Alexandra Schwarz the third New Yorker writer on the Critics at Large podcast about George Santos made an important point about technology. Scams are given a golden opportunity by new technology like the rise of televangelists in the 1980s. The latest example is Crypto Currency where space for scams has skyrocketed and as P.T. Barnum said, suckers are born every minute. The Internet itself is a giant example. So is Go Fund Me. And of course, as a result scams abound

Closely related is the arrival of new immigrants to a new country. Mae West starred in the 1937 film Every Day’s a Holiday, written by and starring Mae West as Peaches O’Dea who sold the Brooklyn Bridge for $200 to greenhorns arriving straight off the boat to the land of opportunity. She assured buyers that if the bridge got run down she would send them another one. In the land of opportunity buyers were eager to buy because they were in the land of opportunity, not knowing that no one had a better opportunity than scam artists.

As Alexandra Schwarz said, “We are again in a golden age of scamming stories.” There is an IT fest of scams  happening in books and movies. Another example was Elizabeth Holmes who in January 2022, was found guilty on four charges of defrauding investors in the Theranos scandal where a young woman claimed to be doing complex chemical engineering with a mere high school degree. She claimed to be making health care accessible to everyone in the country by her revolutionary inventions related to blood analysis.