Is It a Scam? Yep: How to Spot Swindles and Recognize Rackets [9781419790478]

Overview

TikTok creator and comedian Alex Falcone explores many of the contemporary “con artists” that are scamming us all––from recycling, to credit card points, to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch

Today, scams are a dime a dozen. In fact, you’re probably getting scammed right now and you don’t know it. Yes, you. We live in a scammy world—everyone knows it, as we all dodge spam texts and read about people losing their money to AI emails. Not to mention all the big stuff like DOGE, knockoff AI built on piracy, and Amazon’s effective tax rate of ~6%. But the truth is, that’s all just the tip of the scam iceberg, the mere cherry atop the scam sundae. The bigger danger isn’t the phishing attempt you caught, it’s the companies and processes that get away with their scams every single day. It’s the “groundbreaking” inventions that just need your investment to save the world; it’s TurboTax intentionally making taxes harder; it’s the coffee pods that are in your office kitchen, it’s every attempt to clean the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (which itself is also a scam). Scams are in everything, from death to taxes.

But don’t freak out just yet. Writer and comedian Alex Falcone isn’t bringing us a story of despair. Instead, Is it a Scam? Yep. will give us an edge in our scam-hunting efforts, delivered with enough biting levity to keep us from simply giving up. Is it a Scam? Yep. is a lively, funny, open-eyed walk through the entire carnival, from governments and companies all the way down to the white-chocolate bar near the grocery register. His approach lets readers absorb the information with humor instead of feeling the true existential sadness of knowing that even the “good” guys are secretly out to squeeze them of their hard-earned cash. Based on Falcone’s “Is it a scam? Yep.” social-media series, this book is a taxonomy of the scams that make up our world, and will help readers develop the whimsical cynicism needed to query anything that seems off with, “Is that a scam? Yep.”