Laci Mosley on Scams, Comedy, and Scams as Comedy

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It’s only partly an exaggeration to say that Laci Mosley got me through the pandemic—or at least, through its early days. For pretty much that whole first year that we were all hunkered up alone at home, I found myself utterly incapable, for the first time in maybe my whole life, of picking up (or turning on) a single book. Nor could I manage to sit through an album, or watch a whole TV show, or listen to any of the hip non-fiction podcasts I suddenly found stacking up like so many precarious Jenga blocks.

But what I could listen to was Scam Goddess, the weekly true crime(-ish) podcast created and hosted by actor and improv comedian Laci Mosley. Dedicated to “fraud and all those who practice it,” Scam Goddess forgoes the “host tells a story to a naive guest” format that’s endemic to podcasts these days and kicks it up a notch: not only does Mosley’s comedian guest not know the shape of the con, crime, or caper she’s going to regale them with when they sit down at the mic across from her, but neither does she. This leaves Mosley to learn about the fraud-of-the-week in real time, the twists and turns which she and her very funny guests then riff off the rest of the episode. It’s so goofy! It’s so fun! It was, in short, the exact energy so many of us needed that first pandemic year.

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It’s no surprise, then, that Hachette commissioned a Scam Goddess memoir to give Mosley space to talk more about the kinds of scams that showed up in her early life, and how they led her to building not just the Scam Goddess brand, but also her broader career as a comedic performer.

To talk more about all of this, I caught up with Mosley over the phone earlier this month. And after a lovely 45-minute chat, I turned to my recording app and discovered that while the visual dial had been bouncing the whole time, only the first five minutes had been successfully recorded. Technology! It’s a scam!

Happily, Mosley is not only a pro, but incredibly generous with her time. What follows is that same 45-minute conversation, recreated over email by Mosley in the week that followed our original call. As she says below, if there’s one thing scammers can teach us, it’s that we don’t have to accept our lives (or technology failures) the way they are, and that you can create the life (or technology wins) that you want.

Paste Magazine: As a longtime listener of the pod, I feel like I already have a good sense of your relationship with scams—and also, that’s much of what your forthcoming book is about. So rather than starting with that question, I want to ask instead, what is it about scams that reads to you as “comedy”?

Laci Mosley: Scams are theatrical. They don’t call them con artists for nothing. Sometimes there’s costumes, fake accents, tons of backstory. You have to memorize your lies like a script, so you don’t get them twisted up. There’s a lot of performance in scams that I find truly hilarious.

Paste: Something you said in a 2020 interview with The Verge resonated with me when thinking about that same “comedy” question: “There’s something about con artists, they have this confidence, usually to the point of delusion: even if you don’t belong there, feeling like you belong there and showing people you belong there.” Is this something that you still think about, this many years into your show?

Mosley: Everyone can learn from scammers. Imposter syndrome is something that’s constantly running rampant throughout our society. Especially when you grow up and realize that nobody knows exactly what they’re doing, we’re all just trying to figure it out. We can all learn from scammers’ confidence, and maybe not use it to do crime but to get that promotion!

Paste: Recently your reader letters have trended towards including some kind of note thanking you for raising their alertness to scams, and/or keeping them from falling for something they’d otherwise have been a great mark for. Has that trend extended to your real life friends and family?

Mosley: Yes, that trend has extended to my real life in a massive way. I feel like a lot of people in my life have replaced 311 in their phones for me. I constantly have friends and family reaching out to ask “should I click this link?” or “ this person called and asked for this information but I hung up like you said.” And nothing makes me happier than when listeners send in letters where they have warned their parents about a scam or stopped them from clicking on something on Facebook. Obviously, I got into this show because I love comedy and I love scams, but a huge priority for me has been erasing the shame of sharing that you’ve been exploited. I love to hear people share and realize that they’re not stupid, a mark, or gullible just because they were exploited. I love to hear people using that information that has been shared to decrease the amount of harm that they face in their life from scammers. I mean scammers likely call me more than my mom at this point, so if we can stop them from getting you I’m all about it.

Paste: Talk a little about the process of writing a book, which is all about solo creativity, versus the podcast/improv/acting, which is all about creativity as part of an ensemble/larger group. I am also interested in hearing about the audiobook recording process, and what it was like reading your words back in that kind of environment!

Mosley: I will say that a bit of my scam is that I did not have to write my book alone. Even though all of the words are mine, and I re-read all of the chapters, I was shooting iCarly and Lopez vs. Lopez, and recording the podcast at the same time I was writing my book. So writing it with [a co-writer] sometimes felt like a therapy session, and I discovered a lot about myself. Then, reading the audiobook out loud for the recording I got to revisit everything almost a year and a half later and see how much I have changed. So a solo journey is definitely more personal because I’m not playing off of any material, the material is me. I got a lot out of it, and I think that readers will too.

Paste: Talk a bit about the process of developing the TV show, which as I understand it IS taking the premise of the podcast and pursuing the more dramatic/emotional/serious side of scams (compared to the comedic framing of the pod).

Mosley: Even though the TV show shares the same name as my other two children, the book and the podcast, it’s very different. A lot of people these days read a headline, maybe skim an article, and judge based on the little information that they’re given. I can’t say that I haven’t fallen victim to that. But meeting people that I had only read about in real life is a stark contrast from reading about their lives in a snapshot. My goal with this show is to show more than a snapshot of these people’s humanity.

I know that two big reasons people watch true crime is either they want to prevent the same type of crime from happening to themselves or they’re just very nosy. But there’s a third thing that we don’t talk about which is judgment. A huge reason why people do get scammed is they think something would never happen to them, so they ignore the red flags popping up. I hope that you can watch this show and see how a lot of people got into the predicaments that they did with care. And you still get to be nosy and keep yourself safe!

Paste: I feel like a lot of people would make (or at least stand by) the claim that we’re living in a golden age of scams. With all the episodes you’ve released these past years, many of which feature truly historic cons, where do you land on that question?

Mosley: One thing about the scam industry is that it’s the grift that keeps on giving. We all know what the first oldest profession is, and I would say scams is the second. I believe we’re going to continue to live in a golden age of scams, but I think that people’s heightened awareness of scams and how scams are baked into the institutions that we live in will hopefully open people’s minds to changing unjust laws. That way we can create a society that is more equitable and livable for all instead of just accepting the scams that we’ve always known.

Paste: There have been several banger scams these past few years, most of which you’ve covered on the podcast (and some, like Shaun King, that you’ve covered repeatedly). Are there any stories that have ended up too woolly, as you’ve gone through the research process, to actually record something about? (“Woolly” being anything from “too many holes that research couldn’t fill” to “too potentially litigious,” etc.)

Mosley: The large amount of scams that are untouchable for me are for legal reasons. If you listen to my podcast I often mention my abogado fund which is the imaginary fund I joke with the congregation about just in case I get sued. We try to avoid stories that lean into speculation, have not been adjudicated, or other people from legitimate news sources haven’t already put their name on the line for. Most of those come from Twitter. I would love to do a secret Twitter episode that is just all the ridiculous things that people send me from Twitter that I can’t actually talk about on a platform that gets millions of downloads because some of them are fun.

Paste: What’s the biggest scam in American life?

Mosley: The biggest scam in American life is government. At the end of the day I think we all have to remember that everything is made up and the rule of law is just a bunch of old dudes who got in a room and said “hey, let’s make laws.” So if something isn’t feeling right, just because it’s on paper or it’s in the constitution doesn’t mean that it’s right. I hope that we come to a day where we realize that we don’t need to be bullied by dead people like the founding fathers. Times change and we must adjust with them. Tradition is just peer pressure from dead people!

Paste: What’s something I didn’t think to ask you about, but that you’d like Paste’s readers to know?

Mosley: I want people to know that I’ve learned a lot since starting the Scam Goddess franchise, and I think that there is such a huge value in sharing information and not gatekeeping. I encourage everyone to share information, talk to people, to ask more questions, and to not be afraid of what you don’t know. I talk about a lot of this stuff in my book and about how you can run scams of your own (that are legal). But I think we all should be just a little bit scammier. You don’t have to accept your life the way it is. You can create the life that you want. And that’s the biggest thing I’ve learned from scams.

Scam Goddess: Lessons from a Life of Cons, Grifts, and Schemes lands on bookshelves everywhere September 10. Scam Goddess, the podcast, is available wherever you download your podcasts.

Alexis Gunderson is a TV critic and audiobibliophile. She can be found @AlexisKG.