Social Media in the Scam Age

Abstract

This essay examines scams as a central organizing logic of contemporary social media rather than peripheral criminal activity. Drawing on research in cryptocurrency and financial technology alongside childhood experiences in 1990s Miami, the piece argues that social media is entering a “scam age” where boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate economic activity increasingly blur and the technological and social systems that make those distinctions are being rebuilt. It calls for social media scholars to explore the work that scams—and the idea of “scams”—do in the production of social media, the future, and the future of social media.

I grew up in Miami at the end of the millennium. Life in Florida when I was a kid was marked by the experimental, the entrepreneurial, the scammy—everyone’s parents sold vitamins or drugs or timeshares or modeling contracts, or ran a church or a cult, or were lawyers to those who did. Everyone had a hustle.

Florida has a long scamful history. “Swampland in Florida,” the quintessential scam investment, refers to waves and waves and waves of real estate scams. Charles Ponzi spent time there, selling plots of land, some underwater, promising 200% returns on investment in 2 months. The securities regulations—notably the Howey Test—that are used to regulate crypto and other unlicensed securities were developed in response to Florida swampland scams. The legal infrastructure we use to distinguish legitimate investment from fraud was literally built on Florida soil. Today, Miami is, its mayor claims, the “crypto capital of the world.”

Florida was the crypto of the twentieth century. It was the future, and it was mostly a scam future. When confronted about selling housing parcels on land that was inaccessible by road, unserviceable by electricity or sewers, and unbuildable by contemporary civil engineering, one Florida real estate developer is reported to have said, “We aren’t selling the people a subdivision, we are selling them the dream of a subdivision.” From this perspective, the buyers of these plots knew deep down that their new life in sunny Florida would never actually be lived. They were paying for a necessary fantasy. Which brings me to social media.

Social media is entering its scam age. Social media has proven to be fertile ground both for cultivating a world where scams make sense and for the diffusion of scams themselves. Social media—its affordances, business models, and governance—are and have always been co-constructed with scams. Scams are not just peripheral to the digital economy but central to it. A key task for social media studies is to understand scams, how they shape the rules we follow, the realities we inhabit, and the futures we can imagine.

After a decade and a half studying cryptocurrency, financial technology, and the digital economy more broadly, I have accidentally but necessarily become an expert on scams. I draw from that research here to call for more research from social media scholars on scams and explore facets of the work that scams—and the idea of “scams”—do in the production of social media, the future, and the future of social media.

To understand scams, we need to think about them as capitalism out of place: calling something a “scam” performs 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 are in flux, and the technological and social systems that make those distinctions are being rebuilt.

Social Media Governance as Scam Governance

Scams are at crisis levels on social media. In 2024, the global scam industry is estimated to have yielded $1.03 trillion. The vast majority of Americans have experienced an online scam of some kind, and over a third have reported giving away money or personal information to a scammer.

Tales of elaborate harpoon whaling—like the deepfake zoom meetings that led one executive to send $25 m to scammers—make the news, but social media scams are coming for everyone. Children are targeted on Roblox, teens by sextortion scams, young adults by job scams. Poor people are targeted by government assistance scams, immigrants by naturalization services scams. The more vulnerable you are, the more vulnerable you are to scams.

Scams flourish when many people come together on new and uncertain terms. Historians describe how the term “con man” was coined in mid-nineteenth century America, an era marked by waves of immigration, when scammers preyed on new arrivals to the country, the big city, and the frontier—and those displaced by those colonial demographic shifts. Today, we are interacting with strangers all the time, everywhere. Like the interfaces themselves, the terms of engagement online are always changing. We are all always new arrivals. Scammers can take advantage of near-instantaneous communication at an industrial scale across the globe. It’s becoming easier to transform everyday social vulnerabilities into financial ones.

Scams are a fundamental aspect of technological innovation. Commerce, like any other form of communication, maps to communication channels. Each new communication technology—telegraph, telephone, email—creates vulnerabilities that scammers exploit. Scams work by pushing up against and discovering the limits of technical, economic, and social systems. In turn, scam prevention shapes the norms and rules of communication systems. Social media is constantly changing, always in “permanent beta,” and always exploitable.

Scams are destroying people’s lives, leading to bankruptcy and suicide. And the problem will get worse. AI-enhanced techniques like deepfakes are dramatically expanding scams’ scale and efficiency. As agentic systems handle transactions independently, traditional methods of distinguishing legitimate business from scams may break down entirely. Failed economies and failed states mean more people will be pushed into the forced labor of scams. Globally, governments, financial institutions, and platforms are trying to fight scams, sometimes with user welfare in mind, sometimes with the bottom line, sometimes both.

At a moment when platform rules are actively being rewritten, it is important to understand the consequences of scam prevention. Mechanisms for distinguishing legitimate from illegitimate economic activity can reveal as much about power as they do criminal behavior. Anti-fraud measures become governance infrastructures that shape who has access to digital commerce and on what terms, while simultaneously authorizing unprecedented surveillance of economic life.

Scams are one of capitalism’s key boundary-making mechanisms. The promise of fraud prevention legitimizes the collection of intimate behavioral data that platforms use not just for security but for profiling, targeting, algorithmic sorting, and feeding AI models. When payment systems flag transactions as potentially fraudulent, freeze accounts for “suspicious activity,” or exclude categories of people, transactions, and industries, they aren’t simply preventing crime, they’re performing the fundamental work of defining economic citizenship in the digital age.

Social Media Culture as Scam Culture

We are moving into a social media economy where the boundary between legitimate opportunity and scam increasingly dissolves and where scamminess may be the terms of participation itself, and this makes the question of how social media platforms categorize scams all the more urgent.

Today, we are told that nearly everything—the college degree, the 9-to-5 job, the promise of retirement, the entire market-democratic system—is a scam. This may be true. After all, amid environmental, economic, and political collapse, there is no guarantee that the methods for comporting oneself as a provident economic citizen will work the way they did in the second half of the twentieth century.

As scholars of racial capitalism demonstrate, there have always been many people for whom institutional promises have never panned out, respectability was always a risky strategy, and hustling was always a way to get by and maybe even a form of liberation. As comedian Laci Moseley points out, “certain types of scamming” are “necessary when you’re born in a body that’s more marginalized.” For Moseley, the rules of good scamming are the same as the rules of good comedy: always punch up, never punch down.

But claims that everything is a scam—ubiquitous on social media—are almost always an advertisement for something even more ambiguous, multivalent, and, in a word, scammy. And those scammy alternatives almost always involve social media. Instead of a college degree, the 9-to-5 job, or retirement, enroll in Andrew Tate’s “hustler’s university” or growth hacking courses. Do a certification to become yoga teacher or life coach and start creating content for other yoga teachers and life coaches. Join one of endless platforms ranging from OnlyFans to Substack. Try a multilevel marketing scheme (MLM) and cultivate your downline by streaming on Facebook Live. Buy Bitcoin or NFTs or memecoins or meme stocks. Find the right sportsbook gambling discord that will help you beat the algorithmic house. Dream of financial freedom. Dream of passive income.

In these scammy alternatives, it’s often hard to tell precisely who a scammer is and who is getting scammed. In an MLM, you are part of both an upline and a downline. The value of your investment in a crypto asset depends on there being a market for that asset—a greater fool, some would say. You might not believe in the long-term future promised by the scammy thing you have gotten yourself into, but it doesn’t matter: you must keep hustling anyway. A true believer is indistinguishable from a shill and from someone desperately trying to protect their life savings.

Scams are usually imagined as a game with two players: con artist and mark. But today’s scams are more like massively multiplayer online games. They are, as I have put it, “network scams.” In this economy, everyone is reminded to respect the hustle of the next person, to always try to out-hustle them, but to accept when they themselves have been out-hustled.

Network scams demand that we exploit our communities, our social networks. They privilege celebrity, those whose position in the network affords them visibility across it. Some people are stitched into networks such that they can move crypto markets with a tweet. Those who promote an MLM to millions of followers will have a far vaster downline than any of those followers. Punching up may be the liberatory mode of scamming, but in the network scam, it’s nearly impossible.

The scam landscape is both a reaction to the precarity produced by the withering of institutions and a deepening of it. When scams fill the gaps and take the shape of failing institutions, they fill (and reveal) unmet human needs—identity, agency, community, a future. But it is unclear who believes in the potential for that future to ever actually arrive or deliver on any of its promises.

Scam Futures

Florida is a land quite literally terraformed by scams. History tells us that Florida’s first modern scam era, the 1920s land boom, went bust in the Okeechobee hurricane of 1928 that devastated Miami. But of course, the scams didn’t end there. Just because all is revealed to be scam doesn’t mean the story ends, the plot resolved. Terraforming swamp land is also terraforming a future. Florida is a palimpsest that bears the marks of semi-completed scam infrastructures. Eventually most of that swampland was filled in, gated communities and shopping centers were built and rebuilt. There is an osmotic threshold where scams just become a reality. Florida passed that threshold and so did crypto. Even if the promised future doesn’t come to be, some future inevitably does.

I worked hard to leave Florida, to learn the rules of the legitimate economy, to live in a future that wasn’t a scam. But that economy and that future no longer seem to exist. Today, it feels to me like the Florida of my childhood, which felt like the edge of civilization, has gone mainstream. Things are getting warmer everywhere. Hurricanes are landing in places they are not supposed to. The dry land I sought to build a house on has eroded into the bay.

Understanding this scam age requires the tools of media, communication, and technology studies. We can see what others miss: understanding scams is never just about fraud detection and prevention, but about how economic life is organized, how communication systems shape social relations, how platforms govern millions of users through ostensibly technical decisions.

Social media platforms are like Florida, built on digital swampland, promising futures that may never arrive. They are infrastructure for scams and for scam culture, and somehow they have become the terrain we all inhabit. How do you keep living through social media, where scams and legitimate economies are increasingly indistinguishable, where scam prevention reshapes access and participation, where everyone is both hustler and mark? We will have to learn to keep living in those futures, where old certainties have dissolved and new ones have yet to solidify. This means recognizing that studying social media requires studying scams not as peripheral criminal activity, but as central organizing logic, perhaps the dominant mode of economic life.