Hype

How Scammers, Grifters, and Con Artists Are Taking Over the Internet—and Why We're Following

De: Gabrielle Bluestone

Narrado por: Eileen Stevens

From former Vice journalist and executive producer of hit Netflix documentary Fyre comes an eye-opening look at the con artists, grifters and snake oil salesmen of the digital age—and why we can’t stop falling for them.

We live in an age where scams are the new normal. A charismatic entrepreneur sells thousands of tickets to a festival that never happened. Respected investors pour millions into a start-up centered around fake blood tests. Reviewers and celebrities flock to London’s top-rated restaurant that’s little more than a backyard shed. These unsettling stories of today’s viral grifters have risen to fame and hit the front-page headlines, yet the curious conundrum remains: Why do these scams happen?

Drawing from scientific research, marketing campaigns, and exclusive documents and interviews, former Vice reporter Gabrielle Bluestone delves into the irresistible hype that fuels our social media ecosystem, whether it’s from the trusted influencers that peddled Fyre or the consumer reviews that sold Juicero. A cultural examination that is as revelatory as it is relevant, Hype pulls back the curtain on the manipulation game behind the never-ending scam season—and how we as consumers can stop getting played.

Fascinating Fraud

Great reporting and maybe a little too broad in concept but entertaining if you know the Fyre saga. My quibble is with narrators mispronunciation of famous names and words “Wale” (it’s wall-ee) “reputable” “titular” - which struck me as sloppy for a pop business book. Overall great listen tho.

Will Listen to again!

Great read/listen! Enough that I thought of getting the actual book :) I can’t wait to listen again and learn about human psychology!! Humans will humans, that’s for sure!

So important

This book should be required reading for anyone with a wifi connection. It’s wild How much the line has blurred between fraudster and business mogul.

Wildly Entertaining and Informative

In a culture of followers, likes and vanity metrics - it can be confusing to determine what is real versus postured. This book unwraps the attractive foil off of those looking to foil us.

Brilliant reporting and expert story-tellling

I loved every minute of this audiobook. From the Fyre Festival to Theranos to fraudulent IG influencers, Gabrielle Bluestone weaves fascinating stories about contemporary scams while offering keen insight into the perpetrators behind them.

Boring and pointless

The narrator does a good job, but the book is boring and pointless and a lot of the “cons” the author discusses are petty and uninteresting.

Misleading Title; Not Good

I will admit I did not finish this. I stopped and returned it after two chapters. Essentially this author dislikes Elon Musk to the extreme. It rehashes the story of Billy McFarland (Fyre fraud guy) and randomly weaves in attacks on Elon Musk. This author apparently did the Fyre festival documentary, which was excellent. But here the author tries to create the impression that Musk and McFarland are cut from the same cloth. The problem is that the attacks on Elon largely fall flat as they cherry pick negative facts and omit important balancing facts or context. For example the author tries to impugn Elon's SpaceX because some of his early rockets exploded and didn't work and compare that to McFarland's frauds. That argument is so bad I cannot see how it would convince anyone except for others who want to live in an anti-Elon echo chamber. Elon was building something real and spent much of his own money doing it. Investors who put money into SpaceX knew the risks and Elon didn't commit fraud, at least not with his SpaceX rockets.

Another argument is that Elon should be faulted for Tesla sending ventilators out to hospitals during COVID because the ventilators he sent were not the same as the $50,000 ventilators commonly used. There is no discussion on whether either ventilator type (expensive or cheap) actually did anything useful for COVID patients. My admittedly limited understanding is that all ventilators were not helpful; I could be wrong, but the author would need to explain that to us. The reader is just left to assume that the more expensive ventilators were good simply because they were more expensive.

At best sending Tesla-branded ventilators was an attempt to help that fell flat. It certainly had a marketing play to it as well, no doubt. But to compare sending free ventilators out during COVID to a scammer like McFarland is, again, more than just a stretch.

The author is correct that Elon has oversold and overpromised in the past; sometimes to extremes. His companies are far from perfect and have been sued (likely justifiably) based on Musk's directives or false statements. But by interweaving ad hominem attacks and unfair comparisons the tone comes across as jealous and hateful. The argument could draw parallels between Musk, McFarland, and other scammers in a proper way but simply because there are parallels in methods does not mean that Musk is a scammer

More generally the book lacks any larger explanation about how scammers work. It's just anecdotes about people the author clearly dislikes. Maybe she gets into a something more useful and better reasoned later in the book past where I gave up, but given the first two chapters I doubt it.

Facts…?

This text repeatedly (not to mention the redundancy of this book) talks about the disappearance of facts in the current social climate. Unfortunately, the author also makes claims (denoting them as facts) and never provides verifiable support for her own “facts”. This could be a very interesting topic if the “story” showed extensive research into these cons. Good topic idea poorly executed.