Scam Goddess
Lessons from a Life of Cons, Grifts, and Schemes
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A delightfully subversive essay collection from Laci Mosley, host of the award-winning “Scam Goddess” podcast, about the frauds, cons, and schemes that make up our world—and how the scammer mindset has affected her own upbringing, career, friendships, love life, and more.
From an early age, comedian and actress Laci Mosley knew her path would be riddled with scams, cons, robberies, and frauds. Little ones. Ones that didn’t hurt people or get her in trouble. But ones that would get her where she needed to be. “You see,” she writes, “everyone’s a scammer and everything’s a scam. Some people are better at it than others, but we all do it. The system wasn’t built for people like me. Scamming saved me and has taught me how to navigate a messy and unfair world while looking out for myself, too.”
In Scam Goddess, Laci recounts how her scammer instincts have guided her throughout her life—from a religious childhood in rural Texas, to a stint as a city bartender at what might have been a drug front, to swindling her way past the gatekeepers of Hollywood—recounting the greatest true-crime scam stories that inspired her along the way. Whether it’s by the beauty industry, capitalism, or the people we date, we’re all getting scammed. In this book, Laci identifies the secrets to flipping the script and coming out ahead.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Scam Goddess podcast host Mosley's comedic chops serve her well in this hilarious collection about the lessons she's learned from enduring cons, researching them for her show, and carrying them out herself. "Everything is a scam and everyone is a scammer," Mosley writes, tracing that realization back to her childhood in rural Texas in the 1990s and early aughts, when she would watch her Baptist preacher pontificate from the pulpit, even as he was stealing money from the congregation behind closed doors. Mosley then covers her early days trying to hack it as an actor in Los Angeles, when she narrowly averted shady roommates who wanted to overcharge her for insufficient accommodations and social-climbing beaus. In addition to dispensing wisdom gleaned from those experiences ("The true mark of a Scam Goddess is knowing when to keep your damn mouth shut"), Mosley highlights jaw-dropping examples of historical con artists, including Italian surgeon Paolo Macchiarini, who gained notoriety after his supposedly revolutionary windpipe treatments ended up killing patients, and authorities learned he'd wildly overstated his medical training. Throughout, Mosley strikes a careful balance between endorsing small-scale hustles "to get ahead" and condemning monstrous behavior. The results are as thought-provoking as they are irreverent.