“You’re not special,” Anna Delvey sneers at the reporter covering her story in the Netflix drama series Inventing Anna. The implication is that Delvey, a con artist and convicted felon, is special – and millions of people seem to agree. Inventing Anna has some of the highest ratings in Netflix’s history, with over 400m hours’ worth of views in February; and the real-life Delvey – who goes by her faux-heiress, conwoman name rather than her actual surname, Sorokin – has seen her number of followers on Instagram alone soar from 150,000 to over 800,000 since the series premiered.
The streamer’s other top February hit was The Tinder Swindler, which attracted more than 45m views in its first week of release, and hit Netflix’s Top 10 list in 92 countries. Why two shows about con artists – one a fake German heiress and the other the fake scion of an Israeli diamond business – have so captured the world’s attention has spawned a slew of think pieces asking: why do we love – or love to hate – scammers so much? And why now, especially?
I think so far we’ve missed the actual heart of the matter: whether we like it or not, social media has turned us all into scammers of varying degrees, as well as victims of the constant scam being perpetrated on us by tech companies. They promise they will connect us to the world – but their core profit-making plan is actually the tracking and selling of our data. Essentially, we live in the age of the scam.
Today, online fraud is the most common type perpetrated worldwide, and it has risen sharply during the pandemic. The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) received more than 2.8m reports of fraud in 2021, with a loss of $5.8bn (£4.4bn) to American consumers – an increase of more than 70% over 2020. In the UK, more than £750m was lost to scammers during the first half of 2021, an increase of 30%, according to UK Finance.
The FTC reports that most scams start on social media, which was “more profitable to scammers in 2021 than any other method of reaching people.” It’s curious that people still fall for online con artists, when their scams – the most common being so-called imposter scams, shopping scams and romance scams – have become such a regular feature of online life, widely discussed in the media and documented by the popular reality show Catfish (which premiered in 2012).
And yet even digital natives are not immune: young people in the 20-29 age group are the most likely to fall prey to scammers. And a 2019 study by researchers at Stanford reported that most high school students “lacked the skills to judge the reliability of information online”. Could it be because growing up on social media has diminished their ability to tell real from fake?
You can’t really blame them, when even some of the most absurd fake news that is published has the carefully designed look of truth. On top of which, most of us are indulging in fake news about ourselves on a fairly constant basis, in the form of doctored pictures, staged personal moments and overblown announcements about our lives and careers. Not to mention the fake followers that some users, influencers and businesses purchase to pump up their online presence. The culture of social media has normalised fakeness at a time when authenticity is supposedly so prized.
It’s disheartening as well as ironic that some people laughed at the women who fell victim to the Tinder Swindler, Shimon Hayut – or Simon Leviev as he was known to his victims – and called them “dumb” for falling for his professions of love and promises of marriage. But isn’t that similar to the con that dating app companies run on their users? Their marketing suggests we’ll find the loves of our lives on these services, prompting us to pay for extra features in order to find them faster. And yet, according to a 2020 study by the Pew Research Center, only 39% of online dating users have ever found marriage or long-term relationships on these platforms. Meanwhile, a reported 45% of women have received a dick pic while using a dating app.
Leviev and Delvey both lured in their victims with promises of entry into a world of wealth and glamour, of private jets and yachts, designer goods and tables at the hottest restaurants and clubs – promises they made, in part, through Instagram pictures of themselves allegedly living this life. It was the lifestyle they themselves longed to have, and managed to get through scamming their marks.
Watching their stories unfold reminded me of something said to me by Nick Prugo, one of the members of the Bling Ring, a group of teenage thieves who, in 2008 and 2009, robbed the homes of celebrities including Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan, and whose story I covered for Vanity Fair. “It’s the lifestyle that everybody kind of wants,” Prugo said.
This actually wasn’t always the case, but for many people, it is now – even more so with the pressure people feel from social media and its constant promotion of the lavish lifestyles of influencers. Studies have shown that people compare their own, less affluent lives to the likes of Kim Kardashian and feel low self-esteem because of it; young people are especially vulnerable. But, in a vicious cycle, that decrease in self-esteem only seems to feed a stronger thirst: a 2019 study reported that Gen Z considers wealth and fame even more important to their lives than millennials, who have long been the poster children for these obsessions.
There are more shows about scammers to come; Hollywood seems to have deemed our appetite insatiable. The most recent is Hulu’s The Dropout, a miniseries starring Amanda Seyfried as the Theranos fraudster, Elizabeth Holmes, which premiered earlier this month. Holmes, convicted of criminal fraud in January, is awaiting sentencing; Delvey spent nearly four years in prison and is now in US immigration custody for overstaying her visa. But Leviev is running around free – he was even still on Tinder until The Tinder Swindler came out and the dating service finally kicked him off – and wants to tell his side of the story. No doubt somebody in Hollywood will want to hear it. And maybe we will, too.
Nancy Jo Sales is a writer at Vanity Fair and the author of American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers and The Bling Ring
