Summer is ending, but the season of scamming is far from over. In fact, if there's one thing we learned from these past few months of grifters dominating pop culture, it's that a scam is coming when you least expect it — and also from whom you least expect.
Refinery29's resident scam expert Leah Carroll dropped by our Facebook Watch show After After Party to reflect back on the scammers who rose to notoriety this year. Carroll, who wrote the true crime book Down City: A Daughter's Story of Love, Memory, and Murder, is a devoted fan of true crime and an expert on all things duplicitous.
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"I think Anna Delvey is my favorite scam," Carroll told host Sonia Denis . "So she came to the US and she just basically went into banks and she'd be like, 'I need $100,000 line of credit.' And they'd be like, 'You are a white lady, sure!' She would live in all these hotels and she would befriend people and she would take them out to fancy lunches...then she would slowly con them into giving her money, or she invited a friend to go to Morocco and said 'Oh can you put it on your credit card, I'm gonna pay you back when we get home' and it was a $65,000 trip to Morocco."
Many of us watched this saga unfold from afar, content in our misconception that it could never happen to us. But, Carroll warns, it certainly could. Scammers prey on our insecurities, but there's a way to spot them.
"The way they fit into society, they're often people that other people really like a lot," she explained. "So they usually have a skill that they'll use to make people feel really special and important, so they actually tend to be really magnetic personality types."
Watch the full episode below!