#12 Good scamming
On the Calle Florida in Buenos Aires you can change dollars to pesos. Last Friday afternoon my boyfriend and I walked down three blocks trying to change our money. We’d been advised by a friend that the shady blokes had the best rates, following this advice we followed a gap toothed man into a lift to a second floor office and a dusty counter where we were immediately fleeced for 400 dollars.
How this happened: we put 1000 down on the counter and the man on the other side counted 600 - twice - moving the notes out of view for a fraction of a second in between, where he must have pocketed several 50s. He then immediately demanded we take a look around his side of the counter, in case we didn’t believe him. It was so odd, all happened so quickly, yes we hadn’t counted the notes going down on the counter but we HAD counted them just a few hours previously so were fairly sure we were being robbed. We decided together not to leave until we relocated the missing 400 in our pockets, in our luggage, in the room. They offered us 200 back that they “found” - we said 300 and we would go ahead with the exchange - they said 400 to clear out, putting out notes on the counter.
We took them and exited back onto the street, bewildered.
Oddly, after the whole dance had finished, the man giggled. Of course, by this time we could no longer see him, he’d retreated to a back room, letting another mediate in his place. But we heard him sniggering, once we’d retrieved our 400, and ended up having a pleasant enough conversation about exchange rates.
In retrospect the scam was so obvious, so blatant, I think we kind of forgave him the audacity for trying.
We resolved to try again. In the next place, which we were guided to by a girl in her 20s with thick false eyelashes, we made a great show of counting the notes before placing them on a counter.
This room had a fresh coat of white paint, two cameras, an electric door handle, and the business was managed by two people under 30 with smartphones. So far so straightforward.
But when they produced the pesos, they asked me to step away from the counter, and things started to go wrong. After my boyfriend counted the notes the man picked them back up and put them back through the counting machine. And then we recounted them, and they were wrong. Then they’d go back through the machine and be right. It was confusing, and frustrating, the more we checked the more unsure we got. When we asked to count them together, they gave us back our dollars and told us - again - to clear out.
That experience, unlike the first, was maddening, and mind-bending. But why, especially when with round 1 we stood to lose so much more, did we experience the two differently? Is it because of our modern technology that presumes a level of transparency, making us feel doubly conned when we discover we’ve been deceived?
At Cambridge in the year below me was an influencer by the name of Caroline Calloway. She wrote long missives in her Instagram captions, short stories of life in her ivory tower for the benefit of fans who had followed her since her early days back in the States. People loved her contemporary expat Brideshead narrative. Even though my friends and I had misgivings about the stories of her gilded life, we started to follow her for the way she was able to gloss over the library deadlines and paint a glittery picture of the best bits of college life.
It wasn’t that surprising when Caroline was outed as a scammer. Bits of half-truths about how her captions were written by her ex best friend Natalie, and how Natalie had written a book proposal, for which Caroline had received a substantial amount of money, and according to Natalie had basically no intention of ever writing, let alone repaying. Natalie wrote a tell-all in The Cut but came across as kind of petty. Caroline turned the scamming accusations into an extra layer of her lore for fans. She put the word scammer in her IG profile (now removed), and rose to another level of fame altogether. Where once she was famous to only a specific corner of the internet, now the New Yorker was writing a profile about her.
Caroline’s ability to get away with the scam was tied to the obvious humanity of the scammer, her ability to tell a good story, and a slight inkling that most people had always had (or at least the people who crossed paths with her): that what she was saying on her Instagram was fictitious anyway.
But it’s not just a contrast of technology versus humanity that makes us forgive scammers. A recently-developed AI tool plays with the blurred line of humanity, fact and fiction, to scam the scammers. The AI wastes the time of would-be phone scammers, negotiating delay after delay as it plays the role of a confused old lady who agrees to look for her bank details, a charade without end/ She costs the scammer both time and money, causing them to hang up in sheer frustration. AI as a force for good, turning the skills of scammers back on themselves, imitating human nature to build rapport.
How does tech match up with scamming? The old lady who delays reminds me of keying in a query to ChatGPT who promises to look it up for you and half an hour later there they are…still looking. It’s the empty promises of technological advancement - is it all one big scam? Tech is meant to remove the avoidance of doubt, serve as a reader of big data, a neutral truth teller, but its deployment can have us exclaiming in frustration. In that sense it could be the ultimate scammer, a great leveller in scamming experience.
And within this, despite the edge case of AI technology as a scamming force for good, there’s nostalgia for the analogue scam, the trickster energy of a scam well played, or a double-take of scammer caught in the act, that we miss when we add in the tech layer. A puck-like tale as old as time, where the scammer is only as good as their victim is willing to be deceived. To reference another Argentina experience, it takes two to tango.
By the way, we managed to exchange our dollars at the third place we found. They opened up a micro room inside a kiosk at street level, where we crammed in. The two black market currency exchange dealers took turns to hold and eat a choc ice while they counted out the currency. Better yet, they let us count it too, and didn’t pretend to have lost hundreds of dollars anywhere. We were thankful to exchange, grateful for the lack of scamming (beyond the basic scam of negotiating a personal exchange rate) and as we left we clocked the name of the cafe on the corner: Cafe Truffa, Fraud Café.
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I’m pausing Substack here for the next two weeks while we break for the holidays . I’ll be back on Monday 5th January 2026 👌🏻 wishing you all a gorgeous holiday period and a happy and healthy new year!