This is the golden age of the grifter – and there’s a podcast for every con

Truly we are living in the golden age of the grifter. From Fyre Fest to the WeWork empire to Theranos to the personal development cult NXIVM, we see a charismatic person promising us endless growth, pleasure or wealth and we give them all our money.

The con-man economy doesn’t just stop at the men and women leading these frauds and profiting wildly from them. (Some of them go to jail, yes, but WeWork leader/charlatan Adam Neumann was paid many millions of dollars just to go away.) There is also now a podcast, usually sponsored by a security system, for every con.

There’s a ten-part series on the ‘orgasm cult’ One Taste (reviewed in The Spectator’s 6 February issue), an 11- part series on multilevel marketing wellness scams (The Dream), a ten-part series on the ‘Hollywood Con Queen’ who lured random actors, make-up artists and trainers to Indonesia for filmmaking jobs that didn’t actually exist and then had them driven around Jakarta to look at its main tourist attractions, like some terrifyingly insistent tourism bureau (Chameleon).