I still gag a little when I think of tabloid TV from the ’80s and ’90s—A Current Affair, Hard Copy, Inside Edition. The formula was simple: snarl into the camera, crank up the drama, and serve audiences their daily ration of moral panic wrapped in neon graphics. Having swallowed enough of that sludge in my twenties, I swore off the “true crime” genre, suspecting most modern entries were little more than tabloid reruns with higher production values.
Then my wife and daughters talked me into it. In the last week I watched Love Con Revenge, a six-episode saga of con artists devouring their marks and detectives chasing them down like bloodhounds, and Unknown Number: The High School Catfish, the tale of a grotesque mother harassing her own daughter and boyfriend with a relentless barrage of obscene texts. Both were polished, chilling, and—for my sins—utterly absorbing.
No shock, then, that Netflix, Hulu, and every other platform groan under the weight of hundreds of these fraudster chronicles. They mirror our times: technology weaponized into psychological napalm, the digital swamp rising up to engulf ordinary people. The stories console us by drawing a line between the “real world” of decent citizens and the fever swamp where predators feed—though that line, as these shows prove, is faint and fragile.
What gnaws at me are the faces of these fraudsters: unrepentant, smug, cannibalizing innocence with the appetite of vultures while spinning narratives in which they—God help us—are the real victims. Watching Unknown Number, I thought of Scott Peck’s People of the Lie, a book that haunted my twenties. The book explores the unsettling terrain where mental illness and evil blur into one another, arguing that certain destructive patterns of thought and behavior cannot be neatly filed under psychiatric diagnosis alone. Peck suggests that some people hide behind the language of neurosis or dysfunction when what they are really exhibiting is a willful commitment to deceit, denial, and cruelty—a kind of “malignant self-righteousness” that psychiatry struggles to name. In his case studies, ordinary families cloak acts of profound betrayal and abuse in banality, showing how evil masquerades as normality. The book’s disturbing thesis is that evil is not always the exotic monster of horror stories but can manifest in the evasions, manipulations, and rationalizations of those who choose to deform their humanity, collapsing the categories of illness and moral corruption into one corrosive force.
And here’s the ugly echo: the fraudster’s toolbox of deceit, self-victimization, and gaslighting isn’t confined to con men or deranged mothers. It has migrated, wholesale, into the attention economy. TikTok influencers now weaponize the same tactics, performing ailments and afflictions as if auditioning for sainthood, diagnosing themselves in real time while amassing legions of followers. This is fraud with a ring light: branding through pathology, monetized self-deception packaged as authenticity. It is the same theater of manipulation, dressed up in pastel filters instead of burner phones. And maybe that’s why these true-crime tales fascinate us: they remind us that manipulation, gaslighting, and deception have found their ultimate playground online. We watch to reassure ourselves that we’re still anchored to reality, but what we see instead is how terrifyingly porous the line is between mental illness and pure, corrosive evil.
When we slap a psychiatric label on every grotesque act, we risk letting the guilty off the hook. To call fraud, cruelty, or sadism merely a “condition” is to dodge the darker truth—that people are capable of choosing evil. Peck was right to warn that deceit and malignant self-righteousness are not just quirks of the psyche but deliberate acts of corruption. If we keep misnaming evil as illness, we blind ourselves to the reality that a demon can take root inside ordinary people, feeding on their rationalizations until it grows strong enough to wreak chaos and devastation in the world around them.
Cinemorphosis 
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