Is she just a class warrior? (Ingrid Goes West)
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Some people hunger for thrillers. Others feast on true-crime podcasts. My underrated source of tales of mind-boggling malfeasance is the ‘Scams’ section of the Guardian’s money pages, where no gimmicks are required. Here are stories of deception to chill the blood: the man on a dating site who extorted money from a new partner by claiming that he was being held hostage by loan sharks; the retired nurse who was tricked into paying £160,000 to a phoney financial company in Indonesia; the widower who thought he was assisting the National Crime Agency but ended up losing everything, including his house, and living with a “courier” who, in a further twist, was the fraudster’s victim-turned-employee.
If I’m right in thinking that none of these real-life horror stories has yet been adapted for the screen, then I’m surprised, because the scam, the fraud, the grift, the hoax, the long con, has become a cultural obsession. In the space of three months, Netflix alone has given us The Tinder Swindler, Inventing Anna, The Dropout, Bad Vegan, and Trust No One. False identities and weaponised charm are at the heart of the BBC dramas The Serpent and Chloe. There are hit podcasts about fiendish deception, too: Tortoise’s Sweet Bobby and the BBC’s The Missing Cryptoqueen. These stories have some of the attraction of the paranoid thriller, except that most of them are true and the victims aren’t nearly paranoid enough.
Popular culture has always magnified and marketed our fears — the Bomb, terrorism, technology out of control — and it’s not hard to see why we are currently preoccupied by deception. The 2008 crisis revealed that the global financial system was a Ponzi scheme built on the repackaging of mortgage debt, and almost nobody went to jail for it. Since then, a number of ballyhooed tech start-ups and cryptocurrencies have turned out to be built on sand. Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes — the subject of The Dropout, a book, a documentary, a podcast series and the forthcoming Adam McKay movie Bad Blood — is only the most extreme example of a slick entrepreneur who exploited hype and greed to pull in vast sums of money for digital snake oil.
In the world of politics, we have seen an American president whose entire career was a series of escalating lies and a Russian president whose name has become synonymous with disinformation, while the sphere of online political commentary buzzes with unreliable narrators. We have also become more comfortable with amateur psychology. I don’t remember this much talk about sociopaths, narcissists and toxic fantasists a decade ago. I don’t remember gaslighting.
Pulling all these strands together is the internet, whose initially exciting promise of the freedom to build a new identity online has, perhaps inevitably, led us into a Kafkaesque maze of scammers, fantasists and catfishers. We haven’t all been fooled into transferring our life savings into a fake account but we all know that it could happen because we’re constantly bombarded with fraud warnings and phishing emails. According to Which?, UK account-holders lost around £2.3bn to scams in the financial year 2020-21. So-called “romance frauds”, the cruellest of the lot, stole £100m in 2021. The prospect of being scammed isn’t an exotic possibility, like being eaten by a shark; it’s one careless click away.
Traditionally, there are three ways to tell the story of a con. In a movie like The Sting or Hustlers, the viewer is embedded with the scammers, who are usually charming rogues relieving gangsters and corporations of their ill-gotten gains. As a genre, it overlaps with the heist movie: you can applaud their chutzpah and artistry guilt-free. The new movie Operation Mincemeat, like Ben Affleck’s Argo, depicts an ornate ruse targeted at a tyrannical regime in order to save lives. Who could object to a story about scamming Hitler?
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SubscribeGreat article with plenty of movie recommendations.
My favorite scam movies also have a touch of noir. I think “The Grifters” is one of the best movies ever made where everybody is scamming everybody else. And “The Best Offer” starring Geoffrey Rush is not well known but it’s a classy movie about an arrogant art dealer being taken for a ride.
I can only hope Hollywood, the BBC, whoever, keep producing movies of that quality and not a bunch of woke nonsense.
I recommend to you the Netflix show Sneaky Pete.
“I can only hope Hollywood, the BBC, whoever, keep producing movies of that quality and not a bunch of woke nonsense.”
Fat chance. But have an upvote for the noble sentiment.
Great article by Dorian as always, although curiously (in my view) he leaves out another popular Netflix show from this year telling the story about a scammer in the UK, The Puppet Master. This show very much centred on the story of his victims rather than the scammer, but also told a fascinating yet wholly unglamorous story. I was left apoplectic by the ending, if that’s any recommendation.
A truly awful crime which the Police do almost nothing to catch the perpetrators. It get <5% of the Police budget although it account for >40% of all UK crime!!!
‘The Bahamian workers who got stiffed received far less attention in a story that became the Coachella of schadenfreude, the Instagram Altamont’.
I believe that viewers of the docudrama donated to a crowdfunder for the woman in charge of catering who used her own money to pay the workers and she came out with a good profit – so that was one happy ending in the whole unhappy saga.
The con man offers a service to the ‘victim’: a lesson he/she would have never learned without him/her. Costly, yes, but invaluable
Not just costly, life-ruining in some cases. The only two people that I have known to have fallen for these things was a widowed mother on slender means and an elderly man with dementia; so, no sympathy or admiration for any of the parasites that do this.
I have had dealings with conmen. They do seem invariably to be very talented and could easily a good living. However, there seems to be something almost genetic that compels them not only to cheat people but then rub their victims noses in it in the process.
No sympathy nor admiration from my side either. On the contrary. But neither are there helpless victims, not worthy for what they have been calling forth. That would make it another meaningless experience for them.
No sympathy nor admiration from my side either but still they provide lessons fro those who have not yet learnt them
My Chief of Staff is addicted to ‘Bridgerton’ is there any cure?
No he’s a lost cause.
Alas I thought as much!