brief Silicon Valley interest in “raw water,” which is untreated and unfiltered spring water—teeming with bacteria, and free from all the tooth-strengthening minerals that come out of the tap. In 2017, the Times Styles section ran a piece on the Bay Area raw-water enthusiasts:
Mr. Battle poured himself a glass. “The water from the tap just doesn’t taste quite as refreshing,” he said. “Now is that because I saw it come off the roof, and anything from the roof feels special? Maybe.”
Gale-force ridicule followed. Stories like this—and the gleeful scorn they engender—are ostensibly a sort of scammer prophylaxis. Those idiots, we think, those morons drinking their tapeworm water: we would never be so dumb as to buy that. These stories crop up often in the food space, where it is easy for entrepreneurs to capitalize on the endless well of magical thinking that surrounds health and authenticity in our deeply unhealthy and inauthentic environment. Then, once they cross some line of absurdity or ineptitude, we get to make fun of the suckers who fell for the pitch.
Before raw water, there was Juicero, the company that raised nearly $120 million to manufacture $700 juicers. In Juicero’s model, fruits and vegetables would be individually packaged in Los Angeles and shipped to Juicero customers, who would put the packs into the Juicero machine, which would scan the packs, cross-check them against a database, and then, finally, make a cup of juice. A Google Ventures partner told the Times that the company was “the most complicated business that I’ve ever funded.” The company’s founder boasted that his juicers were made out of aircraft-grade aluminum, that they contained ten circuit boards, that they could deploy thousands of pounds of force. But soon after Juicero’s machines went on the market, Bloomberg reported that you didn’t actually need them. If you squeezed the Juicero packs by hand, you could make juice even faster than the juicer. The company became an immediate laughingstock and, within a few months, shut down.
It can be hard, of course, to draw a precise line between a scam and a product with a highly exaggerated sales pitch. One of the only ways to do so is finding a concrete misrepresentation—as a food blogger did in 2015 with Rick and Michael Mast. The Masts were two bearded brothers who lived in Brooklyn, dressed like they were in Mumford & Sons, and made $10 artisan chocolate bars. The Mast Brothers had always advertised themselves as “bean-to-bar” chocolatiers who processed all their cocoa beans in-house. But then a Dallas blogger named Scott Craig exposed the Mast Brothers for being “remelters,” meaning that they had, for years, melted down and remolded industrial bulk chocolate, wrapped it up in Italian paper, and called it a day. The story broke in another enormous schadenfreude tsunami, with the joke falling first on the Mast Brothers and then, ultimately, as it always does, on the dummies who bought their product. This is what you gentrifiers get with your hard-ons for artisanal garbage! the tweets and blog posts cackled. This is what you Instagram addicts get for paying three months’ rent money for a festival no one had ever heard of! This is what you get for being so rich that you need a QR code to make a glass of fucking juice!
Right around this vicious and satisfying point in the scam news cycle, popular identification often begins to slide toward the scammer, who, once identified, can be reconfigured as a uniquely American folk hero—a logical endpoint of our national fixation on reinvention and spectacular ascent. Stories about blatant con artists allow us to have the scam both ways: we get the pleasure of seeing the scammer exposed and humiliated, but also the retrospective, vicarious thrill of watching the scammer take people for a ride. The blatant scammers make scamming seem simultaneously glorious and unsustainable. (In reality, the truly effective ones, like the prophets of the anti-vaccination movement, can keep going indefinitely, even after they get caught.) In 2016, news broke of a Florida teenager named Malachi Love-Robinson, who had been arrested for posing as a doctor and opening his own medical practice, and then for using false credentials in an attempt to buy a Jaguar, and then for pretending to be a doctor again. In 2018, Jessica Pressler at New York wrote the definitive story on Anna Delvey, the so-called Soho Grifter, a broke young woman with a mysterious European accent who effortlessly convinced hotels, private jet companies, and a