What do Pablo Picasso, Frida Kahlo, and a British baker known as The Bread Bamboozler have in common? They’re all artists to Scam Goddess author Laci Mosley, the actor and comedian who admires the audacity of con artists the way others applaud the elegance of painters and poets.
Scammers have always fascinated Mosley, who costarred in the recent iCarly reboot and in such films as Netflix’s The Out-Laws. She sees frauds as highly motivated strivers who may not have the credentials, talent, or connections to achieve their goals, and yet decide to go for it anyway. This fixation led Mosley five years ago to start the Scam Goddess podcast, a cheeky weekly treatise on con artists of note, which in turn led to the just-released Scam Goddess book, along with an upcoming TV series, currently in production. Of all the benefits that have come from turning scam scholarship into a brand, though, perhaps the top one is absorbing enough dirt about how fraudsters operate to make herself utterly scam-proof.
“The confidence of con artists is something I think we can all learn from,” Mosley says.
Some of what she’s picked up recently from studying the likes of Fyre Fest founder Billy McFarland and scheming activist Shaun King has helped her protect herself. Prior to that, however, she was emulating con artists in her own life, in non-nefarious ways.
“Walking into every room and acting like you belong there was probably the most impressive thing I learned from scammers in the beginning,” she says. “I used to sneak into Hollywood parties I had no business being in because we would just walk in dressed like everyone else and act like it was the most dusty shit we had ever seen in our lives.”
By the time she began landing auditions and booking roles, the bigger picture had cohered. Mosley saw the matrix of machinations undergirding Hollywood. She realized her fellow actors were trying to posture their way past casting directors, while film and TV execs pretended to possess hit-picking powers that were more akin to a psychic’s predictions. Farther north, in Silicon Valley, she saw the fleece-vests at tech startups selling a future that might never exist; and beyond the state’s borders, an orgy of jacked-up “sale” prices, bartending academies, and all manner of crookery. She could now see the whole universe, and it was scams all the way down.
Fortunately, immersing herself in them offered all the insights needed to inoculate against them.
Don’t engage in the first place
The best way to shut down a scam, Mosley claims, is to not engage with one in the first place. That advice doesn’t translate to never talking to strangers on general principle—making friends while on line for a bar bathroom, after all, is one of life’s lovely little pleasures. There’s no need to give time and attention, though, to random characters with suspicious intentions.
“We all have a sense of politeness where, if someone approaches us on the street with a sob story, we tend to hear them out because of the social contract,” she says. “But sometimes, you’ve got to just keep walking or hang up the phone or not answer that email.”
If someone makes themselves impossible to ignore, though, make them play the waiting game.
“When someone approaches you with an emergency, an opportunity, or a big ask, just say wait two weeks,” Mosley says. “Most things can wait two weeks.”
Be aware of your needs
That feeling of being bound by unfailing politeness is a hallmark of the people-pleaser, a type of person Mosley claims is supremely susceptible to scammers. People-pleasers might be more preoccupied with the imagined needs of others than their own actual needs, leaving themselves vulnerable to silver-tongued scammers who intuit their lack of fulfillment and pounce.
“Every human being has needs, and if a scammer catches you at the right time with the right level of desperation, they could certainly exploit yours,” Mosley says. “When you’re aware of what you need, though, you can start figuring out when you’re getting desperate and stop projecting it.”
Whether those needs include more downtime, a higher salary, or a new relationship, understanding their magnetic pull to you is like kryptonite to any huckster dangling them as bait.
If it’s too convenient, it’s probably con-venient
If the tech world seems overrun with Juicero-like scams ensconced in a thin patina of legitimacy, it’s for good reason. “Scammers are innovators,” Mosley says. “When a new window opens, they’re there.”
It’s for this reason that one should always have their guard up when perfect solutions to new problems arrive at a convenient-yet-statistically-improbable time. Take, for instance, the wave of charlatans who emerged very early in the pandemic, hawking homemade COVID tests before the real thing was ready for mass distribution.
“They would be hanging out in parking lots, and all they did was put on a little costume, set up a fake tent, get some swabs, and charge people like $200 for a COVID test they weren’t actually getting results for,” Mosley recalls.
For anyone who does get taken in by a convenient offer too good to resist, though, the U.S. government has a website for reporting the situation.
Remember: Anyone can be a scam target
People who aren’t pleasers aren’t automatically safe from scams either. In fact, the people who most think they’re safe might be putting themselves at risk just through sheer overconfidence. According to Mosley, the biggest mistake people make that leaves them potentially exposed to scammers is thinking it could never happen to them.
“Not being judgmental toward those who’ve been victimized definitely keeps you in a safer space,” she says. “Because then, when you see red flags, instead of thinking, There’s no way this would ever happen to me, you start to actually do the math. And if the math’s not mathing, maybe you won’t get scammed.”
While Mosley allows that it’s technically possible for even her to get scammed, even today, she’s earned the right at this point to higher-than-average confidence on that front. She’s still an occasional target for grifters, like anyone else, but five years into crafting a brand as a connoisseur of con artists, the odds are in her favor. A would-be blackmail operation learned as much recently, when Mosley declined to panic and ignored the blackmailers’ creepy email.
“Obviously, if they had done one quick Google, they would’ve realized I was a scam goddess,” she says. “Like, dude, you’re not gonna get me like this.”