The problem, as we see in these stories of when things go wrong, is where we end up in this endless bending of the rules, this endless desperate asking of: would you do this if you could? Parasite Scamming is a shortcut to where you would have ended up anyway, right? A way of trying to level the playing field in a match which has been fixed against you. Their commitment to the hustle, even as their worlds burn around them, is testament to the delusion which the scammer immerses themselves in. The fake German heiress Anna Delvey, whose story is dramatised in a Netflix series due next month, and founder of the doomed Fyre Festival Billy McFarland, have become figures of intrigue. There's also been fictitious scams on display in cinema, from the multiple Oscar-winner Parasite, to more recent films Kajillionaire and I Care A Lot. Indefensible ways of surviving have been surfacing in entertainment in recent years, chronicling real life scams as in The Big Short, Hustlers, and even a high profile case of literary forgery in Can You Ever Forgive Me?. "There are fewer and fewer options for a person to survive in this ecosystem in a thoroughly defensible way." But who these days has the availability or the time?" she writes. "It would be better, of course, to do things morally. In an essay from from her 2019 book, Trick Mirror, Jia Tolentino writes the story of a generation in seven scams, covering everything from student debt to the stuff that comes out your tap being marketed and sold as 'raw water'. Fyre Festival founder Billy McFarland during the Netflix documentary about the scam of the century event Netflix
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