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Fraud is fashionable. On Netflix, 2022 was the year of the grifter.
The streaming platform ended the year with Poirot-pastiche Glass Onion, an indulgent movie in which Daniel Craig’s character investigates a self-constructed and narcissistic tycoon named Miles Bron. It’s nothing new to observe that the character of Miles Bron has been widely compared to Elon Musk. It’s also no spoiler to say that this murder mystery plot revolves around allegations of major fraud.
Glass Onion is fiction. From the start of 2022, however, Netflix has given us a steady diet of documentaries and dramatisations based on true-grift stories. In February and March alone, it released Inventing Anna, the glamorised tale of convicted con-woman Anna Delvey; The Tinder Swindler, which exposed romance-scammer Shimon Hayut; and Bad Vegan.
This last documentary featured Sarma Melngailis, a “raw vegan” restauranteur who illegally siphoned money from her restaurants for her husband. She is accused of peddling an unrealistic lifestyle to her Instagram followers and celebrity customers. He impersonated a cop, claimed to be under constant surveillance by dark forces, and promised her the cash would go towards servicing a deity who could render her dog immortal.
To understand why we’re so fascinated by fakery, consider the converse human obsession: our quest for authenticity. In her sharply-written and exhaustively researched book, Authenticity, published in May this year, Alice Sherwood identifies two key meanings of the word. For the past couple of centuries, modern English speakers have used “authenticity” to refer to a quality of verisimilitude. An authentic account of an event has an absolute truth value, just as an authentic Rembrandt is the work of the authoritative artist, understood as a solo agent.
In more recent years, however, Sherwood observes that we have come to talk more about “personal authenticity”. This, in Sherwood’s coinage, is “authenticity as self-fulfilment”, a quality of “being true not to external reality, but to your own, internal sense of self”. (Meghan Markle, guiding Oprah Winfrey round her Montecito chicken coop, told the TV producer last year of her desire to “live authentically”.)
Both definitions have at their heart the question of representation. An authentic sentence is one which accurately represents the thing it signifies, whether a tangible or a personal truth. Yet often these ideas of authenticity come into conflict with each other. Traditional “authenticity” privileges facts; “personal authenticity” privileges feelings.
Every human society develops tools to detect forgeries, the crimes which most obviously transgress Sherwood’s first definition of authenticity. We rarely react to the perpetrators of these crimes as emotively as we do to those who fail her second test, that of “personal authenticity”. We don’t make hit documentaries about people who counterfeit banknotes. We make documentaries about people who lie about who they really are. The smaller the gap between promotion and reality, the greater our fascination.
In Bad Vegan, the obvious villain is Anthony Strangis, the convicted conman who married Melngailis and whose lies to her compromise a check-list of the most common falsehoods peddled by fraudsters: a false name; a secret national-security job; a family estrangement in which he was the injured party; a secret access to a mystic power.
But what fascinated TV viewers instead was an allegation about Melngailis. On the run from the cops, the couple were tracked down when they made the mistake of ordering a cheese pizza from Domino’s, the junkiest of junk food chains. Melngailis maintains that the pizza was for her husband. But the damage was done. The woman who promised her customers a purer, higher plane of living at her raw vegan restaurants had failed to maintain the “personal authenticity” of her brand. Strangis, a common-or-garden fraudster, had committed his sins against a traditional idea of truth. Melngailis, far more grievously, had failed to be authentic to herself.
(Her dog, incidentally, is named Leon. Leon, even more incidentally, remains alive and well. The jury must remain out on the truth-value of Strangis’s claim that he could provide canine immortality.)
Our fixation on personal authenticity is a modern phenomenon. It relies on a belief in the personal self in terms that no person born before the Enlightenment could have recognised, just as it is fuelled, in every society that has been significantly influenced by American culture, by meritocratic mantras that we can all forge our own identity. Jay Gatsby, the literary emblem of the American Dream, is also literature’s most famous grifter.
Yet to understand contemporary frauds, we need to recognise that the incentives offered by the 21st century are structural and corrupting, not merely psychological and romantic. The most notorious conmen operate in the gap between the level of self-promotion that their society will tolerate, and the stretch into outright deception. They expose the weaknesses in our own realities.
Consider two final cases. Internationally, the case of the American congressman George Santos has gripped the news. A Republican first elected to Congress last month, Santos appears to have lied about almost everything on his CV. He invented university degrees and fabricated employment at CitiGroup and Goldman Sachs. To win arguments online, he has claimed to be half-Black; and suggested, falsely, that his mother died on 9/11. When running for election in a heavily Jewish district he even dreamed up two Ukrainian Holocaust-survivor maternal grandparents. (His maternal grandparents were in fact born Catholic in Brazil, according to official records.)
It’s not hard to see how Santos thought he could get away with this. He inhabits a political landscape shaped by Donald Trump, where authentic Trumpism is predicated on its incompatibility with objective authenticity.
In a more niche field, the world of medieval studies has been gripped this week by a dispute known on Twitter as #Receptiogate. The allegations concern a research centre named “Receptio”, which claims to have offices in three countries and is run by a former titular professor at the University of Zurich named Carla Rossi. Rossi has received funding from the Swiss National Science Foundation for her work on illuminated manuscripts, according to the SNSF website.
Peter Kidd is the former Curator of Illuminated Manuscripts at the British Library, now an independent scholar who maintains a blog about his research. Last week, Kidd wrote to the Receptio centre to raise concerns that Rossi had appeared to use his work without acknowledgement. He received an email response which claimed to be from Rossi’s secretary, working on Christmas Day, telling him “nobody cares about your blog!”
The operator of the pseudonymous Twitter account, which was soon suspended for issuing Kidd with homophobic abuse and threats, purported to be Rossi’s husband. The resulting row and scrutiny on social media set off a chain of further comic discoveries.
Receptio’s website carried photographs of the centre’s extensive staff. Several turned out to be stock photos which also showed up in adverts for hair transplants and drug lawyers. Irony is rife in this story. To take but one of the plagiarism allegations to have surfaced since, Rossi had previously written in a project on medieval “forgeries and fraud”: “We can state that forgery was rife in the medieval era, with some of Europe’s leading holy men cooking up reams of counterfeit documents.”
As the scholar Giovanni Gasbarri pointed out on Twitter, the text is identical to the header of an article published by another scholar at the magazine History Extra. Perhaps this is a method-acting immersion approach to the study of medieval forgery.
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Receptio and Carla Rossi deny all allegations of plagiarism and malpractice, saying that any similarities to Kidd’s work are due to their use of common sources. Rossi has accused Kidd of pursuing an “unjustified vendetta” against her.
Regardless of the truth of academic plagiarism allegations, it seems that, as with George Santos there is a good case that the married couple behind this “research centre” leant into practices of questionable self-promotion which had already infected their climate.
A running theme of these allegations is that the truth was stretched to inflate the centre’s international network. As the scandal grew online, the internationally acclaimed scholar Bernhard Huss wrote on Mastodon that “I seem to have been listed on the Receptio.eu site for a while as a member of #Receptio‘s organizational staff”, despite having only once been to a meeting for interested parties. The centre’s website showed a photograph of a beautiful building, purportedly their London office. It closely resembled a house used in marketing materials for fashionable estate agency The Modern House.
If proven, none of this acceptable. Much of it is funny. But it is not a far cry from dodgy practices which are already too frequent in academia: the marshalling of big-name absentee “associates” to bolster a friend’s research centre, questionable claims to partnerships in as many funding jurisdictions as possible, cartels of “blind” peer-reviewers who know each other too well. Grifters exploit the weaknesses of the systems in which they find themselves.
Our fascination with fraudsters is likely to continue well into the year 2023. Their prevalence is not just down to our tech revolution: as fast as digital scams evolve online, the tools evolve to confront them. Sherwood’s excellent book forensically compares this to the symbiotic evolution that develops between prey and predator in nature.
The modern conman exploits systems that are already corrupt. The global grifter reflects our international neurosis about how to construct an authentic self in the digital age. We fix onto the tales of Anna Delvey, Shimon Hayut and Sarma Melngailis while we decide for ourselves where to draw the line between false advertising and finding our best angles on Instagram. In 2023, that shows no sign of changing.
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