THE poster promised it would be “an up close and personal” event with Justin Bieber – so it’s no wonder fans were happy to pay over the odds to get their hands on tickets.
And with this unique intimate access to mega stars like Justin, the British founders of party startup company Pollen saw their business valued at £632million last April.
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But just four months later the company went bust, seemingly overnight, owing staff, creditors and shareholders an estimated £78m – including £150,000 to a private jet charter firm.
Now a new BBC Three documentary – Crashed: $800m Festival Fail – reveals how Pollen reportedly left staff and customers millions of pounds out of pocket – with the shocking case dubbed the ‘British Fyre Festival’.
It has found an estimated 15,000 customers were charged double – and some triple – for events, with the unauthorised transactions totalling around £2.5million.
Not only that, the film has accessed internal documents that appear to suggest this was done manually by a senior employee at Pollen.
There are also claims Liam Negus-Fancey, who founded Pollen with brother Callum, married Jim Davidson’s daughter at a lavish Ibiza ceremony and charged £50,000 in expenses to the company – including his wedding photographer bill – just days after the company laid off 200 staff.
Callum, who appears to be the driving force behind the company, was 17 and midway through his A-Levels when he dropped out of school to start running events, selling music festival tickets from his car.
His earlier business, called Let’s Go Crazy, saw him run all-night raves aimed at teenagers, but a BBC London News investigation revealed there was alleged drug use at some of the events.
The brothers, who have since appeared to mysteriously disappear and shut down much of their social media, were in their 20s when they launched the start-up – initially known as Verve in 2014.
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The idea stemmed from their love of partying and going to music festivals.
With offices in Los Angeles, it originally started as a ticketing platform, giving festival goers the opportunity to earn VIP rewards for selling tickets to their friends.
New staff were greeted with mimosas and encouraged to get drunk in the office as a way to bond, while another alleged they did shots “at 10am on a Tuesday”.
Chief revenue officer Liam shared pictures on social media of him using IV drips with the caption: “What hangover?”
Despite not making a profit at the time, the doc claims Pollen spent hundreds of thousands of dollars treating staff to lavish booze-fuelled parties, where they were encouraged to play sexually explicit ‘would you rather’ games.
One US staff retreat in 2019 reportedly cost more than £500,000 and featured scantily-clad acrobatic dancers and contortionists.
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Hagar, who worked as a customer insights manager for Pollen, says the offices were “so big we had scooters to get around”.
She adds: “They told us the point of spending so much money on these retreats is ‘showing investors how well we’re doing. This lavish spending is just part of being in these startup world’.”
By the end of 2109, Pollen claimed it had sold a million tickets to partygoers globally and raised £79million in investments.
But Pollen’s income took a nosedive when the Covid-19 pandemic hit in 2020.
The documentary tells how the company qualified for £5million of government funding from a scheme to help start-ups during lockdown.
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Brit Rosie worked as Pollen’s strategy and operations manager after being approached on LinkedIn.
She says: “Pollen turned around and said, ‘Okay, hang on, we’ve got all these relationships within music now, we’ve got the ticket-selling software, why don’t we put the festival bit on ourselves?’
“And so the idea of the ‘curated travel’ was born.”
Pollen began advertising dozens of future festivals, combined with travel packages, with pop stars including Kim Petras and Dutch DJ and music producer Tiësto.
Jack, a Brit who worked as an engineering manager, says they sold 3,000 packages within “minutes” for one event.
Pop superstar Justin Bieber was the biggest name Pollen partnered with.
Tickets for the Justin Bieber & Friends package weekend, in Las Vegas in October 2021, started at nearly £800.
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Fans were promised they would have intimate access to the mega-star, but it failed to materialise.
Helen, Pollen’s former care operations manager, says: “There was supposed to be a meet and greet, but then it changed to a soundcheck, then it was scrapped.”
She adds how fans in the VIP section could “barely see Justin” and if it wasn’t for him “wearing the neon pink beanie you wouldn’t have known he was there”.
Hagar adds: “They didn’t put it into contract that he needed to show up to any of these add-on experiences. They just put it into the contract that he needed to perform.”
Dozens of Pollen’s events were cancelled, including last year’s five-day Departure music festival in Mexico, which was called off just an hour before it was due to get under way due to newly-introduced Covid restrictions introduced by the Mexican government.
Thousands of festival goers have travelled from all over the world to attend, with them left at their resorts with nothing to do – leading it to be called Fyre Festival 2.0 or the British Fyre Festival.
The Fyre Festival was billed as a luxury festival, with a glossy promo video featuring models including Bella Hadid, Emily Ratajkowski and Hailey Bieber, offering partygoers the chance to live it up like the super rich.
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Ticket packages ranged from £400 to more than £300,000 but there was no festival – and the shocking scam gave rise to the 2019 Netflix documentary Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened.
Pollen claimed all Departure customers had refunds initiated within 90 days of it being cancelled.
In total, they had to cancel 39 events due to Covid, costing them $97million.
But ex Pollen worker Helen says they were told “refunds had to be spaced out”, adding: “I guess there was a cash flow problem.”
Another former employee talks about how she started to question if the company was “up to no good”.
Speaking anonymously, a member of the finance team told the documentary that Pollen misled suppliers about payments by sending a “screenshot” of a wire transfer – but the payment never actually went through.
They claim: “What was happening on the accounting team was, they were inserting all the information necessary to initiate a wire through the banking site, getting to the final confirmation page, taking a snapshot of that page and sending it to the vendor as a confirmation that the wire had been sent, but in reality the final confirmation button had never been pressed and that money was never sent to the vendor.”
Pollen told the BBC that these proof of payments were sent in the belief that the company would have the funds to pay their invoices when due and it wasn’t done to suggest the payment had already been wired.
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Then, last May, Pollen allegedly paid £52,776 to rent a 20-person villa in Ibiza for eight weeks for ‘accommodation and entertainment for key clients’ – the same month it laid off 200 staff and five board members resigned.
Liam married Jim Davidson’s daughter Elsie in a clifftop ceremony on the island a few days after the villa was rented.
Around that time, former staff members tell how the company was suddenly flooded with messages from angry customers saying they had been wrongly charged.
The film shows how Pollen allegedly manually changed the code to instigate these unauthorised transactions, even testing it out beforehand.
Representatives for Pollen told the BBC it was caused by a glitch on the company’s platform.
Filmmakers contacted thousands of those affected and all but 10 of the 259 people who responded said they were still awaiting a refund.
The company was also late paying its staff before it went bust last August.
In a statement to the BBC, Pollen said it had worked hard to keep trading and pay off debts but had to enter administration due to “extreme changes” in the market.
It added that the founders acted responsibly and tried their best to save the company.
Emily, who worked for the company in the US, says: “Our lives were ruined.”
Former Pollen worker Rosie adds: “I think it’s frustrating that neither I nor anybody else have seen anybody being held to account so far.”
Crashed: $800m Festival Fail is available to view on BBC iPlayer.
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