TikTok's scam sleuth wants to show you how companies are cheating — in a fun way

CNN

2 days ago

We live in the golden age of grift. Most of us can't go a day without at least one scammy text about an unpaid toll or a call from an unknown number with a shockingly human-like AI voice on the other side.
The scale of the scam onslaught feels like it's part of some Faustian bargain we all entered into: In exchange for the miracle of, like, access to all the world's knowledge and people in our pockets, all the world's knowledge and people similarly have access to us, including the hustlers and the con artists. But way more hustlers, con artists and grifters than any other generation of human beings on Earth has ever had to comprehend before, let alone fend off.
Thankfully, all the scam spam doesn't seem to have killed anyone's appetite for the grift as a genre. Elizabeth Holmes' Theranos con? I'll take a book, a podcast, a documentary and at least one serialized streaming project, please. Lifting the veil on a doomsday cult? I'm in, every day, and twice on Sundays. Never forget: We once had two dueling Fyre Festival documentaries on Hulu and Netflix.
OK, maybe I'm just a mark for tales of clever cons, exposed. This newsletter is, in part, an outlet for my own fascination with the business hype cycle, which tends to, you know, exaggerate the truth. Or straight-up lie.
But (thanks again to the miracle of the internet), I know that I'm not alone.
Alex Falcone, an LA-based comedian, is a fellow con connoisseur (a con-noisseur?). Through his TikTok channel, Falcone excels at the art of the two-minute explainer, tackling frauds big (AI) and small (white chocolate).
Falcone says he isn't a journalist, but he approaches his work with a similar hunger to peek behind the facade of a thing and expose it. Of his early foray into 'unfun facts,' Falcone says, he wanted to find the intersection of 'a little bit of a wet blanket, but you're OK afterwards… I don't like ruining people's day.'
He's hit a nerve on TikTok, where he has more than half a million followers and a popular recurring series called 'Is it a scam? Yep.' (The delivery here is crucial: 'Is-it-a-scamyep!') The schtick is fast-talking facts and plenty of jokes about the companies and people and concepts that are, in one way or another, selling a bill of goods.
I caught up with Falcone recently over Zoom to discuss the businesses of grift, comedy and journalism.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Nightcap: Can you tell me how you got on the scam beat?
Alex Falcone: I've always liked the scheme-y underbelly. My grandfather worked in a few different contexts in carnivals, but the bulk of his life he was a pitchman, setting up a table by the midway selling kitchen gadgets and magic tricks. My dad's first job was as a kid standing in the audience while his father demonstrated a magic trick then yelling, 'How did he do that? I'll take two!'
I met a con man when I was 16, and he taught me how to do card-cheating and pool-sharking stuff… and, like, mostly didn't use it for evil. I just like knowing how it works. It's sort of like the glass elevator where you see the mechanism behind it. Like, how am I being manipulated?
I was working on 'unfun facts,' which is like the opposite of a party trick. My party-ruiner is telling people something that's going to bum them out that they didn't know. And that, it turns out, had a lot of overlap with my interest in things that were slightly crime-y.
Nightcap: Why do you think people on TikTok have been so receptive to the scam series?
Falcone: I think everybody is vaguely aware that they're walking around in a haunted carnival all the time — that everybody is trying to take advantage of them.
If you're at a midway, then you know the basketball hoop is harder than other basketball hoops. Otherwise they wouldn't give you stuffed animals for making one free throw. Why is that? It's because it's 11 feet, and it's not perfectly round… and you know that it's wrong, but then it's still fun to be like, 'Oh, that's how you were getting me.'
Nightcap: Do you find yourself, or your audience, experiencing scam fatigue?
Falcone: So this is the trick. By slightly redefining what 'scam' means, it allows me to keep finding new ways to talk about things instead of just being bummed out.
Whenever I'm tired of talking about AI or crypto, I can do an episode on white chocolate.
Nightcap: Ugh, such a scam!
Falcone: It's disgusting! It was originally invented as a medical coating for pills. And then they were like, 'we can sell this because we have all this extra cocoa butter lying around, and we can mix it with palm oil, which we've cut down the rainforest to make, and now we have too much of it.'
Every step of that is terrifying, but also it tastes like cat vomit. So that's inherently funny.
That's my palate cleanser. I have an escape valve for a lot of this.
Actually, if you hadn't asked that, I would have asked you the same question… How do you avoid getting bummed out by this? Are all of your colleagues just sort of zombie-brained now?
Nightcap: There's a bit of zombie-brain going around. I will say I spend a good amount of time — like a shameful amount of time — disassociating on TikTok.
Falcone: I think that's great… There are a lot of problems with the way algorithms work, but one of the things that's great is you can just create an account with a new name, a fresh algorithm, and decide this algorithm is just for escapism.
I did a video about algorithms a while ago, and so as a demonstration I decided to make an account for videos about bunnies. In TikTok, it took me 15 minutes before the algorithm was just rabbits and nothing else… So that is one of the ways that I've kept myself sane — having multiple algorithms that I play with depending on my mood. Having a rabbit account as a side project is really fun.
Nightcap: You've covered AI hype and marketing a few times…
Falcone: It feels like there's an emperor-has-no clothes situation — that we're all just waiting for somebody to be like, Oh, wait, it's bad! Oh… we thought so, and then you told us we were dumb for thinking that it's not working, but it is actually bad.
Nightcap: How do you source your scam material?
Falcone: I have what I think of as the mainline scam, where the answer is 'yep,' and I just have a backlog of those.
Occasionally, stuff from friends pops up. Somebody mentioned to me the other day that the Oscars were originally started to prevent actors from unionizing, which I assumed couldn't possibly be true. But it turns out, [Louis B. Mayer] of MGM was the founder of the academy, and that was what he said he was doing. (Editor's note: This checks out.)
The user submissions have a separate path, because the answer to 'Is it a scam?' can sometimes be 'no.'
Nightcap: I was so nervous when I came across one of your videos about Costco. Please don't ruin Costco!
Falcone: Costco was a great 'nope.' The thing about Costco, and this is true of a lot of these things, is it's not a scam, but it's definitely a scheme. You have to pay to shop, which is such a crazy business model. You pay to walk in the door of a store where everything still costs money. That's definitely a scheme. But I don't think it's a scam.
Now I have 100-150 messages every day on the different platforms, asking 'can you look into this thing for me' … But the main source is just things that I'm generally mad about in my own life. I have plenty of those to keep this going for another couple years.