Once upon a time, rather a long while ago, there was a bright-eyed, dim-brained twentysomething called Arwa Mahdawi. Young Arwa had recently arrived in New York City and was searching for that most elusive of beasts: an affordable place to live that was convenient, chic and didn’t involve sharing a bathroom with a psychopath. On her budget, this was impossible.
Then, one day, the Craigslist gods smiled down upon her and she found a unicorn: a reasonably priced room (by Manhattan standards) in a sprawling, stylish loft in Chelsea. The housemates were a gay fiftysomething photographer and his dog. The photographer seemed eccentric, sure, but in an artsy New York way, not in a stroke-you-while-you-are-sleeping way. He had photographed big celebrities; he seemed legit. Arwa handed over a $2,000 deposit and counted down the days until she could move in and start her life as a gay Palestinian Carrie Bradshaw.
Why am I talking about myself in the third person in such an irritating manner? Honestly, because I don’t recognise myself back then. Young Arwa was a buffoon. (Obviously, middle-aged Arwa is not.) As you have probably guessed, the apartment was a scam. A few days before I was supposed to move in, I got a text from the photographer telling me his father had died and he needed to delay things. OK, fine. Hard to protest about a dead dad. But more excuses followed. Eventually, I resigned myself to the fact that my luxury loft life was never going to happen and I moved into a grotty room in the East Village instead.
It was a blow, but it wasn’t a disaster. In fact, I ended up getting my deposit back – the photographer’s assistant dropped it off. I even stopped by the apartment a few times to have drinks with him, hear his crazy stories – and investigate whether anyone else had moved in.
The man was clearly shady, but I didn’t realise he was a full-blown scammer until I Googled him several years later and found a story in the New Yorker about the ruse he had been pulling. It turned out I had had a lucky escape, possibly because I had met him early in his journey towards being a fraudster. He had escalated to “renting” out the entire loft (which he didn’t own) and several people had been swindled out of thousands of dollars. He ended up in jail. I ended up feeling a fool.
I am telling you this cautionary tale because I would like to explain that I am not a complete sucker. Anyone can get scammed. While the stereotype suggests that older, less digitally savvy people are the main victims of fraud, a 2023 Deloitte survey found that gen Zers fall for scams more than their grandparents do; young people just tend to fall for different scams.
Even journalists, people who are supposed to question things for a living, can be duped by something they probably would have thought themselves far too sophisticated to fall for. This year, for example, a BBC Look North presenter was scammed out of almost half of his life savings after answering a call from someone pretending to be from his bank. Around the same time, Charlotte Cowles, a financial advice columnist for New York magazine, went viral with a piece in which she admitted falling for a scam that ended with her putting $50,000 in cash in a box and handing it to a stranger she thought was a CIA agent.
Artificial intelligence is ushering in a new age of scammers and schemers. According to experts, you need only three or four seconds of a recording to clone someone’s voice. The barriers to creating video deepfakes have also been drastically lowered. In February, it was reported that a finance worker paid out $25m to fraudsters after they used video-manipulation technology to pose as the company’s chief financial officer in a video conference call. Things will only get worse.
How do we navigate a future in which reality can be manipulated and almost anything could be fake? We are still figuring that out. In the meantime, it’s wise to be sceptical and remember: if something seems too good to be true, it almost certainly is. Especially if it’s real estate in New York.
• Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
