EGMT 1540: What is a Scam?

According to various reports in the popular media, every year for the decade or so were all “year of the scam.” Scams—from catfishing, to multi-level marketing schemes, to sham cryptocurrencies—abound on the social web. The scam industry behind all those scam phone calls, texts, and dating profiles is truly a vast and sophisticated global enterprise. Some of the flashiest enterprises tech economy have turned out to be scams. And we can’t seem to get enough of scams and scammers: some of the most popular fictional and non-fictional movies, shows, and podcasts are about them. “Scams” can be considered capitalism out of place: what we call a scam is used to perform boundary work that delegitimates certain forms of economic activity (and exploitation) and legitimates others. Scams are particularly important to understand now because the boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate capitalism seem to be in flux. Today, we are told that nearly everything—the college degree, the 9-5 job, the promise of retirement, the entire market-democratic system—is a scam. But, these claims are almost always an advertisement for something even more ambiguous, multivalent, and, in a word, scammy. What are we to make of this apparent scam age? Who decides, and on what basis, what is and what is not a scam? How do avoid being scammed and becoming scammers ourselves?