There are cons in every period — in the 2000s we had Enron, Bernie Madoff and James Frey’s pseudo-memoir “A Million Little Pieces.” But there’s something distinct and era-defining about the current crop of high-profile scams. They hinge on the buying, selling and stealing of cultural capital, taking advantage of preconceived ideas of what success looks like. They’re made possible by the ephemerality of an economy where, to quote Ivanka Trump, heiress to a scamming dynasty, “If someone perceives something to be true, it is more important than if it is in fact true.”
Elizabeth Holmes, founder of the biotech startup Theranos, raised hundreds of millions of dollars by styling herself as a beautiful distaff Steve Jobs, a Stanford dropout who promised to disrupt the medical field. She incarnated an unattainably ascetic Silicon Valley ideal; as The New York Times T magazine once described her, “She only pauses in her work to run — 7 miles a day.”
Elites adored her — Bill Clinton interviewed her on stage at the Clinton Global Initiative in 2015, and Rupert Murdoch and Betsy DeVos invested in Theranos. But her company’s core technology didn’t work, and she’s now facing up to 20 years in prison on fraud and conspiracy charges. Her story is the subject of a best-selling book, a hit podcast and a feature film that’s set to star Jennifer Lawrence. A documentary directed by Alex Gibney premieres on HBO next week.
The Fyre Festival leveraged the modern malady of FOMO, or fear of missing out. Promoters used supermodels and social media influencers to sell packages that cost as much as $12,000 for what was supposed to be a highly Instagrammable music festival in the Bahamas. Attendees, expecting to show off pictures of themselves living like rock stars, arrived to find what looked like a soggy half-built refugee camp. The festival’s co-founder, Billy McFarland, has since been sentenced to six years in prison by a judge who called him a “serial fraudster.” It’s the subject of two recent documentaries.
There are lots more. In a New Yorker piece last month, Dan Mallory, who wrote the best-selling thriller “The Woman in the Window” under the pseudonym A.J. Finn, was revealed to be a charming but highly manipulative fabulist who lied about having a Ph.D. from Oxford, among other things. (His book reportedly has striking similarities to a 1995 Sigourney Weaver movie called, amazingly, “Copycat.”) Anna Delvey — whose real name is Anna Sorokin — posed as a rich woman planning to open a chic arts club and wormed her way into New York society before being indicted for scamming hundreds of thousands of dollars from acquaintances and hotels. Shonda Rhimes is making a Netflix series based on her story.
And now, the high-profile fraudster who has captured the country’s attention is William Singer, who masterminded — and then helped the FBI expose — the college cheating scandal that has swept up famous actresses, wealthy executives and athletic coaches.
Fittingly, it seems that Singer once aspired to make a reality TV show about the college admissions process, which he called, on a 2010 audition tape obtained by TMZ, a “game.” He recognized that the players aren’t high school students, but rich parents who are competing against their friends. Singer described how parents would call him frantically on Sunday morning, after Saturday night dinner parties where they heard all about the accomplishments of their friends’ kids.
Among the many reasons this scandal is so fascinating and so maddening is that it reveals the college admissions process itself as something of a con. Families across the country gear their lives toward a competition to help their children secure a spot in a top college, and hopefully a foothold in the meritocracy. Adolescence becomes, for many, a grind of test-taking and extracurricular activities that leaves kids anxious and exhausted. But poor and middle-class students are playing a game that’s rigged in favor of richer families who wield countless advantages, only the most of extravagant of which are illegal.
If they get in to selective colleges, those who aren’t rich often take out giant student loans that will burden them throughout their adulthood. And for what? Education is a priceless thing, but in most cases that’s not really what the elite college competition is about.
The point is a very specific kind of exchange. Smart kids get to make connections with kids whose parents bought their way in, helpful since the rich kids are the ones who are likely to end up with power in the wider world. Rich kids learn to act smart. They all get a credential that entitles them to a higher place in the social hierarchy than they might have otherwise. In a highly stratified country, social mobility can be a confidence game.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.