3 Money Lessons from Infamous Scam Artists | J Mase III | TED

I'm here to share a truth with you.

And so I am ready to share my truth.

And the truth is,

I love scam artists.

I mean, I don't love scam artists,

I love learning about them.

I love reading books about them, watching documentaries about them,

I love learning about the teleshopping queen Wanna Marchi in Italy.

I like learning how to avoid creeps like Simon Leviev,

you know, the "Tinder Swindler."

I even liked watching both Fyre Festival documentaries the day they came out

and have listened to every single radio edit

of every Billy McFarland interview

that exists in this dimension.

I'm, like, obsessed.

And I think we can all learn a lot from scam artists, you know,

not like how to live your life or something,

but specifically how money functions in our society.

So if you're ready to go on this journey with me today,

I would like to teach you money lessons from famous scam artists.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

(Applause)

So how did I get here?

Well, I'm an artist, you know, minus the scam part.

I'm a poet and a filmmaker specifically.

And when I started my arts journey full-time over a decade ago,

I was unprepared for the amount of grants I'd have to write.

Turns out that a lot of being a professional artist

is fundraising for your own salary.

So I got good at grants.

I got so good at grants,

I started writing grants for other people.

In one year alone,

through writing grants for folks,

running people's fundraising campaigns, supporting mutual aid efforts,

I was able to help move 1.3 million dollars

directly into the hands of Black trans individuals and organizations.

(Applause and cheers)

I started consulting with philanthropic organizations

on the best way to support targeted communities,

and I teach reparations frameworks all across the country.

So I know why people give money.

And honestly, a lot of it is great storytelling,

and scam artists are really good at spinning a narrative.

Now, the first famous scam artist I'd like to tell you all about

is the infamous Elizabeth Holmes.

So Elizabeth Holmes, who founded Theranos,

was able to rake in about a nine-billion-dollar valuation

for a product that didn't even work.

For those of you that don't remember Elizabeth Holmes, because you somehow,

I don't know, like, missed the competing podcast, the book,

the documentary and the very public trial,

let me remind you who she is.

So she started Theranos under the premise that they would be creating a device

that could read hundreds of medical tests

through a single drop of blood.

Now she surrounded herself with government officials,

venture capitalists and a bevy of high-gloss magazine covers.

What she did not surround herself with, though, were medical experts as peers,

right?

And so for many people,

and for many of them that came close to her,

they could realize pretty quickly

that what she was selling just wasn't real.

And so for most folks, it's very clear that Elizabeth Holmes is a scammer.

But have you ever listened to the rationalizations of her funders?

That stuff is gold.

So out of all of her investors,

my favorite interview is one with Don Lucas Sr.

So Don Lucas Sr., who gave her millions of dollars,

was asked to explain, "Why did you give her so much money?"

And so he said, "Well, her great- grandfather was an entrepreneur."

And it turns out the hospital near where her family lives

is named for her great-uncle.

Yeah, so she was supposedly the best of both worlds

and had supposedly learned both medicine and entrepreneurship through osmosis.

(Laughter)

Another gem of an interview was with Tim Draper.

So Tim Draper pushed back against an interviewer who asked,

"Now, do you think that Elizabeth Holmes, being a family friend of yours,

had anything to do with you giving her so much money?"

He scoffed.

I mean, he's a professional.

He doesn't do trivial things like that.

He was a first investor in Tesla and Skype.

He just knows who's going to go the distance.

And as we know, Theranos tanked, horribly and publicly,

after opening 40 centers at Arizona-based Walgreens locations

and endangering thousands of people who got blood tests

that the company knew were going to be faulty.

A lie we get told again and again,

is that broke folks are bad at money.

It's working-class folks who make bad decisions about money.

This brings us to our first lesson.

People with wealth aren't better at making decisions.

They get to make more bad decisions without it hurting them.

(Applause)

With the added bonus of being able to cause extensive harm

to the people over whom they wield power.

When broke folks make bad decisions about money,

it only impacts them,

not whole ecosystems.

The next famous scam artist I'd like to talk to you all about

is the story of Margaret and Walter Keane.

Now in the 1960s,

Walter got famous for painting.

But guess what Walter doesn't do?

Walter doesn’t paint, OK?

He steals all of the work from Margaret, right?

And these beautiful pieces,

known for their resonant features of children with big eyes,

were shown off at clubs,

at festivals, even at the UN.

They made him millions of dollars.

He even had celebrity clientele such as the Kennedy family.

Because of the difficulty of being taken seriously

as an artist who was a woman,

it was easy to erase Margaret from her work.

Walter even was able to convince her

that this was the best way to get her work seen at all.

Which brings us to our next point and lesson for the day.

In an unjust society,

our social identities are often used as markers

to decide whether we are worthy of being taken seriously

or deserving of financial and other resources, OK?

And when I'm saying other resources, I'm saying sometimes it's money,

sometimes it's food,

sometimes it's housing, sometimes it's water.

The next story that's coming up to me

actually is not a scam artist story per se,

but a triumph over scam artist story.

If I can diverge just for a little bit,

is that OK, yeah?

And so I'm thinking so much about the story of Carlette Duffy.

So Carlette Duffy is a Black woman based in Indianapolis.

And in 2020, she decided that she needed to refinance her home.

And so when she did that, she had two appraisal teams come down,

and they both undervalued her home extensively.

The lowest appraisal being at 110,000 dollars.

So she had an idea.

She took down every picture of her family from her home.

She removed every single piece of artwork that depicted Black people.

She removed all of her hair products and she called a friend,

a white man that news outlets simply refer to as "Hank."

Well, don't you know that when Hank stood in for her at the next appraisal,

her home went from being worth 110,000 dollars to 259,000 dollars.

Does that sound like a scam to you?

Because it sounds like a scam to me.

And in that story, what I think also comes up,

is how common that scam is.

And it is one that's based in redlining practices

and white supremacy culture.

Now the next and last scam artist that I would like to share with y'all

is the amazing Anna Sorokin, aka Anna Delvey, OK?

Yeah, so some of y'all are fans, I could tell, OK.

Hide your wallets, OK?

And so ...

So Anna Delvey pretended to be a German heiress,

and she almost, every space she went into,

she took the New York scene of financial institutions and socialites for a ride

that would cost them 275,000 dollars.

She lived in sprawling apartments, she flew on private jets,

she vacationed on yachts,

she ate meals that cost as much as my rent.

She said she was rich.

She looked the part.

And so as a result, people felt compelled to give her more money.

Think of how ridiculous that sounds.

Because she said she was rich,

she looked the part,

people thought she also needed their money.

Whether a gift or a loan,

Anna would always promise to pay people back

that decided they wanted to help her in supposedly urgent situations

when she wasn't able to access her totally fictional

but supposedly sprawling fortune.

What Anna's story reminds me is this next point.

Again, in an unjust system, in an unjust society,

those who are seen as being able to perform wealth

are more likely to get funded than those in actual financial need.

Not only is this a gross practice, it's an unsustainable one.

In 2014, a study found that overconsumption

and economic inequality leads to the collapse of civilizations.

While having a lot of wealth may be able to buy you a PR team

to make you more likable to the general population,

it doesn't make you a more skilled person.

It doesn't make you more capable,

and it certainly doesn't make you more perceptive

about the sustainability of resources.

This idea that wealthy people are somehow more deserving

is one that is very pervasive

and one that many different types of people believe.

In this society, because of all the systems we live under,

lots of broke folks also believe the idea that they are somehow less worthy

than their wealthy counterparts.

Scam artists actually know something

that most of us in this room would deny or refuse to accept.

And that is,

money doesn't typically come from hard work.

Money comes to those who hoard it.

Money comes to those who are willing to exploit.

Money comes to those who work hard

to bury the history of where money comes from.

Billions of people live on this planet that work hard every single day

that will live and die broke.

Money comes to financial institutions like Bank of America

and JPMorgan Chase,

who literally got their start in the transatlantic slave trade

and will find themselves in the news every few years

for denying loans to the very descendants of the same people they once owned.

To big tech giants like Apple and Amazon,

who will pay top dollar for a coder behind a desk in Seattle

but will pay darn near nothing

for the hands of those that work tirelessly

to mine the materials that make our devices function

and to deliver our packages cheaply.

To living in a society where it is legal to pay both disabled workers

and essential workers less than minimum wage.

The way we deal with money in this society is the real scam.

And while the scam artists that I'm talking about

have had their tricks and tools exposed for the whole world to see,

there are scams in our faces every single day.

So what do I want you to get out of today?

I want you to consider

that there are scams that we are asked to agree not to see all the time.

And I want you to think about in your personal life,

in your interpersonal life and in your greater community life,

what are some scams that we are asked to pretend are OK

and understanding that when we do that,

we set up a lot of our communities to fail.

As an artist, I have the distinct pleasure and joy

of helping people to dream possibilities

that don't already exist on this planet.

So today I'm asking you to dream with me.

I want you to dream a possible world

in which we delegate resources like money

from a place of community care.

What do actual ethical practices around money look like?

Money in this society is often used to prove morality,

competency, wisdom,

when really it's just a tool we made up.

And we get to decide how we use it,

how we move forward with it or without it for the collective good.

Thank you.

(Applause and cheers)