Welcome to Call Your Girlfriend, a podcast for long-distance festies everywhere.

I'm Amina Tussel, and I'm Anne Friedman. On today's agenda, a taxonomy of scammers.

Fake royals, political grifters, messy bitches who live for drama, self-declared saints,

wellness icons, pyramid schemers, and Silicon Valley tech scammers.

Hi Anne Friedman, how's it going? Um, so good. I'm so excited about today's episode.

I am super excited about today's episode also, so let's get to it.

I have to tell you that I want to take a little bit of like a pause to just acknowledge the like

zeitgeist pre-dating work that we have done on this podcast because this week the New York Times

has an editorial about grift in the Trump administration. The like New York Times editorial

board has an op-ed at this week. The headline is grifters gonna grift.

And I'm just like, wow, you remember like in like 2015 during the election and in like 2016 when

we even had an episode called American Grifters, I'm like, welcome. Welcome New York Times.

You know, it's nuts. There was that like great New York Times magazine story earlier.

I think it was like last year around the fire fast. The lie in that I will never forget.

It was like scamming has entered its baroque phase. And this some beautiful shit going on here.

Like it is artistically like beautiful. What is happening? Right. Very artful like

height of grift. Right. Like that piece was by Karina Chokano who is great. And then we've also

had Maria Conocova on the podcast who wrote this whole book called The Confidence Game where she

basically points out that like in her book that scam and grift are like tend to rise at moments

of like great like social change and upheaval, which like part of me is like, isn't that every moment

in time, but also it does seem like there is a preponderance of scamming happening right now.

So we're going to endeavor to categorize many of the like recent scams slash ongoing scams.

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