I ❤️🔥 Scammers
Thoughts on Overnight Success feat. The Scammer Approval Matrix
A good scam is like a good joke: it punches up, not down. Which is to say, getting a sprite after asking for a water cup at Chipotle – good. Defrauding the elderly out of their retirement savings à la Bernie Madoff – bad. Neither of these are victimless crimes (if a corporation with billions in annual revenue can be considered a “victim”), but they are bloodless, which might partially explain the cultural obsession with scammers. If you’re a squeamish baby (like me 🙋🏾♀️), you can still get your true crime fix and sleep peacefully at night. There’s also an element of superiority toward the victims that likely lends to the appeal as well. I can’t be the only one who thought to myself “girl…you cannot be serious” several times while watching the Tinder Swindler doc on Netflix.
But I suspect a good portion of the intrigue comes from the fact that there’s simply something fascinating about people who shirk the rules and cut corners in a culture that’s preoccupied with hustling and grinding. (For the record, I am categorically opposed to both of these things – I prefer to vibe and chill.) Why else would we be constantly exploring them in documentaries (there were two Fyre Festival docs released within days of each other in 2019), films (Catch Me If You Can is the marquee title in this genre), and the occasional limited series (how could I write about scammers without mentioning con artist turned genuine It Girl Anna Delvey?) For whatever reason, we love to watch people break all the rules and still end up successful—and then lose it all, as a reminder that justice really does win at the end of the day. (LOL.)
The cultural fixation with youth, instant success, and wealth come together in my favorite scammer archetype, the faux wunderkind: a young phenom who’s outed as a fraud after hitting it big, usually after a series of splashy profiles glorifying them for being Better Than You. They typically have a bravado and dramatic flair that makes it easy for them to draw in audiences to bear witness to their rise and subsequent falls, including me — if only because I am a messy bitch who lives for drama.
One need only peruse the Forbes 30 Under 30 list to get a sense of what I mean. Elizabeth Holmes, best known for living in Steve Jobs cosplay for many years being the founder and CEO of blood testing startup Theranos and currently serving an eleven year prison sentence, is probably the most infamous of this cohort, but she’s not the only one. Just a few days ago, Sam Bankman-Fried, who made the list in 2021 as founder of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX Trading, was found guilty on seven counts of fraud and faces a potential sentencing of over 100 years. There’s also the lizardman pharma bro Martin Shkreli, and Charlie Javice, the founder of student loan startup Frank, both convicted of fraud, among many others. The phenomenon has become so common that there’s now discourse surrounding the 30 Under 30 to Prison Pipeline.
You’d think by now we’d have come to terms with things: that overnight success is a myth, and the people who blow up “out of nowhere” have often put in years of invisible labor to get there. And of course there’s the oldie but goodie, a reminder that if it sounds too good to be true, it likely is – but there’s no Oscar-bait in banalities you might find in a copy of Chicken Soup for The Soul. I could probably go on for another couple hundred words about my own journey leaving behind the wunderkind obsession, the years it took me to accept that things take time, and the realization that all I can do is make dedicated, consistent progress toward my goals so I can be prepared for the right opportunities when they come my way. But I don’t wanna! Instead, here’s my riff on NY Mag’s approval matrix, ranking scammers along the axes of highbrow to lowbrow and brilliant to despicable.
Here we go:
The Scammer Approval Matrix
Sam Bankman-Fried of FTX Trading
Simon Leviev, the Tinder Swindler
Joanne the Scammer, the character created by internet personality and comedian Branden Miller
Anna Sorokin (fka Anna Delvey)
Caroline Calloway
Martin Shkreli
Elizabeth Holmes
Rachel Dolezal (or Nkechi Amare Diallo, as she now likes to be known 🙄)
Quran AKA Twitter user @chckpeas
MourningAssassin
That’s all from me! I’ll leave you all with this:
See you next week!
Lola xx