{"id":48647,"date":"2025-10-01T18:45:22","date_gmt":"2025-10-01T22:45:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tenfourmagazine.com\/content\/?p=48647"},"modified":"2025-10-01T18:45:23","modified_gmt":"2025-10-01T22:45:23","slug":"dont-get-scammed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tenfourmagazine.com\/content\/2025\/10\/the-bookworm-sez\/dont-get-scammed\/","title":{"rendered":"Don\u2019t Get Scammed!"},"content":{"rendered":"
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You\u2019re not going to answer that call, are you?  Nope, it\u2019s not from a number you recognize, and you know what that means \u2013 it\u2019s probably a spammer, robocall, or crook.  You\u2019re not answering because you know how to be safe with this sort of thing.  Or do you?  As you\u2019ll learn in \u201cAnatomy of a Con Artist\u201d by Johnathan Walton, there\u2019s more than one way to be scammed.  In 2013, Walton and his husband were living in a nice apartment building in California that had lost its rights to use a nearby pool, and Walton was angry.  He tried to set up a coalition to fight the loss, and that\u2019s when he met Mair Smyth, who was one of his neighbors.  With her charm, wit, and generosity, Mair quickly became Walton\u2019s best friend, and he grew to love her.  She claimed to be an Irish heiress worth millions of dollars and her circle, she said, was wide \u2013 she was, in fact, having an affair with a powerful, married politician who, later in the tale, personally repaid money that Walton had loaned her.  Mair\u2019s quick offers to help, her too-easy familiarity, and the \u201cdrama, drama, drama\u201d were meant to lay the track for theft.  She used technology to fake her lies, she asked him to wire some money, and she used \u201cDale Carnegie Techniques\u201d to manipulate him.  It took years, but she ultimately stole tens of thousands of dollars from Walton.  That made him angry, so he got busy.  He went public and flipped the table.  \u201cI can never undo what I did in her name and at her behest,\u201d he says, \u201cI can only use what happened to me to help other people avoid getting scammed by the crazy Irish Heiress archetypes in their lives.\u201d  Do you know where your wallet is?  Good, you\u2019ll want to have your hand on it when you\u2019re reading \u201cAnatomy of a Con Artist.\u201d  There are a lot of things to like about this book, starting with the help that author Johnathan Walton offers, help that\u2019s not just for you but also for your elders, disabled neighbors, and new adults who need to see his warnings.  Step-by-step, he explains how a scam begins, how it progresses, and why police don\u2019t often do much about it.  Then he explains how to stop a scam in its tracks.  If you think you\u2019ve heard all that before, well, you haven\u2019t read Walton\u2019s own experiences, which make up half this book and which read like a spy-novel-caper.  His \u201cday job\u201d as a filmmaker shows through here, making the uncover, the chase, and the capture of a scammer as exciting as a movie \u2013 and you don\u2019t want to miss it.  \u201cCon artists don\u2019t outsmart you,\u201d Walton says, \u201cThey out-feel you,\u201d and you\u2019ll feel pretty confident about your safety after reading this book.  If you want to know how to avoid being cheated, \u201cAnatomy of a Con Artist\u201d may be the answer, and that ain\u2019t no lie.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You\u2019re not going to answer that call, are you?  Nope, it\u2019s not from a number you recognize, and you know what that means \u2013 it\u2019s probably a spammer, robocall, or crook.  You\u2019re not answering because you know how to be safe with this sort of thing.  Or do you?  As you\u2019ll learn in \u201cAnatomy of<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":35,"featured_media":48649,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[91],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-48647","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-the-bookworm-sez"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tenfourmagazine.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48647","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tenfourmagazine.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tenfourmagazine.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tenfourmagazine.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/35"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tenfourmagazine.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48647"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.tenfourmagazine.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48647\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":48650,"href":"https:\/\/www.tenfourmagazine.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48647\/revisions\/48650"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tenfourmagazine.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/48649"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tenfourmagazine.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48647"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tenfourmagazine.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48647"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tenfourmagazine.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48647"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}