The internet is chock-full of influencers. Most are shills that sell crap to people further down the chain than them.
Or prostitute themselves to brands for money.
The worst kind, though, tend to deal in information or “specialist knowledge” that only they possess, and most of the time they’re completely full of shit.
Whether they’re standing next to Lambos or taking selfies inside “their” private jet (that never seems to be flying), this special class of influencer is known as a grifter and their type is as old as history itself.
They’re con men, blaggers, and they are legion despite efforts by agencies like the FCC to make life harder for them.
I mean, just look at these examples from the past few years:
- Jay Shetty (2023–2024): Exposed by The Guardian and Daily Mail for fake quotes, false credentials, and overpriced “life coaching” schemes.
- Dan Lok (2019–2022): “High-Ticket Closing” courses promised riches, delivered refund chaos. Covered by Business Insider and Coffeezilla.
- Andrew Tate: “Hustler’s University” turned into a pay-to-play affiliate pyramid. Detailed by BBC News and VICE.
- Colleen Ballinger (Miranda Sings): Accused of grooming fans, showing how influencer intimacy becomes predatory. Reported by BBC and Rolling Stone.
- TikTok Gifting Scams (2022–2024): Creators emotionally manipulated followers into sending large virtual gifts. Documented by CNN and Business Insider.
- Tana Mongeau: Built fame on chaos and over-sharing; “TanaCon” collapse (2018) remains a case study in fandom-fueled failure.
- AI Influencers (2023–2025): Fake personas like Aitana Lopez and Lilian AI sold courses and products with fabricated testimonials. Covered by El País and The Verge.
- Crypto/NFT Scams (2021–2024): Influencer-led rug-pulls like Logan Paul’s CryptoZoo conned fans out of millions. Reported by BBC and The Washington Post.
- Kardashian Promotions (2022): FTC warnings over deceptive crypto and detox product ads.
- “Glow-Up Coaching” Trend (Post-2020): “Femininity mentors” and “confidence coaches” charged thousands for vague empowerment advice.
How To Spot A Grifter & Understand Their Techniques
They sell secrets, quick-wins, access to masterminds that’ll 100x your income, or, like Jay Shetty, they just outright lie about everything from their backstory to what you’ll get / achieve when you take their ridiculously over-priced course or community.
The worst thing about these types of influencers is that they sell aspiration.
They sell an idea, a hope for a better future to people that are struggling or stuck in a rut. People that are willing to try anything, bet big on themselves and their future because they don’t like where they are now.
This is why you see people that are broke handing over five-figure sums to life coach gurus and make-money-online grifters.
They want answers, they’re sick of treading water, they’re struggling to survive, and that’s when the grifter appears, as if by magic, with the promise of solving all their woes.
They make you like them, they seem relatable, and the worst of the worst will tell you that they love you and value you, when in reality they’re literally sitting in a room by themselves talking to a camera.
Think about how weird that is?
They Use Your Own Psychology Against You
This technique — making people feel like they know you — is called building parasocial relations, a one-way relationship where the person (or mark, in this context) feels like they know the grifter / influencer when in actual fact the influencer has no idea who they are and couldn’t care less about them.
It’s artificial, a deliberate persuasion technique and it is used all the time online. It is designed to build relationships, establish trust.
Repeated often, it creates a rapport and that’s when the selling starts.
Read the book Influence if you’d like to dig deeper into the techniques of persuasion. No other text is as detailed or as eye-opening when it comes to the art of manipulation.
I read it back when I was at college. To say it’s something of an eye-opener would be the understatement of the century.
Influence, the book, was aimed at businesses, however, and it was written before the internet was even a thing. But its lessons are timeless because they’re based on psychological techniques that “hack” the brain and make it do things on autopilot, impulsively.
And this is why modern grifters are so dangerous. They not only know these techniques inside out, but they’re now able to deploy them at a scale that most could never have imagined back in the 1980s when Influence was first published.
Grifters Target Vulnerable People And Exploit Them
Grifters prey on vulnerable people, people that lack knowledge about certain things. They tap into their desire to learn and turn it against them.
They position themselves as a friend, a mentor, and they proceed to build rapport, and then they fleece them.
Forty years ago, this was a slow process, requiring personal interaction; it was an artform, of sorts, the kind immortalized in The Sting.
Nowadays, they can automate it using AI and target hundreds of thousands of people a day.
The only problem? These grifters never have the solution. Nine times out of ten, they deal exclusively in hope-speak, platitudes, and fuzzy, ineffable subjects that have no basis in reality.
If they ever get practical, and they seldom do, it’s always utterly basic, surface-level stuff. They’ll still take your money, though, and they’ll make it next to impossible to get a refund once the penny drops for you.
Even if you do eventually get your money back, it’s no skin off their nose because you’re just another mark on a fully-automated conveyor belt that runs 24/7, 365 days a year.
F*ck these people. They’ve turned manipulation into an industry, and you’re the product.
