This year, Felicity Huffman was arrested, charged, arraigned, and convicted. She apologized, served a little time, paid a fine, submitted to supervised release for a year and 250 hours of community service. She had paid a shady intermediary to raise one of her daughter's SAT scores by hundreds of points, so that said daughter would have a better chance of getting into the college of her choosing. And for this, Huffman was fully processed through the federal corrections system in six months. It was a tour de force of the scam narrative, tied with a bow in what seemed like record time.

Because of that, she’s the least notable of this year’s scammers. The most notable scammers presented more complex, less tidy cases. Their inability to accept when the jig was up, their refusal to cow to demands for decency and morality and line-toeing, the rejection of self-awareness—made us wonder to ourselves: Is this what it would be like to live without shame? Is this what we’d do if consequences didn’t matter because money does?

There was Anna Sorokin (scam name Anna Delvey), doyen of Le Coucou, pretend heiress, the one who would run up her friend’s credit card and convince investors to lend her money for her idea for some kind of arts community in Manhattan that would never be. She spent the money instead on everything it takes to live a socialite’s life in the city. And then she was caught, charged, tried, and found guilty (all the while remaining extremely concerned about her wardrobe).

And there was Huffman’s alleged cousins in crime, Lori Loughlin and Mossimo Giannulli, who like Huffman and 50 or so other parents, were busted in what was dubbed Operation Varsity Blues: Last March, Loughlin and Giannulli pleaded not guilty to three federal charges that carry decades of potential prison time. This couple taught us that even if one’s lawyers put a gag order on you, anonymous sources—who told tabloids that Loughlin and her daughter had a falling out, that they were supporting each other, that Loughlin could be seen lunching because she realizes she might spend some time in prison, etc.—can never be gagged.

Which is why Caroline Calloway also rose to “scam” prominence, though her offense was not on the level of those above. You get the sense that hers is a story of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or the right place at the right time, depending on how you look at who wins here—a victim of scam discourse overreach. These people’s stories all emerged this year in the wake of Billy McFarland’s Fyre Festival fraud, and Paul Manafort’s indictment, and the president of the United States going about being the president of the United States like he’s some kind of mid-tier goodfella. In 2019, there was a taste for stories like these, and a kind of enjoyment in the spot-the-scam media frenzy surrounding them, whether or not her actions deserved that particular taxonomy.

Calloway developed hundreds of thousands of followers on Instagram, which she got by writing long, personal captions that covered her life at Cambridge University, mostly, and her boyfriends, in the voice of a YA character come to life (and by buying followers initially). Her downfall arrived, thanks to her own documentation. She posted Instagram Stories about the disastrous planning for her “creativity workshops,” which involved too many mason jars being sent to her apartment and not enough flowers for flower crowns.

The workshops, when they actually happened, were a mess, like most things promising to teach a person “creativity” often are. But the mess brought value to her—in the form of a self-deprecating story to feed to her followers. She cast herself as the 20-something who couldn’t “adult.” Ha ha. And the workshops functioned mostly as a meet-and-greet, with some limited activities. Macro influencers like, say, Justin Bieber, had been charging for a photo with their fans for years. Micro influencers could get in on the racket, too. It was kind of hard to find the scam. Whom did she hurt here? Wasn’t this just a case of person prone to oversharing, suddenly out of her depth?