The Guardian

From Fyre festival to Hustlers: why are we so obsessed with scammers?

This year has seen a treasure trove’s worth of scamming documentaries, podcasts, TV shows and movies, all appealing to a collective interest in the con
Kirsten Dunst, Jennifer Lopez and Elizabeth Holmes. Illustration: Erum Salam

2019 is shaping up to be the year of the scam. This is not a new idea; scams have been on the mind since at least January, when the mother of all Schadenfreude cannons, Fyre festival, was memorialized in (and Netflix and Hulu documentaries. I arrived at this conclusion around then, when I created a Google Doc (“Scammed”) to document a single week in which Fyre content competed for space with the , the exposé on bestselling author and , and a of the Atlantic in which 50 articles catalogued

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