Public defenders are reserved for defendants with limited assets, and the government will often challenge whether those who apply for them really qualify, as they did in the case of Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the Mexican drug lord known as El Chapo who is currently incarcerated in New York.

Ms. Shroff also argued that Mr. McFarland was not a flight risk because he had not abandoned his home even after being served with a subpoena two months ago. After posting bail, she added, he would go to live with his parents, who are successful real estate developers in New Jersey.

But Kristy J. Greenberg, an assistant United States attorney, was skeptical that Mr. McFarland was out of money. He lived an “extremely lavish lifestyle,” she said, and added that the government’s investigation was still seeking answers about the assets of Mr. McFarland’s company, Fyre Media.

“There are real questions about where his money is,” Ms. Greenberg said at the hearing.

In a criminal complaint unsealed Friday, the government accused Mr. McFarland of operating a scheme to defraud investors by drastically overstating his wealth and the revenues of Fyre Media, whose main business was a website that allowed people to book celebrities for concerts and parties.

In one example of these misrepresentations, the complaint said that Mr. McFarland had doctored a Scottrade account statement to say that he owned $2.5 million in a particular company’s stock, when in reality his position was worth only $1,500.

The investigation was continuing, Ms. Greenberg said, and while the complaint identified only two people who had invested $1.2 million into Mr. McFarland’s venture, investigators believe that there may have been as many as 85 investors in total.