By Keyaira Boone ·Updated September 9, 2024
Laci Mosley arrived in Hollywood with few liquid assets beyond highly flammable club dresses, questionable bartending experiences, and super-sized confidence. That didn’t stop the trilingual baddie behind the Scam Goddess podcast from chasing everything the City of Angels offered in English, Spanish, and the language of scams.
She finessed herself from awards season party crasher to comedy series regular. Along the way, she was scammed by shady employers, seedy photographers, sus acting coaches, and strange potential roommates. Instead of being ashamed, she excelled. “I decided that I was still going to live the life that I wanted, no matter what,” Mosley tells ESSENCE.
She started a podcast about “scams, cons, robbery, and fraud.” Soon, it was adapted into a television series and a combination of memoir and instruction manual titled Scam Goddess: Lessons from a Life of Cons, Grifts, and Schemes.
Mosley, who went on to star in A Black Lady Sketch Show, Florida Girls, and Lopez vs. Lopez, advises readers to accept the world as it is, not as they wish it was, and scam their way through it. “We have institutionalized scams, so much of our government is a scam; everybody made things up, nothing is real,” she says.
Her stance is that when the game is rigged, there’s no shame in a shortcut. Tears, fibs, fraud – it’s all fair game in an unjust world where school children go hungry and homelessness is criminalized. When systematically biased income verification threatened her California dreams, she disposed of them with a lot of enthusiasm and a little Photoshop.
“The first apartment that I got in LA. I had paystubs, but I fudged the dates on the pay stubs,” she explains. Anyone who has ever been denied a $1800 mortgage while paying a $2700 rent could understand her motivations. “It’s like I know I can pay the rent to live here, so if you’re going to discriminate against me, well, then let me go ahead and open up my Photoshop and my Microsoft Paint.”
Scamming up serves Mosley well. She flaunts her vulnerabilities strategically to fend off stereotypes and suggests others who are at a systemic disadvantage play along in her book. “I think one of the largest scams that has impacted Black women is the cultural scam of strength,” Mosley states. “Everybody wants a Black woman to save them—shout out to Kamala.”
“It’s something that’s been projected onto us, and it’s a scam, but we can relinquish the obligation that some of us have felt to show up as the strongest and clean up everybody’s messes while simultaneously being one of the most discriminated groups and not getting the care and treatment that we deserve,” she continued. “You see it everywhere. You see it in the medical field.”
She notes that “certain types of scamming” are “necessary when you’re born in a body that’s more marginalized.” Mosley invented a lawyer when refused pain meds after
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