Today I spent roughly eight hours trying to unfuck someone’s life after they got scammed by “Tiffany”
Who is definitely a woman (probably not lol) who was apparently so deeply in love with the victim that she desperately needed $98,725 in crypto to…
I don’t know, prove her devotion? Buy a plane ticket to true love? Fund her totally legitimate business venture?
Tiffany doesn’t exist. The photos were stolen from some random Instagram model. The sob story was copy pasted from a script.
The “emergency” requiring immediate crypto transfers was bullshit.
Eight hours of phone calls with banks, crypto exchanges, and fraud departments. Eight hours of watching someone realise they’d been played by a professional manipulator.
Eight hours in the special kind of hell reserved for people trying to explain to customer service reps that yes, the victim willingly sent the money, and no, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t fraud.
You know what’s fucked up? The whole time I’m thinking about how this applies to creative work.
So here comes a first class ticket to creative tangent town. (I’ve used that word a lot today)
Not the scamming part, obviously…
But the part where someone’s emotions completely overrode their logic. Where they ignored every red flag because they wanted something to be true so badly. Where they dismissed obvious warning signs because the story felt good. Trust me when I say this. Stories feel real good when emotions are high.
We do this shit with our creative careers too.
We fall for the guru promising to make us famous in 30 days. We ignore red flags about that “opportunity” that requires us to pay upfront fees. We buy into systems that sound too good to be true because we’re desperate for shortcuts.
We want success so badly that we’ll believe almost anything that promises it.
The difference is usually just scale. Instead of losing fifteen grand to fake crypto love, we lose $500 to a course that promises viral fame. Instead of wiring money to Nigeria, we pay for bot followers or engagement pods.
Same emotional manipulation. Same willingness to ignore logic when someone tells us what we want to hear.
Here’s what eight hours of fraud clean up taught me.
When something feels too good to be true, your gut already knows the answer. The red flags aren’t subtle but you’re just choosing to ignore them. We all do sometimes. Emotions are fun eh?
Trust your instincts. Especially when someone’s promising you everything you want in exchange for something you can’t afford to lose.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to dunk my face in ice cold water and pretend the internet doesn’t exist for a while.
Stephen Walker.