Tag: scams

audio, not a book

Not a Book: Unicorn Girl

veritywilde

Happy Sunday everyone, I hope everyone is making the most of the weekend, and that it hasn’t turned too-too cold and wet where you are. I’m back with another podcast today, which is the next series from the presenter of Scamanda, the podcast that inspired the documentary series that featured in a previous Not a Book.

Unicorn Girl is about the rise and fall of Candace Rivera, a divorced single mum in Utah, who built an online community based around her successes as a nurse and a CEO of multi-million dollar companies. But as you can probably guess, all wasn’t quite what she wanted you to think it was. Over the course of nine episodes, Charlie Webster tries to work out what was actually going on and who Candace really was. The first episode of this dropped into the Scamanda feed in mid-August, I listened to it and then went straight over to the Unicorn Girl feed to listen to episode two. And then I got Apple Plus so that I could listen to the rest of the series straight away rather than having to wait for a new episode each week.

Now that was partly because I have poor impulse control, but also because early on Charlie says that there’ll be times when you’re listening when nothing seems to add up, but by the end of the series it will all make sense. And that’s a brave thing to say (in my opinion!) when you’re trying to get people to keep listening, but it also intrigued me. And she’s not wrong. Candace’s con (so to speak) is a lot more complicated than Amanda’s was. In Scamanda, Charlie jumps backwards and forwards in time a bit but Amanda is really just doing the same con more than once. But Candace has got a lot of things going on and is juggling a lot of balls and that all makes it a lot more difficult to follow.

It must be really hard to follow up a series as successful as Scamanda, because so much is depending on finding the right story – the world of podcasts is littered with attempts to follow up something great that haven’t quite come off. It needs to be similar enough that your previous audience will still be interested, but not so similar that it feels like a total retread. And Candace’s story has got a lot going for it on that front, not least interviews with loads of the women who were working for or friends with Candance as well as Candace’s own voice from her social media posts. But there’s just so much going on. However, without wanting to give too much of a spoiler, this has more resolution to it than Scamanda did when I first listened to it (although no more than the documentary series had by the time that it came out).

I hope that doesn’t sound too negative – because make no mistake, I binged this podcast – listening to all nine episodes in less than three days as well as obviously signing up to a subscription service to be able to do that. I do think Scamanda is better, but if you’re interested in the same sort of Utah/Mormon-adjacent/religion-adjacent sort of things that I am (and I’ve written about enough of them at this point) then it’s worth a look. I’ve even held onto this post for a few weeks so that almost all the series is available without having to subscribe to anything! You’re welcome.

Have a great Sunday everyone.

not a book

Not a Book: Madoff – Monster of Wall Street

veritywilde

The latest entry in my catalogue of media about scams is the new Netflix documentary about Bernie Madoff which we binged last weekend.

If you’re not old enough to remember (lucky you!) Bernie Madoff was a Wall Street financier who was sentenced to more than a century in prison after it was discovered that the investment business that he had founded and ran was just a giant Ponzi scheme.

A Ponzi scheme (named after an Italian businessman who ran a fraud on this basis in the 1920s) is a scheme were early investors are paid dividends using money from new investors. The investors obviously don’t know this – and the schemes can keep going as long as new investors keep bringing in money. In the case of the Madoff scheme, he took in billions of dollars from investors and kept the scheme going for close to 20 years (in its final form at any rate) despite nearly being caught by regulators at various points.

This is a four part Netflix documentary that takes you through Madoff’s entire business career, complete with interviews with people who worked at the firm, investors and people who tried to expose what he was doing. It’s a mix of dramatisation, interviews and archive footage and it has one of the clearest explanations that I’ve seen of exactly how he pulled the scam. It should come with a warning though: at one point it shows the attack on the World Trade Centre on September 11 2001, which is not something you see often on TV here in the UK and I find really quite upsetting every time I see it.

Anyway, that aside (and I really don’t think they needed to show it), it’s an excellent documentary about one of the biggest financial scandals in history, but also about how it fits into the wider financial system of the time. Very much worth your time.