MoMA R&D
Salon 53 Scam
Introduction: Paola Antonelli
Alexander Stein
Lana Swartz
Jaqueline Burns Koven
Gabe Whaley
Jovan Scott Lewis
Q&A
Video Contribution: Daniel Treisman
Video Contribution: Jonathan Levy
Video Contribution: Angèle Christin
Video Contribution: Jasmine McNealy
Video Contribution: Kitboga
Video Contribution: Gary Zhexi Zhang
Video Contribution: Winifred Poster
A college degree? A safe retirement fund? The elections? The American dream? All these pillars of our way of life are grounds where scams can take hold––and some people consider them scams in and of themselves. There are fraudulent schemes that are ancient and others that are exquisitely rooted in the age of digital communication and social media, when the feeling of being swindled applies even more broadly across the spectrum of everyday life.
Scams build on the weaknesses of technological, economic, and social systems. They thrive not only on naivete or ignorance, but also on the shared trust these systems depend on. When a new communication or financial technology is invented, for instance, a new scam is right on its heels, astutely exploiting its socio-technical vulnerabilities. And when our key democratic, cultural, and economic institutions are faltering, it becomes even harder to determine where the scam ends and legitimate reality begins.
Some of the questions that we will ask include: Why is everything starting to feel more and more like a scam? Do protections against scams act like antidotes to venoms––each tailored and targeted––or can we build some global immunity response to all scams? Are we willing to give up our privacy to fight against scams? Do scams expose larger, systemic injustices or malaises? What is the role of key political, cultural, and economic institutions in protecting citizens from scams? Are scams foundational to capitalism? Is scamming always malicious exploitation by immoral actors? Or regained agency of the systematically oppressed? How does scamming destabilize systems of power?
This Salon took place on April 1st, 2025
Speakers
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Jacqueline Burns Koven
Jackie Burns Koven is the Head of Cyber Threat Intelligence at Chainalysis, leading the team that tracks cybercriminals and nation state actors stealing, scamming, and extorting cryptocurrency. She spends most of her time combing the blockchain for financial signatures of threat actors and mapping out the underground economy.
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Jovan Scott Lewis
Jovan Scott Lewis is Professor and Chair of the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Scammer’s Yard: The Crime of Black Repair in Jamaica (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) and Violent Utopia: Dispossession and Black Restoration in Tulsa (Duke University Press, 2022). He studies Black people’s lived experience of economic and racial inequality and reparative frameworks for those disparities. As such, his work has been centrally concerned with reparations not only as a means of remedying past harms but how they might engender future Black community development.
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Alexander Stein
Alexander Stein, PhD is Founder and Managing Principal of Dolus Advisors, a psychodynamic strategy consultancy that advises senior executives and boards on issues involving leadership, culture, governance, succession, and other organizational matters with complex psychological underpinnings. Additional practice areas include fraud, corruption, and abuses of power; human risks and vulnerabilities in cybersecurity; and emerging technologies that assume decision-making functions in human affairs.
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Lana Swartz
Lana Swartz is an associate professor of Media Studies and Shannon Mid-career Fellow at the University of Virginia. She studies social and cultural aspects of money to understand the future of financial technology, livelihoods, financial literacy, and consumer protection in the digital economy. She is currently writing a book on scams, which will be about all of that, as well as her upbringing on a boat in Miami.
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Gabe Whaley
Gabriel Whaley is the CEO and founder of MSCHF, a collective of approximately 20 artists who are all about poking fun at contemporary trends and riding on the wave of controversy.
Video Contributors
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Angèle Christin
Angèle Christin is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication (and, by curtesy, of Sociology), a Richard E. Guggenhime Faculty Scholar, and Senior HAI Fellow at Stanford University. She studies the social impact of algorithms and AI. Her work examines the social impact of algorithms and AI.
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Kitboga
Kitboga is the Internet alias of an American Twitch streamer and YouTuber whose content primarily focuses on scam baiting against phone fraud. His channel has over one million followers on Twitch, and his YouTube channel has over three million subscribers.
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Jonathan Levy
Jonathan Levy is Professor of US History, Fundamentals, Social Thought, and the College and the University of Chicago. He is a historian of economic life in the United States, with interests in the relationships between business and economic history, political economy, legal history, and the history of ideas. His research and teaching span the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and are increasingly preoccupied with global and comparative questions.
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Jasmine McNealy
Jasmine E. McNealy is a professor in the Department of Media Production, Management, and Technology at the University of Florida, where she studies information, communication, and technology with a view toward influencing law and policy. Her research focuses on privacy, online media, and communities.
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Winifred Poster
Winifred Poster is the Director and Founder of the Labor Tech Research Network at Washington University, St. Louis in the International Affairs Program. She studies feminist labor theory, digital globalization, and Indian outsourcing. Her focus is on the intersection of post-colonial computing with the political economy of service labor.
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Daniel Treisman
Daniel Treisman is a professor of political science at the University of California, Los Angeles and a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research focuses on Russian politics and economics as well as comparative political economy, including in particular the analysis of democratization, the politics of authoritarian states, political decentralization, and corruption.
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Gary Zhexi Zhang
Gary Zhexi Zhang’s work explores systemic connections between cosmology, technology and economy. He operates individually, in collaboration and within organizational frameworks. He recently edited a book of fictions, essays and interviews about finance and time, Catastrophe Time! (Strange Attractor Press, 2023). Dead Cat Bounce, the opera he co-created with Waste Paper Opera, premiered at Somerset House in 2022 and tours in 2024. His most recent solo exhibition, METAMERS, was presented at EPFL Pavilions in February 2024.
Reading List
ON SCAMS AND SCAMMING
Ben-Ghiat, Ruth and Alexander Stein. “Alexander Stein on the Psychology of Fraudsters and Power Abusers.” Lucid. September 22, 2021. (Available online)
Konnikova, Maria. The Confidence Game: Why We Fall for It… Every Time. Penguin, 2016.
Sameer, Ananya. “But truly, how Freudian are scammers?” Wired Middle East. June 3, 2024. (Available online)
Simons, Daniel and Christopher Chabris. “Why We Get Scammed and What to Do About It.” The Wall Street Journal. July 7, 2023. (Available online)
Simons, Daniel and Christopher Chabris. Nobody’s Fool: Why We Get Taken In and What We Can Do About It. Basic Books, 2023.
Stein, Alexander. “Innovations and Strategic Applications in the Psychology of Fraud.” ICC FraudNet Global Report, (2023): 196-216. (Available online)
Stein, Alexander. “Imposters Are Everywhere: How To Avoid Being Duped.” Forbes. May 4, 2019. (Available online)
WHY IS EVERYTHING STARTING TO FEEL LIKE A SCAM?
Beattie, Geoff. “Why does Donald Trump tell such blatant lies?” The Conversation. October 21, 2024. (Available online)
Binyam, Maya, Lou Cornum, and Tiana Reid. “Scam or Die.” The New Inquiry. April 1, 2019. (Available online)
Gault, Matthew. “Why Does Everything in Tech Feel Like a Scam?” Vice. June 8, 2022. (Available online)
Graeber, David. Bullshit Jobs. Simon & Schuster, 2018. (Available online)
Inskeep, Steve. “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tells NPR: ‘Everything feels increasingly like a scam’.” NPR. February 28, 2025. (Available online)
Moldoveanu, Daniel. “The Ethical Scammer.” 032c. May 4, 2022. (Available online)
Tough, Paul. “Americans Are Losing Faith in the Value of College. Whose Fault is That?” The New York Times. September 5, 2023. (Available online)
Tseng, Francis. “The Art of the Meta-Scam.” Rhizome. April 1, 2020. (Available online)
SPIN DICTATORS
Ben-Ghiat, Ruth. “‘Drain the Swamp’: And Other Myths that Cover Up Authoritarian Crimes.” Lucid. March 31, 2021. (Available online)
Guriev, Sergei and Daniel Treisman. Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century. Princeton University Press: 2022. (Excerpt available here)
Guriev, Sergei and Daniel Treisman. “The New Authoritarianism.” Vox EU CEPR. March 21, 2015. (Available online)
Guriev, Sergei and Daniel Treisman. “A Theory of Informational Autocracy.” Journal of Public Economics (June 2020). (Available online)
Hahl, Oliver, Minjae Kim, and Ezra W. Zucherman Sivan. “The Authentic Appeal of the Lying Demagogue: Proclaiming the Deeper Truth about Political Illegitimacy.” American Sociological Review 83, no. 1 (2018): 1-33. (Available online)
Stein, Alexander. “How To Become A Malevolent Leader: A Field Guide For Aspiring Fraudsters And Tyrants.” Forbes. January 27, 2021. (Available online)
INFRASTRUCTURES OF CAPITALISM AND COLONIALISM
Harrington, Brooke. Offshore: Stealth Wealth and the New Colonialism. W. W. Norton & Company, 2018. (Excerpt available online)
Graeber, David. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Melville House, 2011. (Available online)
Maurer, Bill. How Would You Like to Pay?: How Technology Is Changing the Future of Money. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015.
Parks, Lisa, and Nicole Starosielski, eds. Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures. University of Illinois Press, 2015. (Available with institutional access)
Zhang, Gary Zhexi. “A Brief History of Financial Worlding.” Trust. July 29, 2022. YouTube, 23:49. (Available online)
Rediker, Marcus. Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
SCAMS AS FOUNDATIONAL TO U.S. CAPITALISM
Derrida, Jacques. Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. University of Chicago Press, 1992. (Available online)
Klaus, Ian. Forging Capitalism: Rogues, Swindlers, Frauds, and the Rise of Modern Finance. Yale University Press, 2016. (Available online)
Levy, Jonathan. “Confidence Games.” Ages of American Capitalism: A History of the United States. Random House Publishing Group, 2022.
Melville, Herman. The Confidence Man. Northwestern University Press, 1985. First published in 1857 by Dix, Edwards & Co. (Available online)
Mihm, Stephen. A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States. Harvard University Press, 2009. (Available online)
INFAMOUS U.S. FRAUDSTERS AND SCAMMERS
Alsever, Jennier. “The Holmes Effect Still Stings for a Generation of Female Founders.” Inc. February 17, 2025. (Available online)
Balleisen, Edward J. Fraud: An American History from Barnum to Madoff. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017.
Gibney, Alex. The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley. HBO, 2019. 1 hr., 59 min.
Gibney, Alex. Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. Magnolia Pictures, 2005. 1 hr., 50 min.
Harrington, Brooke. “Why Americans get Conned Again and again.” The Atlantic. July 31, 2017. (Available online)
Henriques, Diana B. “From Prison, Madoff Says Banks ‘Had to Know’ of Fraud.” The New York Times. February 15, 2011. (Available online)
Lehmann, Chris. “The Rise and Fall of the American Fraudster.” The Nation. November 30, 2022. (Available online)
“Samuel Bankman-Fried Sentenced to 25 Years for His Orchestration of Multiple Fraudulent Schemes.” U.S. Department of Justice Press Releases. March 28, 2024. (Available online)
Spielberg, Steven. Catch Me If You Can. DreamWorks Pictures, 2002. 2 hr., 21m.
THE GLOBAL SOUTH AND INFORMAL ECONOMIES
Harris, LaShawn. Sex Workers, Psychics, and Numbers Runners: Black Women in New York City’s Underground Economy. University of Illinois Press, 2016.
Hudson, Peter James. Bankers and Empire: How Wall Street Colonized the Caribbean. University of Chicago Press, 2017. (Available online)
James, Deborah. Money from Nothing: Indebtedness and Aspiration in South Africa. Stanford University Press, 2015. (Available online)
Lewis, Jovan Scott. Scammer’s Yard: The Crime of Black Repair in Jamaica. University of Minnesota Press, 2020.
MacGaffey, Janet, and Rémy Bazenguissa-Ganga. Congo-Paris: Transnational Traders on the Margins of the Law. Indiana University Press, 2000.
Newell, Sasha. The Modernity Bluff: Crime, Consumption, and Citizenship in Côte d'Ivoire. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. (Excerpt available online)
Ndjio, Basile. “Cameroonian Feymen and Nigerian ‘419’ Scammers: Two Examples of Africa’s ‘Reinvention’ of the Global Capitalism.” ASC Working Paper 81, African Studies Centre, Leiden, 2008. (Available online)
SOCIAL MEDIA
Faxon, Hilary Oliva and Courtney T. Wittekind. “Livestreamed land: Scams and certainty in Myanmar’s digital land market.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 42, 2 (2023): 512-533. (Available here)
Gillespie, Tarleton. Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media. Yale University Press, 2021. (Available online)
Lewis, Rebecca and Angèle Christin. “Platform drama: ‘Cancel culture,’ celebrity, and the struggle for accountability on YouTube.” New Media & Society 24, no. 7 (2022). (Available online)
McNealy, Jasmine E. “Platforms as phish farms: Deceptive social engineering at scale.” New Media & Society 24, no. 7 (2022). (Available online)
Poster, Winifred. “Introduction to special issue on scams, fakes, and frauds.” New Media & Society 24, no. 7 (2022). (Available online)
PIG-BUTCHERING
Burges, Matt and Lily Hay Newman. “The Collapse of USAID Is Already Fueling Human Trafficking and Slavery at Scammer Compounds.” Wired Magazine. February 5, 2025. (Available online)
Newman, Lily Hay and Matt Burgess. “The Pig Butchering Invasion Has Begun.” Wired. September 30, 2024. (Available online)
Wong, Sue-Lin. “Scam Inc.” The Economist. February 6, 2025. Podcast series. (Available online)
Yaffe-Bellany, David. “The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself.” The New York Times. February 28, 2025. (Available online)
CALL-CENTER SCAMS
Mirchandani, Kiran. Phone Clones: Authenticity Work in the Transnational Service Economy. ILR Press, 2012. (Excerpt available online)
Mirchandani, Kiran and Winifred Poster. Borders in Service: Enactments of Nationhood in Transnational Call Centres. University of Toronto Press, 2016. (Excerpt available online)
Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. “Scam Empire: Inside A Merciless International Investment Scam.” Scam Empire. March 5, 2025. (Available online)
Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. “Everything You Need to Know About ‘Scam Empire’.” Scam Empire. March 5, 2025. (Available online)
Sanders, Hank. “Dozens of Canadians Are Charged in $21 Million ‘Grandparent Scam.’” The New York Times. March 4, 2025. (Available online)
CRYPTOCURRENCY SCAMS
Gebrekidan, Selam and Joy Dong. “The Scammer’s Manual: How to Launder Money and Get Away With It.” The New York Times. March 23, 2025. (Available online)
”Introducing Chainalysis Operation Spincaster: An Ecosystem-Wide Initiative to Disrupt and Prevent Billions in Losses to Crypto Scams.” Chainalysis. July 18, 2024. (Available online)
Lil Internet. “A Meditation of FOMO.” (podcast) New Models Top Soil. 2020. (Available online)
Max Read, “There’s Nothing to Do Except Gamble: Welcome to the Non-Fungible, Memeified, Cryptodenominated, Degenerate Future of Finance.” New York Magazine. April 12, 2021. (Available online)
Swartz, Lana. “Theorizing the 2017 ICO Bubble as a Network Scam.” New Media and Society 24, 7 (July 9, 2022). (Available with institutional access)
Swartz, Lana. “Bitcoin as a Meme and a Future.” Noēma. February 11, 2021. (Available online)
Wong, Sue-Lin. “Online scams may already be as big a scourge as illegal drugs.” The Economist. February 6, 2025. (Available online)
FORGERIES
Amore, Anthony M. The Art of Con: The Most Notorious Fakes, Frauds, and Forgeries in the Art World. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. (Available online)
Charney, Noah. “Is That Painting a Lost Masterpiece or a Fraud? Let’s Ask AI.” Wired. March 29, 2025. (Available online)
Gleiberman, Owen. “‘Made You Look: A True Story of Fake Art’ Review: The Most Spectacular Art Forgery Ever?” Variety. February 23, 2021. (Available online)
Lawson-Tancred, Jo. “Italian Police Shut Down Secret Workshop Producing Fake Picassos and Rembrandts.” Artnet. February 20, 2025. (Available online)
de Pencier, Hannibal. “Forgery, Facsimile, and the Fabrication of Credit: The Case of William Wynne Ryland.” GreyRoom, no. 98 (Winter 2025): 22-53. (Available online)
Piwowarczyk, Thiago and Jeffery Taylor. “Forgery Experts Explain 5 Ways To Spot a Fake | Wired.” Wired. November 20, 2018. YouTube. (Available online)
SCAMMERS OF THE ART WORLD
Edwardes, Charlotte. “‘The money is not real - it’s a feckless level of wealth’: the inside story of the biggest art fraud in American history.” The Guardian. April 17, 2024. (Available online)
Lyster, Rosa. “A Frank Account of an Unequal Art-World Friendship.” The New Yorker. August 14, 2024. (Available online)
Nir, Sarah Maslin and Zachary Small. “Art Adviser. Friend. Thief.” The New York Times. February 18, 2025. (Available online)
Pressler, Jessica. “How Anna Delvey Tricked New York’s Party People.” The Cut. February 8, 2022. (Available online)
Seal, Mark. “The Confessions of Inigo Philbrick, Art Fraudster Extraordinaire.” Vanity Fair. March 27, 2024. (Available online)
Whitfield, Orlando. All That Glitters: A Story of Friendship, Fraud, and Fine Art. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2024. (Excerpt available online)
Williams, Rachel DeLoache. “‘As an Added Bonus, She Paid for Everything’: My Bright-Lights Misadventure with a Magician of Manhattan.” Vanity Fair. April 13, 2018. (Available online)
Williams, Rachel DeLoache. My Friend Anna. Quercus Editions Ltd, 2019. (Available online)
Ziwe and Anna Delvey. “Anna Delvey Answers Hard-Hitting Questions about Scamming the Rich | Ziwe Interview.” Ziwe. September 17, 2024. YouTube, 17:30. (Available online)
THE AFTER-EFFECTS AND FIGHTING BACK
Bail Bloc. The New Inquiry. (Available online)
Banksy. “Banksy sells work for $60 in Central Park, New York - video” The Guardian. October 14, 2013. (Available online)
Bernard, Tara Siegel. “Scammers Stole Their Savings, and Then the Tax Bill Arrived.” The New York Times. March 8, 2025. (Available online)
Bowman, Emma. “To make sure grandmas like his don’t get conned, he scams the scammers.” NPR. April 14, 2025. (Available online)
Constantaras, Eva, Gabriel Geiger, Justin-Casimir Braun, Dhruv Mehrotra, and Htet Aung. “Inside the Suspicion Machine.” Wired Magazine. March 6, 2023. (Available online)
Furman, Anna. “Youth Collective Teaches You How to Scam the Patriarchy.” Vice. December 10, 2016. (Available online)
Ng, Alfred. “Teens have figured out how to mess with Instagram’s tracking algorithm.” CNET. February 4, 2020. (Available online)
Rose, Janus. “This Script Sends Junk Data to Ohio’s Website for Snitching on Workers.” Vice. May 8, 2020. (Available online)