“I didn’t steal money for drugs,” Kari Ferrell writes in her new memoir. “I stole money in hopes that people wouldn’t forget me.” It’s a surprisingly emotional reveal in a book full of emotional reveals. And all the big feelings are even more surprising once you learn Kari is known as the first ever viral scammer, making international headlines in 2009 with a most hilarious moniker: The Hipster Grifter. 

Kari tells the whole story, with a convincing redemption arc, in You’ll Never Believe Me: A Life of Lies, Second Tries, and Things I Should Only Tell My Therapist. She came on the show this week to talk about the book and her journey, and one thing was clear: She’s just not like those other scammers. 

Her vulnerability and self-awareness stand in stark contrast to the other criminal swindlers we’ve gotten to know via viral headlines and true crime docs over the last few years. Billy McFarland didn’t learn from Fyre Fest. In fact, he was scheming from prison and is now putting on Fyre Fest 2.0. Anna Delvey isn’t contrite: She’s become a Dancing WIth The Stars contestant threatening to sue cast members of The View over criticising her turn on the show. Jen Shah of The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City is in prison now, but I’d wager she’ll be back on Bravo as soon as she’s out, unapologetic and with an even bigger following. 

The first thing you have to know about Kari is that her scamming happened at a very different time: 2009, at the peak of hipster Williamsburg, and in the early days of internet virality, when Gawker and Vice set the tone of the Internet. After cashing hot checks (remember those?) all over Salt Lake City, Ferrell made her way to Brooklyn after a stint in jail to find new victims, usually bearded (and white) hipsters who would get a little too sweaty at a Girl Talk concert. “I never scammed any person of color,” Ferrell told me. Also, “no women.” 

After conning her way into a job at Vice News, she was discovered, and became the subject of breathless coverage from the likes of Vice, Gawker, The New York Observer and more, with some news outlets even starting tip lines to chase her, and others even leaking her nudes online. 

When I asked Kari what makes for a good mark, her answer was surprisingly simple: “For men especially, it’s the entitlement.” And bad shoes, “because it means that they’re not thinking about the bigger picture.” 

As convincing as she was when teaching me the rules of scamming, she was most poignant when talking about how she’s changed: How she’s spent countless hours in therapy figuring out what made her do what she did, and how her new mission is promoting class solidarity, mutual aid, and fighting the larger systems that scam all of us more than we’d like to admit, every day. It was a breath of fresh air compared to those scammers I mentioned above — the ones with no real contrition or self awareness. 

What changed? Why can an OG viral scammer like Kari move towards healing and redemption, and all those other scammers of note I mentioned, the ones popular today, cannot? “The awareness of everything [being]... a scam, right?” Ferrell told me. “We’re all consistently being scammed by capitalism, by the government, by all of these systemic things. And so I think as the world became more aware of that, it’s like, let’s look at the fun, the entertaining ones.” Basically, our collective nihilism has made all of us much more prone to love a scammer, and for a scammer to never have to show any regret.

Our conversation left me heartened in a way I didn’t expect, but it also left me asking myself a big question: Why do I love scams so much? As much as I resent Billy McFarland, Jen Shah, and Anna Delvey, I can’t stop watching them. In fact, I watched more than one Fyre Fest documentary. (For the record, there are two, and they’re both great.)

The question brought me back to one of my sacred texts: an essay that explains, to a tee, our current pop culture moment. It’s an article from SSENSE, called “Everything Is Bravo,” written by Emily Kirkpatrick. She makes the case that the rise of reality television and social media virality itself has allowed all of us to take part in a certain scam of performance, every day. 

“Social media, with its eternal promise of fame, racking up followers, and easy money, has created a generation of micro reality stars endlessly vying for our attention (and also existing as our competition, in the way that we’re all really just one viral post away from stumbling into influencer-dom)... While living in a society has always entailed a performance of the self to a certain extent, for many online, it’s now become hard to know where that performance ends and the real person begins, especially when your audience remains eternally present.”

It’s been more than 15 years after Kari ushered in the era of the viral scammer. But now, fully entrenched in the attention economy of social media and reality TV, we are all so close to going viral ourselves if we just get one post right. That in and of itself is a bit of a scam, no? It shouldn’t be so easy to get famous. But now that it is, the scam of pulling off quick fame isn’t just appealing to watch, but to perform. We’ve entered a moment of media scammer, in which the scamming is not a bug, but a feature. And while I will probably continue to rail against all of this, I know I won’t be able to look away. 

You can see or hear Kari teach me how to scam in this week’s episode, and also find out what scammer name I’d give myself. Thanks for reading. Have a nice weekend. And if you’re so inclined, write back, and let me know your favorite scams.

Check out the latest episodes of The Sam Sanders Show here. 

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