When Mosley was first shopping around a podcast, she even pitched one focused on celebrity stories and kept hearing the market was saturated. Scams were celebrity-adjacent, but an area that hadn’t been exploited for entertainment as much. She calls Scam Goddess her own scam because it’s a Trojan horse for her improv. Her jokes are hidden in the irresistible stories about people who are getting one over on The Rules. It’s working. She just won an iHeartRadio Podcast Award in the crime category, which she thinks is hilarious. “[The podcast] is still such a huge scam to me ’cause I’m not Sarah Koenig,” she said. “I’m just over here making jokes with my comedian friends.”
She begins each episode with a short segment called “What’s Hot in Fraud,” where listeners submit their own scams or frauds. They can be perfectly strange and specific. Like in one episode someone wrote in about a Burger King in Pittsburgh that kept serving food as a Burger King after it lost its franchising license. Mosley, who went to college in Pittsburgh had actually been without realizing it.
“Friends from college hit me up after that episode and were like, ‘You know, we’ve been to that Burger King,’” Mosley said. “I mean, we were drunk, so we didn’t think anything of it. [The restaurant was] like, ‘No, we still gonna be Burger King. We can’t say, “Have it your way” anymore, but we’ll say, “Have whatever you like.”’”
Like that actionable gossip McKinney and Laughlin mentioned above, you can learn a lot about what not to do from Mosley’s podcast. But mostly, altogether, you get a sense of how normal it is for regular people to feel fed up and try to get theirs, how with a bit of confidence you too could be defrauding some big, evil corporations. And if you yourself don’t have the guts, you can marvel at the bravery (or audacity) of some people. At the very least, you can live vicariously through them.
Mosley’s name-check of Sarah Koenig as a podcast-host foil gets at where we are in the form too. The host is using the stories of strangers as fodder for her jokes, and in her capable hands the sometimes-heavy stories do feel light. But they’re still the lives of non-public personas. Ditto McKinney and team, though they work hard to anonymize the stories and pick tales that don’t feel gross to listen to, that aren’t about lives ruined, just lives altered.
I’m not saying this is a bad thing—again, I demand to read and listen to these stories, and if you take them away from me I’ll get cranky. It’s just that the great yawping maw of the internet feeds on content, and it will, left to its own devices, eat up stories anywhere it can get them. If at one time a podcast, like the first inescapable season of Koenig’s Serial, mattered because its subject may have been wrongfully imprisoned and the whole enterprise had the promotional backing of one Ira Glass, now it’s anyone’s game. A short seven years later, anyone’s story, when given the narrative podcast treatment, is worthy of an hour of your listening time.
