Ep. 263: “The Affinity Scam Playbook”

“What the Hack?” is DeleteMe’s true cybercrime podcast hosted by Beau Friedlander.

Beau: If you’re anything like me, you’re pretty much cult-proof, right? You’ve been listening to the show for a while, maybe you just happened upon it, but you know, personality shmersonality. No one is going to sweet-talk me into handing over my life savings. Not happening.

Karen: This is how people are indoctrinated into cults.

Beau: That said, I do love a good drama. I mean, who doesn’t love a good drama? I mean, a good story. I mean, well, actually, a bad story. I mean, we’ve all kind of got the rubber-neck thing, right? Well, we want to get a check on our rubbernecking, especially if it becomes participatory, like okay, oh I see I have your attention; now can I have some money?

Charlie: I still get flabbergasted by what she’s done, and I know the story.

Beau: This week we’re going to explore a very specific kind of love. It’s not the love of drama. It’s real love that’s been manipulated. How scammers can grab the attention, right? And the heartstrings till our purse strings magically disappear and we start throwing money at what is essentially our feelings the way firefighters throw water at a fire. It’s pretty interesting the way certain people can make this particular emotion. This week: scams that get us because they get us.

Daniel: We by default assume that we’re interacting with people who are being honest with us, that the things we encounter in the world are truthful, and it takes effort to stop and think to yourself, “Well, maybe I shouldn’t believe that. Maybe that’s not true.”

Beau: I’m Beau Friedlander and this is “What the Hack,” the podcast that asks, in a world where your data is everywhere, how do you stay safe online? A few years ago, I sat down with my friends Adam Levin and Travis Taylor to hear a story about Coco Berthmann. And a few weeks later, we were told the story of Amanda Riley before her life became the basis of a hit podcast called “Scamanda” and the Hulu series. You’ve probably seen it. What they both had in common is a troubling trend, something I guess we could call affinity scams, right? It’s a sort of Ponzi scam built on friendship, shared identity, and trust. So not affinity like the business term or like the credit card thing, but like actual, like, “I like you.” And ever since we first reported these stories, I really haven’t been able to stop wondering, why do we get taken in? And more importantly, what can be done about it? So let’s start with the phrase itself. What is an affinity scam?

Sarah: It’s actually affinity fraud.

Beau: That’s Sarah Ganim, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist.

Sarah: And it’s when someone abuses membership or association with an identifiable group, like the Mormon Church, to convince a potential investor to trust the legitimacy of the investment. So essentially, believe in my story because I’m an LDS church member.

Beau: Along with her Edward R. Murrow award-winning co-host Karen Given, Sarah told Adam and Travis and I the story of Coco Berthmann.

Karen: Oh my gosh. She had so many tools. When I was reading through some of her communications, I remember I texted Sarah, and I’m like, “This is how people are indoctrinated into cults,” right? Like, it’s very much like, she would keep people up late at night with panic, drama, wake them up early the next morning with excitement and love and gratitude, and just took them on this absolute rollercoaster where they had no time to think about what was actually happening. Like, no time… I kept being like, “Just do the math. Do the math.” But there was no time to do the math. We started talking about it as, like, the Coco time warp, right? Like, once she has you in her orbit, time just takes on this very strange cadence because everything is happening so quickly and it’s changing so quickly, and going up and down and up and down and up and down so quickly that you’re completely disoriented.

Beau: Religion, profession, ethnicity, a shared diagnosis, a shared trauma. Any of us could be turned into a lover. Any of us. Here’s Daniel Simons.

Daniel: Thanks for having me on.

Beau: Daniel Simons is a cognitive scientist. He and Christopher Chabris spent years pulling apart con scams and everyday deceptions, looking for what they have in common. And they wrote a book about it, Nobody’s Fool. Underneath every single one of the things that they cover, they found the same exact foundation.

Daniel: We’re focusing more on the thinking aspect of it than on the motivation. So we’re not so much interested in the personality of a con artist or of the victim, right? We’re interested in the cognitive mechanisms, how we think, what our habits of thought are, and what sorts of information we inherently find appealing, often for really good reason. We divide these sort of cognitive principles into what we call habits, which are cognitive tendencies, things we do really well and they’re really useful most of the time, but that can be turned against us. And hooks, which are kinds of information that we find inherently appealing, and that most of the time that’s a good thing. They draw our attention to the things we care about. But then again, if somebody’s looking to deceive us, they can present information that we find appealing when it shouldn’t actually be trustworthy. And all of these sorts of cognitive tendencies, habits, and hooks are premised on the idea that we mostly accept what other people are telling us as true, right? We by default assume that we’re interacting with people who are being honest with us, that the things we encounter in the world are truthful, and it takes effort to stop and think to yourself, “Well, maybe I shouldn’t believe that. Maybe that’s not true.”

Beau: So the default here is to believe. That’s how we get out of the grocery store, how we have a conversation, how we live in a community. Every con in this episode is a crowbar jammed into that one small crack that like, “Oh, nice person,” or, “I believe I put the key in the door and turn it, and the door will unlock.”

Beau: Coco Berthmann arrived in Utah with a story that, well, almost feels designed to make you care.

Karen: The story that she told was that she had been born and raised in Germany and that she had been sex-trafficked by her mother for the first 15 years of her life.

Beau: Here’s Karen and Sarah again.

Karen: And then she had escaped in the middle of the night while listening to a Celine Dion song. It was all very, very beautiful. She had escaped and gone to a clinic for traumatized children. And then when she got out of that clinic, she said that she had been basically duped by a therapist into moving in with him and starting a romantic relationship with him, and then he held her captive for the next two years, right? So the story just keeps growing and growing, and I think it’s important, it’s very important for survivors, for us to say, like, the things that Coco said happened to her do happen to people. They just maybe didn’t all happen to this one person from Germany.

Sarah: She was internet famous, you know? She was. She was an influencer. There are people certainly who haven’t heard of her. She wasn’t, like, a household name even within a certain generation. But she certainly, like, within Utah, within the LDS community, I think within the sex trafficking, anti-sex trafficking and advocacy world, she was a rising star.

Karen: She had just done a TEDx talk. She had just appeared on a couple of pretty big podcasts, and so her influence was growing.

Beau: A rising star on the strength of her identity. A survivor, a Mormon, and a member of the queer community. I mean, take your pick. Each one is an affinity group, a reason for a specific group of people to look at her and think she’s one of us.

Daniel: Having a familiar name, having something we’ve encountered before, makes us somewhat more trusting of it.

Beau: That’s Daniel Simons.

Daniel: And most of the time, that’s a great thing, because most of the time, the people we’re really familiar with are people we have known for a while, we’ve grown to trust and rely on them because they haven’t mistreated us in the past. But these days, what counts as familiar, what counts as a close friend, might be somebody you’ve never met before, right? It might be somebody you just know on social media and have interacted with virtually, and you’ve never actually met them or interacted with them in person, and that can lead to a lot of problems.

Karen: We talked to a lot of people who said that she could have done very, very good work as an advocate because she was well-spoken, and she was telling a story that was heartbreaking and got people’s attention.

Daniel: We have a cognitive tendency to focus, which is to pay attention to the information we have right in front of us, and often to not think about the information we don’t have in front of us. And most of the time that works great because what we actually want to do is focus on what we’re dealing with and not be distracted by irrelevant stuff. But that means that if somebody wants you to believe something in particular, all they have to do is put that information in front of you and keep you busy with it and have you not think about what you’re missing.

Beau: The thing that’s so interesting about this is that affinity scams, that’s a slippery slope, but it does make sense.

Karen: Because so many of the things that she did are not otherwise illegal, right? It’s not illegal to lie to someone.

Sarah: There’s a journalist, Lynn Packer, in Utah who is right out of a movie, I have to say. I really… Just everything about him is movie character-worthy. But he’s a veteran local television reporter who’s been there forever, knows everybody and everything about everybody. And when he got wind of her and her story, he was totally unconvinced and did what he describes as, like, two weeks worth of digging, came up with a ton of stuff, some stuff that we still after 10 months have not been able to replicate, and did like a 40-minute YouTube video, and I think he ended up doing a part two as well, that called some serious question into the original story of being sex trafficked. He talked to her mother and other members of her family and got documents that just called a lot of the timeline into question, and that was out there I think for a couple of months…

Karen: Oh, that was out there for, yeah, almost six months before she faked a cancer diagnosis.

Beau: So what do you do when one victim story stops working? Well, you add a cancer diagnosis. Disgusting, and also a kinehora. But anyway.

Daniel: Yeah. It’s really hard because that is our natural tendency to try and resolve a problem. And one thing that I think helps is seeing a whole bunch of examples of how that sort of time pressure works in settings ranging from terrible to completely innocuous.

Beau: That’s Daniel Simons again.

Daniel: Magicians use that all the time, right? They put you under pressure to make a decision right then, and you don’t think about it when you’re doing it, and that forces you to not think about the other things they’re trying to hide from you. Anything where it’s kind of a rapid decision, which you have to decide on this right now, almost never the case that you need to decide on something right now. So being able to stop and say, “Okay, wait a second, I need to think about this a little longer,” is a good mode, a good move to make. Asking a couple of additional questions can really make a difference there.

Karen: The problems were many, though, right?

Beau: Karen and Sarah again.

Karen: As it went along, it was pretty clear that her main goal was probably to be famous or at least to get a whole lot of attention, both on sort of a public scale and a personal scale. And so the community that she was advocating for is actually the community that felt, feels most hurt by what she did, both in how she treated them, how she presented this thing that she was advocating for, and ultimately the betrayal of all of the lies that she told in doing that.

Sarah: Yeah, I think that the community also was among the first to call her out. And it’s interesting, like they saw some of the red flags before many others did, in part because of how she was treating them. The so-called advocacy, like I think it was very surface level, and they saw through that really, really quickly.

Karen: She would say that she was raped. Then she would say that she was pregnant. Then she would say that she went to the doctor. Then she would say that she had a miscarriage. And you do the math, and you’re like, that was three and a half weeks. There’s not enough time for all of those things to have happened. Like, the doctor doesn’t see you if you say, “I’m pregnant from two weeks ago.” The doctor says, “Go away now.” But all of these things were happening so quickly.

Sarah: There were definitely people who, like, saw that kind of story, but because I think she is, I think a very smart person, Coco is a very smart person. She had already, by that time, laid such a foundation that people were, I don’t know if it was hesitant maybe or nervous to call her out on that, or they just attributed it to some other kind of trauma that, like, “Okay, that can’t be true, but she’s clearly dealing with some sort of trauma. She’s clearly something has– terrible has happened to her, and so I’m gonna let that go. I’m gonna let that slide. I’m not gonna call her out on that.” And they didn’t cut her off or view that as, like, a terribly huge red flag because she had already laid this foundation of sympathy and she had already sort of built a fail-safe story in a sense. And I also think it has to do, and this goes back to the affinity fraud of the community that she targeted, people who are very, very giving of their time, of their homes, of their space in general. People who are very willing, no matter what your problems seem to be, to help you even if they don’t fully believe you.

Karen: Because they feel that it is their duty, that they feel that that is what they are supposed to do. One person even said to another person, not to us, you know, “Well, these things might not be true, but she’s still a child of God, and it’s …”

Beau: 100%. And the LDS community, I have a cousin who’s LDS and that is 100%. It really does at the end of the day not matter much what’s wrong with you because what you need is God.

Karen: Oh gosh. Yeah. So the cancer diagnosis was really the desperate thing that she did as she was getting caught.

Beau: Coco Berthmann raised approximately 9,000 to 10,000 maybe through a fraudulent GoFundMe campaign. Police subpoenaed GoFundMe records confirming she withdrew funds as a beneficiary, though medical institutions verified that she had never been a patient.

Sarah: When we started talking to people who knew her and consider themselves to be victims of her, they don’t talk about the money. They talk about the emotional scam and what they lost, what they personally lost to them. You know, we had to sort of ask about the money. “Okay,” like, “what did you give her? How much did you spend?” That’s not the first thing they say to us. The first thing they say is, “You know, I’ve lost my ability to trust people. I’ve lost my will to help people.” They were emotionally pained by what she put them through.

Karen: For a long time I thought she was scamming for love. And not romantic love, but, like, the love of a mother. She very much goes after women and mothers and people who are her mother’s age. But I think it’s just attention. She needs to be the center of everything, so fame is part of that. But really, if you’re one-on-one with her, she needs to make sure that you’re not thinking about anyone else or anything else. And I think when people were talking to us, right, Sarah’s right, they never mention the money, and I think that’s part of why they didn’t realize they were being scammed, is she didn’t have her hand out the whole time and say, “I need money.” And when she did, it was something specific like, “My car broke down. What am I gonna do?” You know? It was always something like that. I think they just gave of themselves and gave of themselves until there was nothing left. And so there were serious financial consequences for these people, right? So, like, some of them lost their careers, like, there were serious consequences. And Coco did make money, right? She did. She’s still, I think, making money. But I don’t, it doesn’t feel right to call it a purely financial scam. It’s so much deeper than that. People could describe that without us even asking them. They had been thinking about what she had taken from them emotionally for years. But describing what she had taken monetarily, you know, people were sitting down or we were on the line with some people where they were adding things up, you know, and saying, “Oh, wow.” There was this one interview with a couple who lost quite a lot of money, but they are people who have quite a lot of money, and so they hadn’t realized it until we asked.

Beau: But they knew exactly what the emotional impact was?

Karen: Absolutely.

Beau: Sarah, you’ve won a Pulitzer Prize. Karen, you have an Edward R. Murrow Award under your belt, and I’m sure other things. You’re both very impressive people, and I wanna know, you’re not new to stories like this. How has it affected you personally?

Karen: Yeah. I am a very trusting, believing kind of person. And yes, absolutely. Especially the deeper I got into it, “how can she? How can she lie like this?” And after that, every interaction with friends, with family, you know, friends would be like, “I’m sorry, I can’t make dinner. Something came up.” And I’d be thinking, “Did it? Did it really?” Because her lies just came so easily and so quickly. And for me, it was hard to see that up close.

Beau: Coco Berthmann pleaded guilty to the charges related to the scam and was ordered to pay full restitution.

Sarah: Nobody that we interviewed thought that this was, like, a just outcome. No one felt that justice was served.

Karen: There was no trial. This, there was a hearing with a plea deal. But I think one of the things that’s important to point out, and in episode one, Lynn Packer, that veteran Utah journalist says this, is that there was a lot more that police could have investigated. There was a lot more that they could have looked into prosecuting. She was getting money as a survivor that she said she was gonna be giving to other survivors, that we have found no evidence of it getting to where she said it was going to. She was asking people for money just for herself that nobody has ever tracked. And for whatever reason, the State of Utah decided not to pursue any of that. And Lynn Packer believes that it’s because politicians were embarrassed. Many of them had sort of stood beside her and had their photos taken, or had spoken of her brave work.

Sarah: I think part of that too is like the difference between whether this was a money scam or something else. And so, like the emotional part of it is not, like it wouldn’t be an easy prosecution if you could figure out a way to prosecute it at all. And like, you know, a GoFundMe account’s like a really straightforward thing to prosecute. A GoFundMe account off of a fake cancer diagnosis. Imagine a trial where some of the people that we’ve interviewed, like, get up on the stand and say, “Well, she made me stay up with her texting all night.” Like, what is a jury to do with that, you know? It’s horrible. It’s not a nice thing to do. It’s not a nice way to treat people. But is it illegal? Like, I think a good defense attorney would have a field day with that.

Karen: But I also think that’s why she was able to get away with it for so long, right? Because I think people didn’t think they were being scammed because they weren’t opening up their wallets in the way that we think of, you know, like money wasn’t disappearing from their account. And so they thought, “Oh, she’s just hurting. She just needs me. She’s just in trouble. I’m here for her.” And so I think that, I mean, for me, a takeaway, not to tell other people how to feel about this story, but for me a takeaway is like, money is not the only thing that can be stolen from me.

Beau: So it sounds like Anna Sorokin, you know, Anna Sorokin the fake German heiress, meets Scamanda. I mean, it’s like a kind of weird hybrid of a story here. Am I close?

Sarah: Yeah, plus religion, minus private jets, kinda…

Beau: Wow. Okay, now hold that thought. Amanda Riley or Scamanda lived in San Jose in 2012. She did something that at the time made her an early influencer. She started to blog.

Charlie: And the blog was to start talking about her journey because she got diagnosed with cancer.

Beau: That’s Charlie Webster, the main investigative reporter behind Scamanda.

Charlie: And I’ve spent so long diving into the story and, you know, I went up to San Jose. I built a relationship with her and I still get flabbergasted by what she’s done, and I know the story. Turns out she never had cancer. Amanda started her blog in 2012, which if you think about it was, well, TikTok didn’t exist. I’m trying to think. Instagram really I think had only just started. I remember I was mainly on Twitter, but Blogspots or blogs was the thing, wasn’t it? And I think that was the early day influencers, and they kind of set a precedent for what we’re in now. And even then it was like, “Ooh, how do you even set up a website?” Whereas now anybody can do it. So I think the fact that if you had a blog with pictures, it wasn’t just writing and were talking in such an intimate way about your life, I think it just gives that legitimacy because, oh, you’ve got your own website and you’ve got your own professional blog, so why wouldn’t you believe it? It just gives automatic credibility. So she started her blog in 2012, and that was when she said she was diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma. Amanda even called her first blog “What the Heck is Hodgkin Lymphoma?” And then she said she was diagnosed, and that’s why she started the blog, because she was diagnosed for the first time with cancer, and she was documenting her journey. And it was inspiring. Like, I was reading the blogs, it was inspiring and informational and educational. But then I found out that two years previous she’d also been diagnosed for the first time. There was more even before what I originally found out. So I think this had been going on for quite a while in different communities and capacities. The night before she told her friend, her friend had invited her to somebody’s fundraiser who had cancer. And the next day she said, “Oh, I have cancer.”

Beau: Amanda watched her community pour love toward a sick person, and the very next day she stepped into the spotlight. Where do you find the biggest spotlight? The warmest crowd? The deepest reservoir of “we take care of our own?” Yep. Amanda went to church.

Charlie: She went to a mega church, so that’s thousands of people that she could access and, you know, by the end of that, people were calling her the anointed one because she would stand on stage, and she would use people’s faith and their prayers and their kindness and want to help to be able to get to people. So, you know, she was stood on stage preaching and using the word to manipulate people.

Beau: Demonstrating their power in the process, which made them buy in even more.

Charlie: Yeah, absolutely, because she was healing, right? She was on a mission. I’ve got pictures of her stood on stage in a mega church with people throwing cash at her. So people donated cash, check, in-kind services . People gave food. One woman let her have a nutrition monthly subscription, which she just used all the time. People babysat. People did fundraisers for her. And I think for me, the money’s almost secondary because everybody I spoke to and when I spent time in that community, it was about the violation of what she’d done, and the hurt and the abuse of trust. She got convicted for wire fraud, and I caveat what I’m about to say with that because that came to about $105,000. To put that into perspective, that’s a lot of money for the majority of people. And that was a lot of people that donated to her, and people that… You know, somebody didn’t even have enough money to give her, so they donated their blood, their plasma to her. People where $50 was so much to them, but they really wanted to give to help this woman. But she also took a lot more money, so it wasn’t just the $105,000. She took a lot of cash. That was only what they could document through wire fraud.

Daniel: The key element of that is that it makes sense to believe it’s true most of the time, because cons and deceptions and scams are relatively rare.

Beau: Here’s Daniel Simons again.

Daniel: Most of us are never gonna be a victim of a large con, right? Most of us are never gonna be, never going to fall for Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. Some will. We have plenty of opportunities to be scammed in small ways, but this idea that we accept as true what we see and what we hear makes a lot of sense, because we can’t go around our daily lives constantly double-checking everything. We can’t go into the grocery store and disbelieve everything on the packaging of a product, right? If you go and buy some fruit, and it says that it’s organic, you’re probably not going to go out to the farm and monitor the farmer 24 hours to make sure that there’s no pesticides being used. We have to just accept that some of these things are true, and they might not be, and most of the time it doesn’t matter. So it’s a really good default assumption to have because it allows us to have a conversation. It allows us to interact with other people and be a part of a community. It does mean that somebody who’s looking to deceive us, whether it’s a con artist or a magician, will say things that simply aren’t true, in order to get you to believe what they want you to believe, to focus your attention where they want to focus it. So that’s a precondition for any act of deception, is this willingness to believe.

Charlie: You know, so it’s not technically illegal to lie, right? It’s not, unfortunately, illegal to lie, and the bar is high, right? To go through the justice system, there has to be tangible evidence. There’s at least five points where she could have got away with it, that I’m like, “Okay, if she’d have stopped back then, she wouldn’t be serving time,” which she is now. So how she got caught in the end was because she was documenting things, it’s just a matter of time before you make one mistake, right?

Beau: Amanda Riley forged a doctor’s letter from a real hospital, and investigators later found out she was never a patient there. When Detective Jose Martinez asked Riley’s lawyer for proof of her diagnosis, Riley panicked, and she sent a forged letter using the real name of the Santa Clara Kaiser Permanente clinic. Detective Martinez called that specific Kaiser Permanente clinic to verify the letter, and while they couldn’t share details due to privacy laws, HIPAA laws actually, they confirmed that while they had sent a letter to Riley, it was absolutely not for that, meaning it had nothing to do with a cancer diagnosis. Federal investigators later subpoenaed every single medical facility listed on her blog. They all officially responded with a variant of, “She has never been here, and she has no appointments.” Thinking back to somebody I knew from college who passed away from cancer a few years ago, and we were in the middle of a very serious feud because we had once been good friends. We’re both creative types and hotheads, and we just were in a feud when it turned out that he had cancer. The feud ended when I donated some money to his GoFundMe, ’cause he really needed money. And I still was pissed at him, but, you know, the fact is that’s a serious thing and it overrode anything else that was going on. And that’s why I think this Amanda is a sociopath, because you have to dissociate. You have to completely not care and have zero empathy. It’s like pushing the nuclear option on human emotions.

Charlie: I honestly really believe that she believes her own lies. I’m not saying she’s a narcissist, but that narcissistic behavior where the only way you can deal with what you’re doing is by disassociate or blame somebody else because you can’t actually face what you’re doing, so you believe your own self and then blame everyone else, which is what I think that she’s doing. And you know what? I feel awful as well because you said about your college friend, and it made me think of, I did a GoFundMe page for a friend, for my friend who passed away in January. And while I was doing it, I was just finishing making Scamanda, and I was thinking, are we creating something where we are losing faith in people? You know, ’cause I wanted people to donate to the GoFundMe page that I set up for my friend to help her family. I wanted people to help and support her family, and there was so much pain, and I’m sure, Beau about your college friend, and you don’t want people to question genuine people and not help because I think that’s really important. And then you look at what these people are doing, and it makes you… You know, one of the things that, when I was talking to the detective, and he was like, “You know, people should question this.” And I’m like, “Well, should they, though?” Because I don’t wanna live in a world where if I need people’s help, would they question whether they believe me or not?

Daniel: Some people are going to be more willing to fall for things than others or more willing to accept as true something that’s not.

Beau: Daniel Simons.

Daniel: But I think one of the key insights here is that we all can be targeted by scams and cons, more often by scams than just deception. We all can be targeted if they happen to tap into the sorts of things we’re interested in or that we want. Any of us can recognize something is too good to be true if it’s kind of implausible to us, but all of us can also find something to be just good enough to be plausible if it’s framed correctly. Most people, for example, are not going to respond to an email from a Nigerian prince promising a share of their inheritance. Most people won’t. Some people will. Some people will only because they want to kind of scam the scammer. But, a lot of times, those sorts of scams, it might appeal to somebody and they might respond to it, but that same person under different conditions, hours later or a day later, might not, right? And it really depends on whether it catches people at the right moment in the right way that they respond to it. Some people will never respond to that sort of email because they recognize it immediately as too good to be true, but those same people could be victimized by something that seemed completely plausible to them and implausible to somebody who would respond to a Nigerian prince scam.

Beau: But what does that mean? I mean, obviously you’re saying there’s a scam for all of us out there. But what does that mean exactly?

Daniel: For me, it’s how consistent, across all of these forms of deception over thousands of years, right? Everything from the Trojan Horse on up, that they all rely on a small set of principles that are pretty consistent. I think that’s a positive, right? It means that if we can understand how these sorts of deceptions take advantage of the way we think and the way we reason and the kinds of information we find appealing, then as new variants of these things emerge, we’ll be able to better spot those consistencies. So I think that’s something that for me was a bit surprising that they all kind of rely on a similar set of tactics.

Beau: In the book, you sort of put them into two categories: habits, good sort of mental shortcuts that can be turned against you, and hooks, the kind of information we find appealing. We’ve already met a few of them or talked about them. We’ve talked about them, the focus, familiarity, efficiency…

Daniel: Yeah, exactly. And that works in both a positive way and a negative way, right? So, offers that are expiring in the next hour or there are only two left, right, are attempting to get you to act with efficiency to kind of pick up on that deal, which is almost never necessary, right? It’s almost never that urgent. But in the same way, it can work as a negative, right? So there are scams right now that are fairly pervasive that involve calling up parents or grandparents or cousins and saying, “Hey, this kid has been arrested. We need you to send over money to get them out of jail.” There are lots of variants of these, some of them more horrific than others. But all of them are preying on that immediacy. “We need you to respond right away. It’s an urgent situation.” Even the call center scams where people will call up and say, “You made a mistake on your visa application. The police are coming to arrest you and deport you right now.” That same sort of scam is putting people under immediate pressure to say, “If you pay it off, you can make this go away.” And we really like that sort of efficiency, making it go away quickly when you’re under pressure to deal with something. That takes your opportunity to say, “Wait a second, this doesn’t make any sense,” and takes away your ability to check on it really quickly.

Beau: There are two other hooks I want to talk about because they explain something specific about Coco and Amanda: why the people closest to them stopped asking questions.

Daniel: If you expect or believe some pattern to be true and you predict an outcome, you’re going to be more receptive to things that are consistent with it. You’re not gonna question them as much as you would if something were completely opposite your predictions. So we tend to challenge things that counter what we believe pretty effectively. We’re all pretty good at this, right? We’re all pretty good at shooting down that claim that we just don’t agree with. And the problem is we’re not as good at shooting down claims that we agree with. We don’t tend to do that as much. And I think that’s probably something that’s cross-culturally universal. We all are going to have to make predictions. We have to do this. Same thing with commitments, which are just basically strongly held assumptions that we really can’t discount, right? Once we’ve made this strong assumption, we’re not as likely to challenge things that are consistent with it. That’s gonna be true for anybody who makes an assumption anywhere.

Beau: She’s a survivor, she’s sick, she’s a child of God. Once a community commits to that, every new detail gets waved through ’cause it agrees with what they’ve already decided to believe. And the tragedy is that instinct, believe the survivor, is really a good one. Sarah and Karen wrestled with this constantly.

Karen: Our tendency is gonna be to believe people who tell us that they’re survivors, right? We’re gonna believe survivors of rape. We’re gonna believe survivors of abuse. We’re gonna believe them because that’s what we need to do, and I don’t want this to change that. However, some fact-checking can be in order, especially when a story is this intense, especially when it starts to change, especially when the person can be seen as trying to turn that story into a monetizable career. I think then some fact-checking can really come into play.

Beau: Daniel Simons has a tool for that, and it is the antidote to the hooks, and he calls it the possibility grid. In his example, he’s looking at claims a psychic made.

Daniel: Imagine a two-by-two grid. The top row would be predictions that the psychic made, and then the top left column would be predictions that were true. So The psychic predicted that there would be a hurricane that would hit Miami in this year. And it did, right? So that’s the top left cell of that grid, the top left box. That’s the one we tend to focus all of our attention on. That’s the one with the success stories of a successful leader, right, the activities of a successful leader. But you can also look at what are the predictions that psychic made that didn’t come true? That a hurricane will hit Galveston. We need to know how many of those also failed, those cases where they predicted something that didn’t come true. We need to know about those in order to know whether they’re any good at making predictions. We also need to know about the things that they didn’t predict that did come true, right? And there’s a great project out of Australia, Richard Saunders helped lead this, where they cataloged a whole bunch of world events. Everything from the Indonesian tsunami, to 9/11, to a whole bunch of international world events that you’d think if psychics were able to predict the future, they should predict. They then looked at all of the prominent psychics in the Australia area, in the media, in television, YouTube, and looked to see if any of them actually predicted those things, and turns out, no, they hadn’t, right? So those are the ones that would go in that bottom row of predictions that weren’t made, but things that actually happened. And then there’s all the predictions that weren’t made and that didn’t happen, which we just don’t know about. So if you wanna understand whether or not the information you have is complete, you have to look at all four cells. And the idea of the possibility grid is not to necessarily make you kind of calculate all the numbers and figure out all those details. We can’t do that for anything most of the time. But what you can do is say, “Okay, all I’ve got are things that are success stories. What about the people who did the same thing and failed? What about people who did something different and succeeded?” There’s a real danger in studying case studies of success, right? In that you can fool yourself into thinking that the things that happened to that one, in that one case, are representative of all people, or that they’re even associated. It may turn out that those things are anti-predictive of success. It may turn out that they actually are worse for you to do, and it might be that that person just got lucky.

Beau: So maybe you’re sitting here listening to this and going, “Beau, come on. This is so obvious. These scams, I would never fall for any of this stuff. No way.”

Daniel: That’s one danger that I think you commonly see among people who are kind of contrarian is that, “Well, I’m a skeptic. I’m a contrarian. I’ll never fall for any of this.” And it’s like, well, no, that’s not true either. If somebody targets your skepticism, you could absolutely fall for it. There are probably good fake skeptic organizations out there catering to people who believe they’re skeptics. But we can’t be skeptical of everything all the time or we’d never get anywhere. We have to be able to trust other people. And, you know, I think again, it’s important to keep in mind how rare big cons are, how common probably small forms of deception. And those small forms of deception most of the time don’t matter enough to most of us to worry about them. If a grocery store happens to scan prices slightly higher than they were marked on the shelves, for some people that really matters and they have to check every penny that they’re spending. But if you can afford to lose a couple of dollars here and there when you go grocery shopping, it’s probably not worth your effort to cross-check every receipt against every price in the store because that form of deception just isn’t that big a deal. But if you are investing your retirement, it probably does make sense to double-check, especially if you’re planning on investing your retirement with a money manager who reaches out to you, it probably makes sense to check them out really thoroughly.

Beau: So should we trust each other? Do we wanna live in a world where we’re scared to help people who are asking for help, who we feel badly for or whatever? We just wanna be there. I don’t think the answer is to believe less. Coco and Amanda didn’t succeed because their communities were foolish. They succeeded because those communities were good, trusting, generous, quick to believe a survivor, quick to help a sick young mother. That goodness isn’t a problem. That’s the whole point of having a community. The fix isn’t a thicker wall. It’s a longer pause, right? Sorry, I just demonstrated that. But, you know, it’s a pause that’s long enough for you to say, “Is that really true? And if it weren’t, how would I know?” It’s actually the best way to use an LLM if you use AI. Don’t… They get sycophantish and will tell you everything you say is great, but if you ask, “What’s wrong with this idea?” It will tell you. I mean, you can ask that question and still give money. You can ask that question and still love someone. You can ask before a ticking clock runs out because you’ve been told something is horribly urgent. Real emergencies survive most questions, and a con almost never does. And if you’re wondering whether any of this actually gets easier, Daniel Simons, someone who has spent a lot of time studying this, is an optimist.

Daniel: My hope is that maybe people will realize, “Okay, I can’t trust things just because somebody’s sharing them and they match my beliefs.” And maybe we’ll go back to having some sort of verification before people will pass it along because they’ll recognize, “Hey, this could very easily be fake, and I don’t have an easy way of knowing.” That’s the optimist view.

Beau: Money is not the only thing that can be stolen from you, but trust isn’t the only thing that can protect either. A little curiosity goes a long way. To hear more about Coco Berthmann, you can listen to Sarah Ganim and Karen Given’s podcast, Believable: The Story of Coco Berthmann. Charlie Webster hosted the podcast Scamanda, which was turned into a Hulu true crime series. And Daniel Simon’s book, Nobody’s Fool, is available wherever books are sold. Okay, now it’s time for our Tinfoil Swan, our paranoid takeaway to keep you safe on and offline. We’re going to stay kind of simple here. The next time a story makes you reach for your wallet (or your phone to share the story or your phone to hit Apple Pay or Google Pay) do one thing before you do anything else: find another person and ask them what they think about what you’re about to do. On a GoFundMe, look at who else donated. Maybe message one of them: “Hey, how’s she doing?” Especially when it comes to friends-of-a-friend, you want to ask the friend. But I also think sometimes if you’re just giving $20 and somebody’s being dishonest, that’s more on them than on you, and you should never be giving more than you can afford, but you know, not putting your family at peril, all that. Listen, that’s it, pretty much. One outside voice, just like, hey, does this seem right to you? Because an affinity scam works by keeping you inside the hula hoop of the drama created by the scammer. Riht? It just keeps you embroiled in the story, so all you’ve got to do is just take a breath and get out of the story for a second. Take a pause and think. Like, ask someone who’s not in the story; who hasn’t heard this mess what the real message is, and if the real message is I just want your money, then you know what to do. Check with somebody before you go and do something if you’re not sure. I know. You know what it really does? It gives you that pause, and really, all scam-proofing revolves around pausing. “Is this right? Does this make any sense?” Yada, yada, yada. Okay, that’s it for this week. Stay safe out there. Again, if you like the show, rate it wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can even write a review and tell your friends about it. Also if you have a story you want to tell on What the Hack, please reach out. We’re always looking for good stories. Thanks so much for listening. See you next week. This episode of What the Hack was produced by me and Andrew Steven who also did the editing. What the Hack is a production of DeleteMe, which was picked by the New York Times’ Wirecutter as the #1 personal information removal service. You should be using it already. If you’re not and you want to, well, you can. Here’s what to do. Go to joindeleteme.com/wth. That’s joindeleteme.com/wth and get 20% off. I kid you not, 20%. 20% off. That’s joindeleteme.com/wth. Now, stay safe out there. See you around.

Learn More:

• Read about military romance scams, another common type of fraud we covered previously on What the Hack.
• Learn how to protect yourself and your older adult relatives from gift card fraud.
• Listen to more from What the Hack.