Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
What is it about scammers that has us so fascinated?
WHY are we so fascinated by scammer lore? It’s a question I have been trying to answer for more than three years. I find myself so fascinated by people who behave badly and almost get away with it, as much as I find wealthy people fascinating. I guess it has to do with how audacious scammers are and how they have the guts to hoodwink people and get away with it for a long time.
The conversation around the hit Netflix documentary The Tinder Swindler has been raging for more than a week. People just can’t get enough of it, from those blaming the women for being gullible to those saying Simon Leviev was very smart and his victims should have known better. I have tuned in to a couple of Twitter Spaces conversations where people shared how they have also been scammed by those they were in relationships with.
So for those who don’t know anything about Leviev, here’s the tea. Leviev is actually Shimon Hayut, an Israeli man who conned the women he was in relationships with. He met these women on Tinder, hence “The Tinder Swindler”, and proceeded to swindle them out of millions of dollars. He did so by catfishing them (the original scam) and claiming to be Simon Leviev, the son of Israeli tycoon Lev Leviev, who is known as the “King of Diamonds” and is reportedly worth $1 billion (about R15bn).
It was an easy con. Imagine being matched with the scion of a billionaire who lives an extravagant lifestyle, travels aboard private jets, attends exclusive yacht parties and is always seen in trendy brands?
How these women were hoodwinked to bail out the son of a billionaire, giving him money via credit cards and loans, is mind-boggling. It speaks volumes about the manipulative tactics that scammers use.
Take the story of Marty Markowitz, a wealthy man who was taken advantage of by his therapist, Dr Ike Herschkopf. The subject of the popular The Shrink Next Door podcast, their story was so riveting it was adapted into an Apple TV+ series of the same name starring Will Ferrell and Paul Rudd.
That was a story of classic manipulation told by veteran journalist Joe Nocera, who came across something strange when he moved to the Hamptons
and just couldn’t place what was happening at the house next door. It turns out he was on to something: the doctor who claimed to own the house was not the owner. It was owned by the man who appeared to be the caretaker. The caretaker was Markowitz, who after inheriting his family’s textile business could not cope and sought a mental health professional to help him set boundaries and be a better CEO.
Instead, the therapist, Herschkopf, took over his patient’s life for nearly three decades. It went far beyond the doctor-patient boundaries. Herschkopf took control of his patient’s finances, made sure that he cut ties with his remaining family, made him have a bar mitzvah as an adult because he wasn’t confident enough when he first had the ceremony as a youngster, and then moved into the house at the Hamptons where he threw lavish parties and pretended that he owned the property. It was a fascinating story, one that reminded me how powerful and manipulative con artists can be.
Another scammer who targeted wealthy people and almost got away with it is the crafty Anna Sorokin, who pretended to be a wealthy German heiress known as Anna Delvey and proceeded to scam hotels, banks and her high society New York acquaintances. Now the subject of a Netflix drama starring Julia Garner, Inventing Anna (which is currently streaming) tells of how Sorokin hoodwinked many people from 2013 to 2017. She is now a convicted fraudster. She was found guilty in 2019 of theft of services and grand larceny, having scammed banks and luxury hotels out of more
than $200 000. She was released in February last year for good behaviour.
I think scammers are able to get away with conning people because they have realised that humans are inherently trusting. Not everyone has their walls up and not everyone is expecting to be taken advantage of by a person they just met. And we are all fascinated by these stories because we think it could never happen to us. Meanwhile, it takes one good reference or a picture to make us believe the person we are dealing with is honest and would never do anything to hurt us. If only.