Scammers are the new It-girls - Harper's Bazaar August 2019
Why is pop culture obsessed with young, chic female scammers?
Grifters have been manipulating people since time immemorial, but this year saw the emergence of a new kind of con artist: young, chic and, most surprisingly, female. While I do love the occasional email from my Nigerian prince who seems to have copious amounts of money waiting for me (if only I could find the time to visit) and the odd white-collar embezzlement case that isn't a total snoozefest, my appetite for the next-gen grifters has reached the level of insatiable. These women are beautiful, they know the street value of a Birkin and they prey primarily on wealthy older men. Their stories are meteoric: they crash and burn from great heights, and it's a spectacle to behold. I cannot get enough, and I'm not alone in my obsession.
Following a new scammer story is all entertainment, all the time (or, more accurately, all fun and games until someone gets hurt, which they inevitably do). The most outrageous are available on demand, no matter your preferred medium. Dirty John, the story of a man just released from jail who preys on an affluent woman with bouncy hair and a Chanel bag for every mood, began life as a podcast and was then made into a Netflix series, followed by a documentary featuring the family he terrorised. The Australian podcast Who the Hell is Hamish? did a deep dive into a serial conman who swindled more than $7,000,000 from his marks. And what does it say about us as a society that there were two docos made at the same time about the disastrous Fyre Festival?
Like many Australians, my first foray into the brave new scammer world was through our very own Belle Gibson. The since disgraced wellness guru claimed she cured her terminal brain cancer through alternative therapies and a healthy lifestyle. She sold thousands of copies of her cookbook, and her wellness app, The Whole Pantry, was downloaded 200,000 times in its first month. She was praised for promising to donate large amounts of the proceeds to charity, but she almost never followed through. It was all quiet on the Gibson front until May this year, when she was dragged to court to cry poor after not paying a $410,000 fine for her various breaches of consumer law. While she faced questions about her discretionary spending, she revealed that her housemate paid her rent, her legal fees and for a monthlong trip to Africa. The court heard that at one point she owed him $90,000. Her story truly is the gift that, much like her housemate, keeps on giving.
It was during the Gibson hiatus that the stories of 28-year-old Anna Delvey and 35-year-old Elizabeth Holmes emerged to fight for first place in scammer folklore. Delvey's real name is Anna Sorokin, but she also answers to Soho Grifter and her Rikers Island inmate number. Russian-born Delvey scammed Manhattan's elite out of hundreds of thousands of dollars by convincing them that she was a German heiress with plans to open a huge interactive art space in the city that they should invest in. Holmes is the one-time Silicon Valley darling who set out to revolutionise healthcare through her biotech company, Theranos, by providing hundreds of blood tests from one prick of the finger. The only problem was her idea is a physical impossibility, and because she convinced people (including Rupert Murdoch and former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger) that it could exist outside of her imagination when it couldn't, she's been charged with nine counts of wire fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and is now facing up to 20 years in prison. Holmes has pleaded not guilty.
ELIZABETH HOLMES AND BILL CLINTON AT THE CLINTON GLOBAL INITIATIVE IN 2015
Many have suffered at the hands of these women, but every time New York magazine posts an update about the latest designer outfit one of them has worn to a court hearing, I inhale every word and photograph. Does deriving such entertainment from a situation in which real humans have been victimised make me a bad person? The obvious answer is yes, but in an attempt to feel less guilty, I call Dr Caroline Moul, a senior lecturer of psychology at The University of Sydney, who specialises in callous, unemotional personality traits (the scammers', not mine. Hopefully).
"People are so interested in scammer stories like these because what Anna and Elizabeth have done is so far outside the realm of acceptable behaviour," Dr Moul explains. "The main interest comes from just how bizarre it is. Most of us grow up with an unwritten, unspoken understanding of what is and isn't OK, and while we all exaggerate and lie at times, these women have [apparently] engaged in behaviour that goes so far beyond that."
This makes sense. And I think part of the reason we enjoy a ripper scam yarn is that it targets a place deep down where our most volatile emotions live. It's where anger (How dare she con all those innocent people?) meets outrage (Who let her get away with this for so long?), meets jealousy (That sounds easy, why didn't I think of it?), meets ego (I would never have fallen for something like that).
As a faux heiress, Delvey made her way through the New York art scene, staying in hotels on credit, bouncing checks and convincing respected banking institutions to give her loans based on what prosecutors say were forged bank statements (when money came through, she spent it at Apple and Net-a-Porter). She always picked up the tab on champagne and oyster nights; she was never without her signature Celine glasses, which she even wore to court with Saint Laurent and Victoria Beckham pieces (there's an Instagram account dedicated to her style: @annadelveycourtlooks). In an article for The New Yorker titled "The Fiends and the Folk Heroes of Grifter Season", Jia Tolentino does a deep dive into why "scamming was suddenly everywhere". "Delvey was a perversely relatable striver," she writes. "She was us, just with more energy."
ANNA DELVEY (FAR RIGHT) WITH GIUDO CACCIATORI, GRO CURTIS AND GIORGIA TORDINI AT THE FIRST TUMBLR FASHION HONOR IN 2014
Rachel DeLoache Williams, a (presumably ex) friend of Delvey's, was scammed out of more than $73,000 after Delvey promised an all-expenses paid trip to Marrakech and then conveniently ran into problems with her credit cards. Delvey promised to wire Williams the money ASAP, telling her it would be in her account on Monday. Nearly a year's worth of Mondays went by, and Williams was still out-of-pocket when Delvey went to prison. She detailed her dalliance with Delvey in an article for Vanity Fair, which HBO has acquired the rights to (Lena Dunham is attached to the project). Williams has since published a diary-esque account of being conned by a designer-clad faux heiress in the book My Friend Anna (Hachette), which came out in July. Showrunner Shonda Rhimes and Netflix have meanwhile secured the rights to the original Delvey story in New York by Jessica Pressler.
Holmes has also proved ripe for pop culture content. There's the bestselling book Bad Blood by John Carreyrou (the Wall Street Journal journalist who blew the Theranos scam wide open) that reads like an unputdownable thriller. Alex Gibney's documentary The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, takes you (way too) up close to Holmes's blood-shot eyes as she tries to get her blood testing machines into the hands of doctors whose sick patients might die if they acted on an incorrect Theranos result. The Dropout podcast talks to former employees as well as Carreyrou, and also has previously unheard testimony from Holmes. Then there's former Rookie editor Tavi Gevinson's hilariously deep-voiced and heavily eye-lined impersonation of Holmes on Twitter. (Google it, I'll wait.)
ELIZABETH HOLMES AND MARIA SHRIVER AT THE VANITY FAIR NEW ESTABLISHMENT SUMMIT IN 2015
New York's offshoot The Cut had reporters on the Delvey and Holmes beats throughout what they dubbed the Summer of Scam. Writers discussed everything: "Anna Delvey Wore a Black Choker to Court"; "How Did Anna Delvey Just Instagram From Rikers?"; "Elizabeth Holmes Spotted in Court Sans Turtleneck"; "Elizabeth Holmes's Family Breaks Their Silence on Her Voice" are just some of many articles churned out in the name of scam obsession.
An interesting note, when you put these two cases side by side, is how Holmes and Delvey play on gender. They're both attractive white women, but they use their femininity in different ways. Delvey played up hers in designer clothes and jewellery, and often pulled out the woman card to elicit sympathy: she had no choice but to resort to such drastic measures because investors would never take a young woman with such ambition seriously. Holmes, on the other hand, was taken seriously by older men precisely because she was a young woman in tech, and was taken at face value. But she also had her affected baritone (in stark contrast to Delvey's "unexpectedly high-pitched" voice, as Williams describes it), and seeing her posture on talk shows is like looking at a caricature of masculinity: legs spread, elbows on knees, taking up as much space as possible.
"Typically, people think about women being higher in empathy and more anxious, and men as being the business ones. So you've got a mismatch: you've got a female doing what we would expect more from a male," Dr Moul says. In a fun twist, Jennifer Lawrence is rumoured to be playing both Delvey and Holmes in separate film adaptations.
ANNA SOROKIN WEARING CELINE GLASSES TO HER SENTENCING IN MAY 2019
In the case of Holmes and Theranos, which she ran for more than a decade, the schadenfreude is directed at the scammer rather than the scamee. We want justice. There's huge satisfaction in seeing someone who has been getting away with something for so long suddenly slip up, and we want their downfall to be swift and harsh. As Tolentino puts it, we "prefer a clean arc in our morality play: we like scammers most when they fail".
All told, there might be something nasty about deriving entertainment from stories like these, but obsessing over the scammers could also be a way of keeping our own morals in check by comparison. "For the vast majority of people, considering that [hurting someone] might be the outcome of their actions, those feelings of empathy mean they don't go through with it," Dr Moul says. "Scamming is so bold — it's something that wouldn't occur to most people to do. So part of the fascination is just trying to understand how someone could behave that way. Words like 'psychopath' or 'narcissist' come out because we're trying to understand how these people can engage in these behaviours. We put a label on them so we can say, That's them and they're not us." A comforting thought as I refresh 'Belle Gibson' in Google News.
This story originally appeared on harpersbazaar.com.au in August 2019. Images: Getty.