Scams

Tuesday

Gus Carter

How deepfake fraud is rewiring our minds

We’re led to believe that America was once Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, a place of cardigans and kindness where everyone got along just swell. Then it all went wrong. MSNBC hosts talk of a “crisis in authority” while New York Times columnists blame corrupt Republicans for a “lost faith in liberal governance.” Right-leaning commentators point to mass migration as the great trust killer. Illegal aliens, we’re told, have a “fragmenting effect on shared cultural norms” and are “importing distrust.” No doubt these arguments contain an element of truth: America is a less trusting society than it was a few decades ago. But soon such arguments are going to appear as quaint as Mister Rogers’s model Pennsylvanian town.

fraud

Thursday

Laura Allsop

Inigo Philbrick, the art world’s wheeler dealer stealer

A few months after going on the lam in late 2019, the thirty-two-year-old wunderkind art dealer Inigo Philbrick sent his friend and colleague Orlando Whitfield a trove of documents. Philbrick wanted his old friend to write a sympathetic account of the misdeeds he stood accused of — since described as the biggest art fraud perpetrated in US history, for which Philbrick was later convicted and imprisoned. Whitfield has instead written All That Glitters, a memoir chronicling their friendship and dealings during a heady “gold rush” decade in the art world. Going through Philbrick’s correspondence and the court documents, Whitfield realized his friend was not the person he purported to be, certainly not the one his clients believed he was.

Philbrick

Monday

Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore

Meet the telemarketer-turned-filmmaker behind HBO’s Telemarketers

In 2001, at the age of fourteen, Sam Lipman-Stern dropped out of high school in New Jersey and started working at the now defunct Civic Development Group (CDG) as a telemarketer. He stayed for seven years, calling up citizens to ask for money on behalf of police charities. It turned out to be a massive scam.  More than two decades later, Lipman-Stern, now thirty-six and a seasoned filmmaker, has exposed not only CDG — which underhandedly kept 90 percent of the proceeds it raised — but the entire industry in his frenetic, rip-roaring investigative HBO documentary Telemarketers.  Co-directed by Adam Bhala Lough and produced by the Safdie brothers, the three-part docuseries is a wild ride, largely due to Lipman-Stern’s archival footage.