kibble they were eating. Before long nineteen Furries, some still in costume were being rushed the hospital in dire condition. The hotel staff acted quickly, suspecting a gas leak was to blame. They rounded attendees up and ushered them to a safe venue across the street which was, amusingly, hosting a dog show at the time. One attendee stated their phone blew up with concerned messages from friends and family asking if she was okay, which then quickly turned into asking why she was at a furry convention.
Unfortunately, the story doesn’t stay funny for long. The investigators found that rather than a gas leak, the culprit
was chlorine powder that was very likely intentionally left in the hotel’s stairwell. Meaning the incident was likely an anti-furry hate crime. Creepier still, the FBI and Counter-Terrorism agents investigated the incident but never made any arrests. All these years later, the culprit has never been found.
The Failure Of Rainfurrest
Of all the furry conventions, none are as infamous as RainFurrest 2015. The convention was held between the 24th and 27th of September at the Seattle Airport Hilton, and while many of the events we’ve discussed thus far were disasters due to poor management and planning, RainFurrest 2015’s demise was down to its guests.
The con started off as normal, but as the weekend progressed, attendees gave in to their inner animals, descending into full-on debauchery and destruction. Things began with small acts of vandalism; an elevator was put out of order by guests forcing their way in.Several guests purposefully clogged the hot tub’s pump with rolled up towels, rendering it unusable and requiring thousands of dollars to repair. A toilet in the hotel lobby was destroyed, unleashing a wave of toilet water 2 ½ inches deep.
The acts of incivility only grew bolder and more flagrant; according to hotel staff some attendees began plastering their doors with posters depicting imagery you wouldn’t want grandma seeing on her way to breakfast. It only got worse from there, as attendees began openly engaging in crinkling, which is the act of wearing adult diapers and squirming around because you like the crinkling sound it makes.
And after a while, without any repercussions, crinkling alone wasn’t enough. Those diapers didn’t stay dry, some attendees began filling them. And once they were filled, they didn’t put them in trash cans, instead they were left on cars, in parking lots, in stairwells. If that was happening in public, imagine what was going on in guest rooms.Trying their absolute best to maintain an air of professionalism, the Hilton eventually put up flyers insisting that they return to what they called normal operating procedures. But that still wasn’t the worst of it. Once the convention was over, the Hilton sent a letter to the organizers detailing just some of the damage, as well as multiple incidents of illicit substance use on site. And not little incidents, some of those involved police and paramedics to intervene! RainFurrest had insurance which covered all the expense and damage costs, so the Hilton didn’t lose any money.And RainFurrest paid the Hilton around $1 million to host them. But the Hilton found all that behavior so dangerous and abhorrent, they cut ties with RainFurrest as soon as they could. 2015’s RainFurrest garnered such an awful reputation, because big hotel chains talk to one another that the convention, which had been running since 2007, was never able to find a venue willing to host it on the West Coast again.I hope you were amazed at these embarrassing events that exposed scandals! Thanks for reading.
