First came the scams. Then came the films and shows about the scams

By R.D.

THERE ARE plenty of words in English for tricking people out of their money. You can scam, hustle, bilk, gyp, flimflam, swindle, swizzle, fleece and finagle. Those who do so are grifters, con artists, hucksters, charlatans, hustlers or fraudsters. Such figures are something of a staple in popular culture: think of the champagne-chicanery of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby; Frank Abagnale, Leonardo DiCaprio’s charismatic con-man in “Catch Me if You Can”; or the glitzy characters in “American Hustle”. They are not ordinary villains, causing revulsion or fear. In being able to make a fortune using little more than their wits, they become attractive, almost awe-inspiring. In both fiction and real life, scammers sell.

Consider the media circus around Elizabeth Holmes, a young entrepreneur whose biotech company, Theranos, was once valued at $9bn. Theranos promised, to much excitement, that it could democratise health care with devices able to conduct laboratory-quality medical tests from drops of blood. It couldn’t, and when it emerged that Ms Holmes had lied about her company’s product—going so far as to deliver inaccurate results to consumers and falsify tests for potential investors—Theranos collapsed in disgrace. Ms Holmes was fined, barred from serving as a director of a public company for a decade and, along with Ramesh Balwani (her COO and boyfriend), indicted for nine counts of wire fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud.

Yet Ms Holmes’s time in the spotlight did not end after her ignominious exit from Silicon Valley. A documentary, “The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley”, will be released by HBO on March 18th. This follows “Bad Blood” (2018), a best-selling book on Theranos’s rise and fall by John Carreyrou, the journalist who originally broke the story for the Wall Street Journal. A film by the same name is currently in production, directed by Adam McKay (“The Big Short”, “Vice”) and starring Jennifer Lawrence. Earlier this year ABC released a documentary and podcast titled “The Dropout”—like many tech tycoons, Ms Holmes dropped out of university to run a business—which featured testimony from the Theranos deposition.

As the story has been told and retold, each narrator seeks a fresh angle, probing Ms Holmes’s motivations. In his book, Mr Carreyrou wonders whether Theranos is a symptom of Silicon Valley’s “fake it ’til you make it” attitude (which he thinks is particularly unsuited to health care). “The Inventor” asks if a crucial aspect of entrepreneurship is the determination to bend reality to your will.

Similar scrutiny has been applied to Billy McFarland, the founder of Fyre Festival. In April 2017 what he billed as an exclusive music event in the Bahamas turned out to be a disaster. Attendees—drawn in by advertising by Instagram “influencers”, and paying up to $12,000 for luxury villas—arrived on the island of Great Exuma to be greeted by disaster-relief tents. Despite a catalogue of failures, Mr McFarland had managed to convince employees and investors that the event could be a success. By declaring that the event was “cashless”, he obliged festival-goers to preload spending money onto wristbands they barely got to use.

In January Hulu and Netflix released competing post-mortem documentaries, and for those involved in the Fyre fiasco, this interest in the scandal was something of a saving grace. Jerry Media, a controversial internet company which ran the festival’s marketing, served as an executive producer on Netflix’s film, obtaining payment and a mea culpa in one. Hulu reportedly paid Mr McFarland an undisclosed sum for an exclusive interview, which was filmed after he began a six-year sentence in prison.

The stories of high-profile hustlers often provide a sense of closure and justice restored (though there is an element of selection bias in play: scams cannot attract attention before they’re busted). Anna Sorokin, a young woman who seduced New York society into believing she was a German heiress named Anna Delvey, is currently detained on Rikers Island, awaiting trial for grand larceny (she financed her lavish lifestyle with other people’s money, and by skipping out on bills). That has curtailed her swindles, but it creates a neat rise-and-fall narrative; Shonda Rhimes, a television writer responsible for “Grey’s Anatomy”, “Scandal” and “How to Get Away with Murder”, is bringing a series about Ms Sorokin to Netflix. “Dirty John”, a podcast about John Meehan, a con man and sociopath, was downloaded more than 10m times within weeks of its release. It has recently been adapted into a television series starring Eric Bana. The real-life Meehan was killed by the daughter of one of the women he was scamming.

Critics have contemplated why these stories have attracted so much attention. Many have seen it as evidence of the power of schadenfreude. Amanda Hess of the New York Times noted that “the grandiose expectations placed on actual children have grown wildly out of proportion with the economic reality into which they’ve been born”, and that social media encourages individuals to present themselves in new ways. But the scramble of journalists and film and television executives to cover grifters may have more prosaic roots. Scammers, from Charles Ponzi to Bernie Madoff to Ms Holmes and her ilk, have long been a feature of American life. In recent weeks, headlines have been dominated by a scheme allowing rich parents to bribe and cheat their children’s way into elite universities, piloted by a racketeer named William Singer. Even as the news cycle moves on, expect spinoffs based on Mr Singer’s life and business. Such stories are valuable commodities to hawk.