The Scammer in You

If the late 2000s and early 2010s were the Age of the Lovable Sociopath, then the mid-2010s has been something of a cousin era: the Age of the Scammer. In no particular order, take Fyre Festival’s Billy McFarland, fake heiress Anna Delvey or Silicon Valley’s own girl boss, Elizabeth Holmes. Then there are the quarterly waves of “micro-scammers”: fraudulent drop shippers, high school frenemies involved in various MLMs, grifting podcasters and hot take merchants, pseudo-scientist dietitians, the victims of Munchausen’s-by-Internet. It’s not that this type of duplicity is new. In the United States especially, there have always been con artists, snake oil salesmen and hustlers. Arguably much of America’s cultural heritage is built on it.