Character in Escrow
How scams reveal more about the character of victims than their perpetrators
Three Netflix docudramas came out in 2022 with the same plot. Inventing Anna shows a fake socialite persuading middle-class glommers-on to ante up for lavish vacations, promising to repay once her alleged fortune is accessible. The Tinder Swindler depicts a playboy who dazzles women with private jets, then claims access to his fortune has been cut off and needs massive loans to bridge the gap. Bad Vegan follows a restaurateur who wired her partner millions, convinced he would bankroll her empire. Notice anything in common?
In each case, the money flows the same way, from a comfortable person to someone they believe is already rich. These weren’t charity cases. They weren’t troubled friends in need of help. Nor were they normal spot loans between peers. “Cover my rent and I’ll pay you back when my paycheck clears.” They were middle-class lenders fronting large sums to someone they thought had millions, gambling on outsize returns. Whether they wanted social entry, lavish gifts, or a windfall payout, they were already spending the trapped fortune in their heads.
They behaved less like friends or lovers and more like small-time private lenders taking equity-like risk in someone else’s alleged wealth. If your lover needs $40,000 and promises $100,000 in return and you happily accept, you may be their lover, but they are not yours. Yet one of the Swindler’s “victims” embraced this exact offer. It’s what she, and all the others, were hoping for when they wired the money.
The con artist doesn’t install greed. He runs a test for it. Call that pattern The Sort. It has many arms, some socially sanctioned, some extrajudicial. Its goal is to place people where they would likely end up before they take the harmful actions that would put them there.
DUI laws are essentially precrime statutes. You’ve done no harm yet. You may never. But the state you’re in is illegal because it is highly likely to lead to harm. To Catch a Predator works the same way in TV form. Chris Hansen and a decoy don’t create a new desire in the man who walks through that door. They send feelers into the world and see who shows up. Only those with the right deficit in impulse control and conscience reply.
Advance-fee fraud is the market’s bootleg version of The Sort. It’s better understood as a black-market arm of precrime. The email, the DM, the docudrama’s relationship arc are all text that present a very specific deal and watch to see who comes forward.
In that light, the docudrama “victims” stop looking like random civilians hit by superior persuasion. They start to look like people making the same trade from different rungs of the ladder. The rich scammer is running an advance-fee fraud on the middle-class mark. “Front me cash now and share in my fortune later.” The mark, in turn, is trying to run a softer, deniable version of that same bet on someone they think is richer. “I’ll cover your temporary cash crunch, as long as I get a slice of the ridiculous payout.”
If you try your hand at being a loan shark to the wealthy, you are no victim. You are a usurious opportunist whose bet went bad. All the malice and opportunism, none of the ambition. Next time you want 100% return on a loan, get it in writing or join the mafia. Lesson learned.
Scams evolve in a tighter loop than almost any other prose. Your marketing campaign may A/B test copy, but it’s throttled by ad budget, brand image, limited product, and blowback if you go too far. You cannot just spam the world with increasingly deranged versions until one barely-legal monstrosity prints money.
Scammers have no such restrictions. They can spray a million messages in a hundred variations and pay no reputational cost. If one hits, you’ve won the lottery. Mutate its winning genes into the next batch. Email marketers couldn’t dream of this feedback loop.
The average scam email is an optimal form. Every sentence earned its spot through decades of trial by fire. Lines that didn’t pull in enough money died quietly. Phrases that triggered banks or spam filters got edited out. Even misspellings are purposeful, screening out marks who would eventually wise up to the fraud anyway.
Much like a bumblebee orchid evolved to look like a bee without “knowing” what a bee is, the modern 419 email evolved to mirror the psychology of its targets better than its authors understand. It’s a blind climb up an invisible hill. The gradient is “who sends money,” and every surviving tweak is one more step. What feels from the inside like persuasion is, from the outside, only selection.
You can see the same thing at the street level. Panhandlers’ tight scripts are no different. Whether San Francisco, Denver, or Knoxville, the dialogue tree has been crowdsourced to plug every escape hatch. Each story miraculously fits every constraint.
This is a one-time request.
I’m a hard worker down on my luck for external reasons.
I live simply: no luxuries, addictions, or vices.
I only want help but will reluctantly accept cash.
Your tiny investment will have outsized effect.
It’s so perfect that if you do hear such a story, you can be certain it’s dishonest. Nobody’s real life is that thematically tidy. But regardless of their actual situation or need, they have to optimize the pitch. They are competing against others who polished theirs in the zero-sum market for pocket cash. Those who don’t refine their stories disappear.
Consider the current optimal form of the Nigerian 419 email. It tells you more about who responds than who writes it. It references Sani Abacha, a real person you can look up. He jailed press, rigged elections, crushed unions, looted billions in oil money. And his wealth can be yours.
The script is simple. A relative of an ex-dictator reaches out, desperate to expatriate stolen funds. You, total stranger, can help move the loot and skim a percentage for your trouble. Maybe you believe money is amoral and stealing from kleptocrats is virtuous. Maybe you just see a victimless crime. Maybe you see yourself in him and want power without responsibility, wealth without work, cruelty without conscience.
Whatever the story, by the time you’re wiring fees to help liberate stolen oil money, The Sort has already done its job. You’ve tagged yourself as greedy but unambitious, and the system quietly makes sure you’re too broke to exercise that vice if you ever get a burst of ambition.
There is a whole ecology of texts that are less like spells and more like filters. They don’t try very hard to drag the median mind to a new position. They try to slice off tails. If text is a kind of spell, these are a special subclass of incantations that don’t so much enchant the world as light it up. They don’t change who you are. They highlight it, then bill you.
What they gain is the power to run more entrance exams against the world’s existing stock of character traits and private hungers. The nightmare scenario isn’t one perfect phrase that hypnotizes everyone. It’s a fractal jungle of micro-spells, each exquisitely tuned to a narrow seam of weakness: the lonely insomniac, the aging narcissist, the guy who will wire money to a fake princess if the letterhead looks official. The more probes you can send, the more efficiently you can sort.
Our mistake isn’t thinking text is powerful. Our mistake is treating every sharp piece of text as an attack on our will, instead of noticing how often it’s actually a mirror. The darkest spells are not the ones that overpower you, but the ones that calmly ask what you were willing to do all along, only to rearrange your life around the answer.
Tomorrow, if a few sentences can measure us this precisely, what is text really representing?