Early in her new Netflix series Apple Cider Vinegar, its star, Kaitlyn Dever, breaks the fourth wall. Staring into the camera, she speaks in third person about the real woman she’s portraying. “This is a true story based on a lie,” she announces. “Some names have been changed to protect the innocent. Belle Gibson has not been paid for the re-creation of her story.” Then, suddenly, Dever is Belle again, with a blunt response to Gibson’s exclusion from the project: “F-ckers.”
As any scam aficionado knows, Belle Gibson was an Australian wellness influencer who amassed a huge following—one that would earn her glowing media coverage at home and abroad, as well as a prestigious book deal—during the early-2010s Instagram gold rush. A young, photogenic, and unfeasibly vivacious single mom who claimed to be treating her terminal brain cancer with healthy eating and alternative medicine, she monetized her adoring audience through an app called the Whole Pantry. But before she could become the millennial Gwyneth, it came out that she’d never actually been diagnosed with cancer. Hence Netflix’s eagerness to both mine her juicy story and ensure viewers know that, unlike some other scammers who’ve captured the public imagination, she wasn’t compensated for this retelling.
Apple Cider Vinegar, which contrasts Gibson with two genuinely ill young women in her orbit who are searching for miracle cancer cures, comes at the crest of the latest wave of scam content. January saw the premieres of ABC News docuseries Scamanda, about another cancer fantasist, and Scam Goddess, a Freeform show that profiles a different scammer in each episode. Also back in the spotlight, with a memoir titled You’ll Never Believe Me, is Kari Ferrell, a colorful small-time crook dubbed the Hipster Grifter by the late-aughts New York press.
Nearly seven years after the season that went down in history as 2018’s Summer of Scam, propelled by the sagas of Theranos fraudster Elizabeth Holmes and faux heiress Anna Delvey, you could call the current encore a Winter of Scam. But the truth is, the trend the New Yorker named Grifter Season never ended, in pop culture or real life. In 2023, the last year for which FTC data is available, Americans reported losing $10 billion to scams—an all-time high. As AI, deepfakes, crypto, and other tech breakthroughs enable new means of deception, and a President who settled for $25 million with students who alleged they’d been defrauded by Trump University kicks off his second term, scamming is no longer a passing fad; it’s the new normal.
Yet the real people who dominate the scammer entertainment of the 2020s are not, by and large, powerful politicians or titans of industry. The ones who really seem to hold our attention are regular women—or women who were regular until they invented an alternate reality in which they appeared to be extraordinary. Which makes each one of them a fun-house mirror for a true-crime audience often estimated to be 80% female, and a screen on which we project both our anxieties about trusting other women and our own urges to get what we want by breaking bad. The best scammer stories synthesize our ambivalence about these characters in ways that cast light on our fascination with them. The worst, like the tonally incoherent Apple Cider Vinegar, reflect this queasiness without saying much of value about it.
Like any mildly alarming cultural phenomenon, the Summer of Scam inspired reams of reporting that attempted to psychoanalyze scam fans. Common explanations included self-defense—women in particular are thought to consume true crime as a means of gathering information they can use to avoid becoming victims—and schadenfreude, whether directed at the grifter or at her unsympathetic marks. Conversely, a therapist suggested to British Glamour that we find both sides of these stories relatable: “there’s a bit of the scammer and a bit of the scammed in each of us.” In an interview with the New York Times, a producer of the true-crime convention CrimeCon, in making an implicit connection to that other trending topic, conspiracy theories, got metaphysical: “These stories make us ask, ‘What if nothing is as it seems?’”
Surely there’s some truth to each of these theories. Yet as someone who long ago burned out on the true-crime genre at large but still can’t resist a scam saga, I suspect there’s more going on here. If true crime is inherently sordid, wringing cheap thrills out of murders, kidnappings, and abuse that destroyed the lives of real human beings, then the scam subgenre can feel like a slightly healthier vice—Diet Coke to the toxic corn-syrup high of a serial-killer addiction. Scammers, and particularly female scammers, seem less likely to trigger a viewer or reader or listener’s own trauma than the violent criminals who otherwise dominate true crime. The Scam Goddess podcast, from which the Freeform series was adapted, pitches itself as “true crime, but without all the death.” Both versions are hosted by a comedian, Laci Mosley.
Which is not to say that all scam stories are equally innocuous or offer precisely the same pleasures. Perhaps the most benign archetype is the social scammer—characters like Ferrell and Delvey, the subject of a viral New York magazine exposé that begat Shonda Rhimes’ sudsy Netflix hit Inventing Anna, who infiltrate exclusive scenes and leech off their superficial denizens. It’s tough to feel much empathy for the white-guy trustafarian hookups Ferrell, who is Korean American, was able to rip off (for relatively small sums) by appealing to their fetishization of Asianwomen. Business Insider reported that Netflix paid Delvey $320,000 for its docudrama. But her victims, with a few life-ruining exceptions, were mostly rich jet setters and high-end businesses. The stakes are so low, in these cases, that the stories go down more like gossip than crime.
More insidious but also often more fascinating, from a psychological perspective, is the category of so-called spiritual leaders. Docuseries like HBO’s Breath of Fire and Love Has Won: The Cult of Mother God and Freeform’s The Deep End profile women who’ve enriched themselves by manipulating followers searching for a messiah or a sage to bring meaning to their lives. More often than not, these stories end in tragedy. Yet, especially for women in these positions, the lines between deception, desperation, and delusion, which coexist in different ratios for each subject, are thin. The sins of Breath of Fire subject Guru Jagat paled in comparison with those of her predatory male predecessors in the shady tradition of kundalini yoga. The troubled woman who christened herself Mother God died of her own neo-hippie health regimen; her emaciated corpse was blue from consuming colloidal silver.
If these figures promised an escape from the emptiness of the material world, then another, incrementally less sympathetic category of scammers—shady entrepreneurs—have sold themselves as inspiring forces for good within it. Amazon’s LuLaRich follows DeAnne Stidham and her husband Mark, whose multilevel marketing company LuLaRoe promised stay-at-home moms a side hustle that could help support their families. But, like most MLMs, LuLaRoe left many of these women poorer than they were before signing on. Among the most notorious scammers of our time, Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes raised more than $700 million to fund the production of a groundbreaking, minimally invasive blood-test technology that she hadn’t bothered to actually invent. Her rise and fall has been memorialized in multiple podcasts, John Carreyrou’s best seller Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, Alex Gibney’s HBO doc The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, and the wild Hulu drama The Dropout.
While we might not pity the VCs (Tim Draper), corporations (Walgreens), and billionaires (Rupert Murdoch) who invested in Theranos without doing due diligence, it’s harder to laugh off the losses of Holmes’ real victims: the patients misdiagnosed by her faulty machines. In that respect, she wasn’t just a business scammer; she was a medical scammer, a breed whose stories, which prey on and make a mockery of people who really are gravely ill, are uniquely resistant to being twisted into light entertainment. Like Scamanda, whose subject Amanda Riley raised money to fund care she wasn’t getting, Peacock’s 2024 docuseries Anatomy of Lies unravels the yarns of a woman who faked her cancer diagnosis. This grifter was former Grey’s Anatomy writer Elisabeth Finch, and she built a career on deception. Darker still was Belle Gibson’s scam. She not only used cancer fraud as a bankable origin story, but also peddled false hope—and a bogus, potentially lethal alternative to such harrowing treatments as chemo and amputation that her followers were desperate to avoid—to real cancer patients. No wonder Apple Cider Vinegar struggles to strike a balance between seriousness and schadenfreude.
“Words are my forte,” writes Ferrell in You’ll Never Believe Me. “They’re how I got myself into things, and how I got myself out of things.” Known for passing lurid notes scribbled on napkins that would have tattooed revelers scrambling to pay their bar tabs and get her back to their lofts, where she could pilfer bank cards or cell phones, Ferrell was a sort of scenester Scheherezade, crafting fantasies nightly in order to survive the next day. That she proves to be a disarmingly insightful, entertaining narrator of her own misadventures shouldn’t be so surprising.
All grifters are storytellers, weaving fictions more seductive than reality. Those successful enough to pull off true-crime-worthy scams have charm, depth, and psychological complexity that you just can’t find in an overexposed butcher like Jeffrey Dahmer. It’s how they draw in not just their marks, but also audiences learning about their exploits secondhand, in the intimate mediums of TV, podcasts, and memoir. The challenge in adapting scammer stories is to tease out of the villain’s (or antihero’s) tantalizing lies a metanarrative compelling enough to justify the retelling. It’s not enough to breathlessly repeat the things they said; you have to unearth some core of meaning.
In a paper published this past fall in the Journal of Gender Studies, Sarah Banet-Weiser and Kathryn Claire Higgins use The Dropout and Inventing Anna to explore the explicitly gendered nature of our fascination with female scammers. Now that the hypercapitalist girlboss archetype of the early 2010s has collapsed under the weight of pop feminism’s failures, they write, “The con woman summons her historical understanding of precisely how the rules of the game are rigged to weaponize them for her own advantage and enrichment.” Hence the ambivalence predominantly female audiences feel toward this figure. What separates You’ll Never Believe Me and The Dropout from Apple Cider Vinegar, Inventing Anna, and most other scammer content, however, is how effectively the former grapple with the myriad ways in which the protagonists’ gender complicated their deceptions and how they were received, while the latter mostly invite us to marvel at ever more shocking examples of their subjects’ audacity.
At the heart of every true-crime story is a vision of justice. When it comes to female scammers, that means asking: What constitutes justice for a woman who, in order to get more money or success or attention than she could access honestly, hurts people? Gibson—who admitted in 2015 that she never had cancer—lost her reputation, lifestyle, and career but not her freedom. Holmes’ prison sentence, which has been shortened twice, ends in August 2032. Delvey and Ferrell did shorter stints behind bars. Now, both are capitalizing on their infamy; while the fake heiress flamed out early this past fall in Dancing With the Stars, the erstwhile Hipster Grifter is on a redemption tour that, along with the memoir, includes founding a production company dedicated to sharing the stories of women of color.
How we receive each of these outcomes—whether we savor the scammers’ punishment or cheer their rehabilitation, whether our reactions vary based on the severity of the harm they did—says as much about us as it does about the women we love, hate, or love to hate. “Men screw people over all the f-cking time, and not only are they able to go on and live their lives, they’re given thousands of dollars to be the keynote speaker at fancy business conferences,” Ferrell observes, in what is perhaps a reference to Wolf of Wall Street turned motivational speaker Jordan Belfort. “I wonder why they get the opportunity to do all of that, when I, and many other women, do not.” It’s a question worth not just raising but, as Ferrell does, trying to answer.
