West Coast Taco & Beer Festival Being Called Fraudulent
Photo via ticketing website Tixr
Last week a friend invited me to go to the West Coast Taco & Beer Festival. I had a ton of stuff going on, so I declined, and it appears I’m lucky I did. The event, which happened on Saturday August 3rd, appears to have been an utter shitshow, and is being called a scam even being compared to the infamous Fyre Festival.
The main problem seems to be that while the event was advertised as having unlimited taco and beer tastings, they apparently had no taco tastings and varying degrees of beer tastings.
As my friend Matt told me via text, it was:
“Staycation meets Fyre Festival. Taco festival minus tacos.
It took us an hour to reach the gate, which is when we found out that the all-you-can-eat tacos were not, in fact, free… as was advertised. They had one person scanning qr codes for the one thousand-ish people in line. I made the best of a bad situation by drinking as much canned beer as I could on an empty stomach, after fasting all day.”
People on Reddit had similar experiences. As user cheesy_luigi wrote on a post called “[FRAUD ALERT] West Coast Taco & Beer Festival”:
“I arrive at 2pm and I see an insane line stretching the 3 sides of The Midway. There was only ONE person checking IDs as we inched closer. At around 2:45, it’s announced that the taco vendors were all out of food. Everything else inside was paid for, no “bottomless” taco samples or “unlimited” sample pours as advertised.”
Classic_rr, one of the people who commented on cheesy_luigi’s post said “Beer was free, tacos were not, led to lots of people drinking with empty tumtums. The vibe got weird…The beer was just pours from warm six packs.”
It appears that the vendors who were there may have also gotten screwed. Another post on Reddit by DrippedoutErin ,titled “West Cost taco and beers is a scam” said “the vendors didn’t get their promised pay and the promoter disappeared damn.”
The promoter of the event is called Blue Stream Entertainment.
Apparently this isn’t the first time that Blue Stream Entertainment has throughly disappointed and allegedly scammed people with their West Coast Taco & Beer Festival. There are Reddit posts about the same thing happening in San Diego, San Jose, and Los Angeles. And considering that the one from Los Angeles was six years ago, and it had the exact same complaints, this may be a pattern, not a coincidence.
Another friend named Ali, told me over text “The very first thing said to us when we got to the front of the line was ‘get your phones out I’m only going to say this one time, for a refund email brandon@bluestreament.com, and you’re still welcome to attend the event and get a refund. The tacos inside are *not* free.'”
While it’s up in the air if Blue Stream Entertainment will give refunds, some users on Reddit have posted that they’ve been able to get the charges reversed by contacting their credit card companies and telling them it was a fraudulent event.
Despite all of this, Blue Stream Entertainment appears to be going through with their planned San Jose installment of the West Coast Taco & Beer Festival on August 31st. Hopefully people will google the event and do some research before buying tickets.
Howdy! My name is Katy Atchison and I'm an Associate Editor for Broke-Ass Stuart.
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