This year, the last week in May marked the beginning of grifter season: the wind changed, the pressure dropped, and the scent of scamming was suddenly everywhere in the air. Anna Delvey, the young woman with messy hair and a vague European accent who allegedly convinced the superficial people and institutions of New York City night life that she was a millionaire heiress, was back in the public eye, thanks to an instant-classic New York feature by Jessica Pressler. (Delvey is currently on Rikers Island, awaiting trial on charges of grand larceny and attempted grand larceny.) Elizabeth Holmes returned, too, in the pages of John Carreyrou’s new book, “Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup,” which tells the story of Theranos, Holmes’s biotech company, which boasted of a miraculous blood-test technology that lived only in its founder’s imagination. (The company raised nearly a billion dollars from venture capitalists and private investors before Holmes was accused of fraud; she recently reached a settlement with the S.E.C., which required her to pay a fine and relinquish control of the company, among other penalties.) Elsewhere, Thomas J. Mace-Archer-Mills, Esq., a frequent media commentator on the British monarchy, was revealed to be some guy from Albany named Tommy Muscatello, who had learned his British accent in a high-school production of “Oliver.” A twenty-five-year-old was accused of posing as an aristocrat explorer and scamming luxury tourists out of nearly seven hundred thousand dollars. A Colombian man pleaded guilty to fraud and identity theft after successfully pretending to be a Saudi prince for the past three decades. And Jill Stein, we learned, was doing exactly what we expected her to do with the seven million dollars that she raised for an election recount: spending the money, largely in secret, without any recount having ever taken place.
Grifter season comes irregularly, but it comes often in America, which is built around mythologies of profit and reinvention and spectacular ascent. The shady, audacious figures at its center exist on a spectrum, from folk hero to disgrace. The season begins when the public catches on to a series of scammers of a particularly appealing sort—the kind who provoke both Schadenfreude and admiration. Not long before Pressler’s feature on Delvey appeared, my colleague Naomi Fry attended a pop-up sale of Fyre Festival dead stock: it was a foretoken, the grifter-season equivalent of a robin in the back yard in March. Fyre Festival was the handiwork of Billy McFarland, who, last year, advertised an Instagrammable music-festival extravaganza full of luxury beach palaces and models frolicking in the sand. To the eager twentysomethings who ponied up large amounts of money to be a part of this, he delivered FEMA-style tents sitting on gravel and Styrofoam boxes of white bread and American cheese. It was a matryoshka doll of empty ambition: the attendees, like McFarland, seemed more interested in conveying a life style than embodying one. This is what made it so delicious, as a spectator. Previously, McFarland—who pleaded guilty to wire fraud this March—had scammed the same kind of customer base through his company Magnises, which charged social-climbing New York professionals a monthly fee for access to a clubhouse, a lead on concert tickets that kept mysteriously disappearing, and a signature black card, which was intended to telegraph high status, even though it was, fittingly, just the user’s existing credit card with a fancied-up face.
McFarland, though he inspired vitriol, was also an inadvertent hero of the class war, embarrassing kids who felt entitled to indulgence, exposing the intertwined frauds of millennial-era wealth. Delvey has been celebrated as a sort of Bling Ring icon: her journey through the worlds of New York art and night life threw a spotlight on people who seem to have more money than substance, and on people who aspire to be like those people, as well as the companies that cater to all of them. Her friends, who became her marks, barely knew her: all she needed to do, for them, was pay for dinner, drop a few status signals, and persist in being around. The hotels that were so comfortable with rich young white women that they let Delvey stay for months without a credit card on file? They deserved to get fleeced, as did anyone who found themselves throwing thousands of dollars at a girl they sponged off but didn’t actually know. Delvey, as one tweet put it, was a shining example of what a person could do after overcoming impostor syndrome. Her ridiculous ambition—to build an enormous interactive consumer art space—differed from many more famous New York ambitions mostly in that she failed. That she got so far without the smoke screen of extraordinary looks or taste endeared her further. Delvey—who was born in Russia and later moved to Germany, and whose real last name is Sorokin—was a perversely relatable striver: she was us, just with more energy (and, possibly, a knack for forging or repurposing bank documents).
“Cons thrive in times of transition,” Maria Konnikova writes in her book “The Confidence Game,” from 2016. The term “confidence man” was coined in 1849, by the New York Herald, in pieces about a bumbling scammer who would ask strangers on the street, “Have you confidence in me to trust me with your watch until to-morrow?” At that point in American history, the gold rush was producing a swarm of swindlers in California, and free banking was enabling wildcat banks and counterfeiters to circulate worthless bills. Scammers love nothing better, Konnikova notes, than “exploiting the sense of unease we feel when it appears that the world as we know it is about to change.” One gets the sense, these days, that such unease may become constant: the entire globe is getting hotter, market pressures are accelerating, technology is advancing at a dizzying rate. At some point between the Great Recession, which began in 2008, and the terrible election of 2016, scamming seems to have become the dominant logic of American life. The things that people have historically used to build non-scammy lives in this country—housing, say, and higher education—have deteriorated to the point where they are likely to punish you if you are not already wealthy. The bankers pushing reverse mortgages, the recruiters at for-profit colleges, and the many startup founders hoping to take massive investor-backed losses until they eradicate the rest of the market understand the world better than we do. That’s part of the reason they’re so riveting, down to the last detail. Scammers show us the glitzy bullshit intrinsic to stratospheric wealth in America; they show us that the best way to make money in this country is to treat everyone around you like a mark.
But we prefer a clean arc in our morality play: in the end, we like scammers most when they fail. The ones who seem like they’ve actually gotten away with something—such as Stein, who not only helped tip the election to the definitive American scammer of our age but who continued to profit from it after the fact—aren’t very fun. Like Stein, Holmes has not been the subject of much ironic idolatry, and this is partly, I think, because pleasure played no evident role in her extended scheming: she didn’t go on vacation, she ate like a robot, she over-engineered her voice and comportment in service of the exceedingly dry goal of resembling Steve Jobs. (Delvey and McFarland seem to better recognize that scamming means putting on a good show.) But it’s also, I suspect, because her downfall exposes a nauseating level of vulnerability and stupidity in our current way of living: Holmes ran Theranos on bluster and deception for more than a decade, and had Walgreens, Safeway, James Mattis, Rupert Murdoch, Betsy DeVos, David Boies, and a nine-billion-dollar valuation on her side. We want the failure of our scammers to seem inevitable, but Holmes reminds us of how many are likely still out there—raising money, talking a big game at conferences, perhaps reading about Anna Delvey on a private jet.
Sourse: newyorker.com
