A fall haiku to kick off November:
Fall rose, overnight
Touch of red in every glance
Eyes brimming and bright
Scamming the System, One Tennis Ball at a Time (An Excerpt)
By: Clara Drimmer
It’s been a year since my obsession with scammers began. It started with a podcast, as all embarrassingly niche interests do. I started listening to Scamfluencers, a show where lovable Canadian journalists, and friends, Scaachi Koul and Sarah Hagi tell stories about cons, the artists who craft them, and their downfalls.1 I’m not exactly sure why these stories gripped my psyche. I do know that it probably says something questionable about me that I give over my earspace to these stories.
There is something gripping about scams, maybe because we are all so familiar with the feeling left in its trace. We’re conned by countless things, often in small ways – credit scores, security deposits, terms & conditions, health insurance, and shitty, slimy political candidates come to mind. We know the powerlessness that bubbles up. And this powerlessness often comes at the hands of our institutions. Banks, tenant laws, healthcare, and governments respectively.
Personally, I’ve never experienced a person-to-person scam like identity theft – the type of fraud that drains the resources and energy of normal people, often those who are most financially vulnerable in the first place. I’m not ignoring that these kinds of scams are by farrrr the most common, not to mention our institutions – governments, courts, banks – ignore these. Fraud puts corporations squarely at fault for selling and profiting from our personal information, movements, and keystrokes. Consequently, these scams only become easier to carry out and more prevalent.
But once in a while, we are surprised when the scam of an institution or the uber rich is made public, and it's just the teensiest bit satisfying to watch. Think Gamestop, think bitcoin bullshit. I can’t be the only one who feels this way – I mean, come on, we all watched Ocean’s 8.
There is one con in particular that I find fascinating; Grigor Sargsyan. Grigor’s scam involved all the elements you’d expect from a scam artist – money, fame, deception, burner phones, and general shadiness. But Gregor’s scam revolved around tennis – a sport that some (definitely not me…) would drop into the bucket of boring rich sports, right there along with racquetball.
1 Unfortunately this podcast is on Wondery, Amazon’s podcast network. Perhaps the biggest scam of all???!!!
Sources:
Kevin Sieff, “The Maestro: The man who built the biggest match-fixing ring in tennis,” The Washington Post, September 7, 2023. https://web.archive.org/web/20240516121458/https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2023/tennis-match-fixing-itf-grigor-sargsyan/
Kevin Sieff, “The Maestro: The man who built the biggest match-fixing ring in tennis,” The Washington Post, September 7, 2023. https://web.archive.org/web/20240516121458/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/ interactive/2023/tennis-match-fixing-itf-grigor-sargsyan/
Scaachi Koul and Sarah Hagi, “Episode 103: Game. Set. Scam,” Scamfluencers, April 29, 2024.
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What's happening in our W.E.R.L.D. <3
What Sydnie is:
Wearing: Cheetah-print coat
Eating: Halloween candy
Reading: DMs
Listening to: New people
Doing: Dates
What Sarah is:
Wearing: Band-Aids
Eating: Delicacies
Reading: Ur texts over ur shoulder when we r on the subway
Listening to: Blondie
Doing: Coughing
What Clara is:
Wearing: Layers
Eating: Baguettes!
Reading: Magazines delivered to the old tenants of my apartment
Listening to: CMAT
Doing: Drinking Emergen-C
What Veda is:
Wearing: Chelsea boots
Eating: Banana bread
Reading: PeePee PooPoo #1 by: Caroline Cash
Listening to: Dear Nora
Doing: Talking on the phone
What Rylee is:
Wearing: Devil horns
Eating: String cheese
Reading: Text messages about voting (a frankly absurd amount)
Listening to: What a Relief by: Katie Gavin
Doing: Purchasing a suit
THANK YOU FOR READING!
xoxo
SplashLand
