The Links x Sunday Long Read guide to online scams

12 tales of greed, grift and all-around shenanigans

America loves a scam story. Consider Netflix: The streamer spotlights a genre called “Schemers & Scammers,” devoted to tales of the shady, the greedy, the predatory, the corrupt and the scandalous.

Or scroll on over to Spotify, where scam podcasts have become a pop culture craze onto themselves. You can spend weeks unraveling individual frauds, a la “The Dream” and “The Dropout,” or tune into a new con every week on shows like Scam Goddess.

I recently asked Jacob Feldman, the co-founder and managing editor of the legendary longform journalism newsletter The Sunday Long Read, why scam stories seem to captivate readers. Since 2014, The SLR’s esteemed team of curators has highlighted the best in new journalism every weekend; earlier this year, they also spun off a monthly true crime newsletter. That newsletter, edited by The Washington Post’s Albert Samaha, regularly features stories about grifters, con artists and other frauds.

Scam stories are popular for two reasons, Jacob theorized: “We're all secretly terrified of being scammed ourselves, and we secretly harbor a bit of envy for the scammers among us, who have found ways to work the system (and live with themselves for it).”

“Stories of their downfall also offer a bit of moral cover for the small deceptions we accept — and commit — every day,” he added. What is the internet, really, if not an interlocking system of small deceptions?

To compile this guide to online scams, small and otherwise, Jacob and I embarked on a scam study, of sorts. We first brainstormed a list of almost 40 longform scam stories from the past 20 years, drawing from our newsletter archives, journalism awards lists and other sources. We then read them, ranked them, debated our favorites and came up with the following syllabus. Paid subscribers, I’ll share a link to the full list of all 40 stories in Saturday’s edition.

This is the fourth in a series of monthly round-ups where I dig into the archives and partner with experts to bring you the best reading around a given topic or theme. Previous installments covered infamous viral essays, the moral panic around teen social media and online dating. If you’d like to nominate a future theme or flag a scam story we missed, please let me know in the comments.

And if you’re interested in getting more recommendations like this — recommendations that encourage you to spend a little more time actually reading, rather than just scrolling — I could not recommend The Sunday Long Read more enthusiastically (!!).

🌟 CLICK HERE to view all 12 stories, plus 11 related ones, in a quick, clickable format.🌟

The Links x Sunday Long Reads Guide to Online Scams

“Meet The Women Trying To Catch One Of Canada’s Most Prolific Romance Scammers,” by Courtney Shea for Chatelaine (January 2020)

Marcel Andre Vautour is an audacious conman, even by the standards of romance scammers: In 2018, he tricked three educated 40-somethings into relationships, then bilked them out of tens of thousands of dollars. In the aftermath, however, the three women found each other, launched a social media counteroffensive and eventually tracked Vautour to a Salvation Army in British Columbia. It’s not justice, exactly … but it sure is satisfying to see Vautour’s victims reclaim their power. 

• Why we recommend it: There were plenty of romance scam stories to choose from as we put together this list (and several made the final cut!). As many of them explain, victims are generally kind, trusting and isolated. Even after the ruse is up, they can be hesitant to admit what happened. Here, those duped by Marcel Andre Vautour actually found each other, offering fellow victims empathy — if not justice — in the end. Courtney Shea wisely expands the scope of her story too, to look at how romance scamming has changed in the digital age and to interrogate where the justice system fails to mark the point at which love ends and fraud begins. 

• If you like this, you may also like … Katherine Laidlaw’s September 2020 profile of an equally daring Canadian conman, Shaun Rootenberg, who used similar techniques on two high-powered women in the Toronto area. One of those women even got him a job as a healthcare executive. Canadians: Are y’all okay?! What’s with all the romance scams?? 

“The Great Zelle Pool Scam,” by Devin Friedman for Insider (October 2023)

Devin Friedman just wanted a cool status symbol in the form of a backyard pool. When his pool guy emailed and asked for payment through Zelle, Friedman was happy to make the transfer. Only later did he learn that such emails can be faked and such transfers can be lost to the void forever. If all stories of peer-to-peer payment fraud were so genuinely funny, maybe someone would pay attention to the problem!

• Why we recommend it: Devin Friedman’s personal story feels like a roller coaster. You know where this is going — the headline says it all — and yet Friedman offers a shockingly enjoyable ride as he plunges you into the frustration, embarrassment and anxiety that follows his $30,000 transfer to very-much-not-the-pool-guy.

• All’s well that Zelle’s well: In the process of investigating whether the Friedmans ever actually got their pool, Caitlin discovered that the family has since decamped to Madrid. So when you think about it, they ended up with a vastly more impressive and enviable status symbol than the woefully middle-class pool they started out with. 

“The Grindr Grifter,” by John H. Tucker for Observer (June 2019)

In 2018, a mysterious and charismatic investor named Daniel Spence seemed poised to save Northside Media from ruin. He’d matched with an employee of the company, which publishes Brooklyn Magazine, on Grindr; he then leveraged that connection to meet its chief executive officer. Said CEO was days away from selling Northside to Spence when the sweet-talking 32-year-old was arrested for theft, embezzlement and parole violations. He had, it turned out, been scamming friends, lovers, roommates and random acquaintances since college. 

• Why Links recommends it: “Grindr grifter” really sells Spence short — this guy was a far more versatile financial conman. In fact, he probably represents the most multifaceted, multitalented scammer in any of the many profiles we read. Romance scams, Ponzi schemes, fraudulent loans, credit card theft, false purchase offers … Spence could, and did, do absolutely everything. Moreover, he did it while living on the lam with his mother (!).  

• Enter the grifterverse: “I got Anna Delvey’d,” one of Spence’s victims told reporter Josh Tucker. It’s great (and terrible) that our scam canon has reached the point where even victims are referencing other notable con artists. In addition to faux German heiress Anna Delvey (famously profiled here by The Cut), you might also remember the Hipster Grifter and the Tinder Swindler as high-profile standouts of the genre. 

“Scamworld: ‘Get Rich Quick Schemes’ Mutate Into an Online Monster,” by Joseph L. Flatley for The Verge (May 2012)

Long before “MLM” entered the pop culture vernacular, courtesy companies like Herbalife and LuLaRoe, an equally shady breed of internet marketer hooked the eager and desperate on so-called “get rich quick” ventures. These schemes typically tricked gullible people into spending huge sums of money on online businesses or coaching that never came to be … sometimes using, without irony, techniques borrowed from the self-help industry. 

• Why SLR recommends it: I was pretty shocked by how open these scam artists were about their tactics. But it seems they justify their work (or came to it in the first place) because they see the entire world around them—relationships, college, talk shows—as a series of scams themselves. Plus, these guys discovered they can make an extra buck by selling advice on how to separate desperate people from their money to desperate people looking to get rich. Yet more proof that irony died with the internet.

• If you like this, you may also like… Rachel Monroe’s 2017 deep dive on more literal (snake) oil salesmen. For The New Yorker, she infiltrated the ranks of Young Living and doTerra, essential oil companies that — like the internet marketers of the early 2010s — promised eager, desperate people health, wealth and independence in an otherwise uncertain market.

“The Romance Scammer on My Sofa,” by Carlos Barragán for The Atavist (June 2023)

Barragán began investigating the “Yahoo boys” after his mother fell victim to one: In 2015, she told her family she was in love with a divorced American soldier she’d met on Tinder — in reality, a scam artist based in Nigeria. Nigeria has long been a hotbed for international cons, beginning even before the Nigerian prince scams of the 1990s and 2000s. But as Barragán learns during four weeks in Lagos, the dark art of “doing yahoo” has grown both more sophisticated and, tragically, more intimate, with scammers spending months or even years reeling in their lonely, far-away victims. 

• Why Links recommends it: I generally don’t like “quest” stories that fail to fulfill their stated goal. But even though Barragán never finds the scammer who conned his mom … I really like this one! It’s an unusually wide-ranging and empathetic study of the Yahoo boys, from their modern-day YouTube anthems to colonial history. And I appreciate the depth of his on-the-ground reporting.  

• If you like this, you may also like … two other shoe-leather investigations that report on international cyberscams from the scene: “The Sextortion Scammers of Rural India” (Rest of World) and “Who’s Making All Those Scam Calls?” (New York Times Magazine).

“I Accidentally Uncovered a Nationwide Scam on Airbnb,” by Allie Conti for Vice (October 2019)

Shray Goel and Shaunik Raheja surely rue the day they tried to scam Allie Conti. Conti booked an Airbnb for a trip to Chicago … then was mysteriously rebooked at the last minute in one of the host’s other, lesser properties. In the course of investigating what happened, Conti discovered a national network of fake host accounts, orchestrated by Goel and Raheja. The massive bait-and-switch scheme double-booked guests in high-end units, then intimidated or tricked them into worse accommodations. 

• Why we recommend it: Every journalist will find a little inspiration in the way Allie Conti turned her shitty stay into an investigative masterpiece. Maybe everything really is copy!    

• Five years later: A federal grand jury indicted Goel and Raheja on federal fraud charges last January. Investigators, following up on Conti’s reporting, linked the pair with more than 10,000 (!) misleading and fraudulent reservations at 100 properties.

“The Package King of Miami,” by Ezra Marcus for New York (May 2024)

Programming wunderkind Matt Bergwall fit right in at the University of Miami, a campus where, as Ezra Marcus writes, “everyone is an influencer; everyone is launching a brand.” But when Bergwall started posting pictures of himself wearing a $41,000 Rolex and lounging in a Dubai infinity pool, friends wondered where the money was coming from. Welcome to the shady, high-stakes world of retail return fraud. 

• Why Links recommends it: Bergwall’s story alone is absolutely wild — in typically late-teenage fashion, he’s both amazingly bright and deeply, stupidly reckless. But his saga also speaks to our larger, increasingly spammy culture, both online (think: sports betting, crypto, many “influence” schemes, other promises of easy, independent wealth) and off it (surely there’s no greater scam than our gilded economy — on full display in Miami, where Bergwall lived). 

• Where is he now? Bergwall pleaded guilty to mail fraud conspiracy earlier this month, and faces a potential sentence of up to 20 years in prison. But based on federal sentencing guidelines and the terms of his plea deal — he’s “cooperating fully” with federal investigators, helping them catch other retail return scammers — it seems likely that the Package King of Miami will serve far less time than that.

“7 Months Inside an Online Scam Labor Camp,” by Isabelle Qian for The New York Times (December 2023)

Neo Lu was lured to Thailand with the promise of a good translation job. But after leaving China, the 28-year-old was promptly kidnapped and trafficked into Myanmar to work at a cyberscamming operation. These “scam labor camps,” which have proliferated in Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos, force trafficked workers to build fake online personas and carry out so-called “pig butchering” scams. Lu’s group alone made $4.4 million in five months from 214 victims. 

• Why SLR recommends it: Sometimes there are victims on both sides of a scam. In fact, the scale of the trafficking and forced labor, numbering in the hundreds of thousands, are inconceivable. Neo Lu risked everything to make the details public.

• Go deeper on this: ProPublica also published a harrowing investigation of Southeast Asian cyberscam camps in 2022. Last December, CNN ran a special investigation titled “Billion-dollar Scam,” which included videos and text message transcripts from trafficked scam workers. 

“The Truth Behind the Amazon Mystery Seeds,” by Chris Heath for The Atlantic (July 2021)

In the summer of 2020 — already a strange and paranoid season — thousands of people around the U.S. began receiving mysterious, unsolicited seed packages. The seeds sparked wild conspiracy theories; officials later concluded they were part of an e-commerce scam. But the truth was ultimately simpler, and more eye-rolly, than that.

• Why SLR recommends it: This story was published three short years ago, but it reads as if it was sent from another planet. I’m usually a bit annoyed by stories that take so long to get to their findings, but the twist here was worth it. 

• Bad seeds: Amazon banned foreign seed sales in the U.S. after this agricultural hullabaloo. But that hasn’t stopped so-called “brushing scams,” in which third-party sellers ship unsolicited orders out to random customers, then use their name and order number to write up fake reviews. 

“Priscila, Queen of the Rideshare Mafia,” by Lauren Smiley for Wired (July 2014)

Priscila Barbosa built an empire stealing unsuspecting drivers’ identities and using them to help undocumented immigrants secure work on rideshare and delivery apps. It doesn’t get much more American, or made-for-Netflix, than that.  

• Why SLR recommends it: This was  a late entry to our list, but a worthy one. I’ve already interrupted multiple only-slightly-related conversations to drop nuggets of info I learned from Lauren Smiley’s vivacious story. She peels back the curtain on all the nitty-gritty details our gig economy overlords would prefer to leave unseen and discovers a true American dream.

• Following up: Barbosa’s Instagram profile features heavily in this piece, but it’s … tragically (and sensibly) set to private. Never fear! She seems pretty liberal with the follow-requests and approved me (Caitlin) in a few hours. I personally look forward to following her glamorous post-prison life on the ‘gram. Already, she’s posing poolside and at four-star beach hotels. 

“Scammers Are Targeting Teenage Boys on Social Media—and Driving Some to Suicide,” by Olivia Carville for Bloomberg Businessweek (April 2024)

Romance cons have traditionally targeted older people and played out over months or years. But this fast-growing scam tricks teenage boys into sharing nude pictures, then uses their shame and vulnerability to force them into sending payment. Some desperate boys have died by suicide within hours of receiving the first text. Worse: The scammers, who aren’t much older than their victims, then go on to taunt the children’s family and friends.

• Why SLR recommends it: This story is the worst-case combination of every online scam trend. Yahoo boys share blackmail scripts with thousands of readers that explain step-by-step how to solicit nude images and threaten to share them with the world; families are forever marred in a single night; and victims’ advocates allege that the biggest companies in the world could have done more to limit the devastation.

• If you like this, you may also like… Paul Solotaroff’s investigation of Snapchat’s teen opioid crisis for Rolling Stone, which — together with this sextortion story — paints a pretty dour picture of modern teenagehood. 

“Vigilantes for Views: The YouTube Pranksters Harassing Suspected Scam Callers in India,” by Andrew Deck and Raksha Kumar for Rest of World (January 2023)

Art Kulik and Ashton Bingham, the founders of the YouTube channel Trilogy Media, are locked in a dubious, one-sided battle with hundreds of Indian call center workers. Since 2016, the American duo has identified centers that they think are running scams, then orchestrated elaborate pranks against them — documenting the chaos (glitter bombs, live mice) for an audience of more than 80,000. Like the old-school scambaiters that preceded them, Kulik and Bingham’s tactics raise lots of questions. But their ethics are further muddied by the pair’s financial stake in their particular brand of vigilante justice.

• Why SLR recommends it: Reading all of these stories, it becomes clear just how futile it is to fight back against scammers by leading them on or even retaliating against them. And yet, the impulse seems universal. Because simply ignoring the constant barrages surely doesn’t seem to be working.

• If you like this, you may also like… Ron Rosenbaum’s early dispatch from the world of scam-baiting, published in The Atlantic in 2007. Despite the intervening 16 years, these two stories ask the same central question: “Are the scam-baiters Jedi-like cyber-guardians … or are they cyber-vigilantes engaging in vicious pranks that can, at times, border on racism?”

That's it! Until the weekend. Warmest virtual regards,

Caitlin