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 fibroid removal surgery. Inherent bias in the medical field often leaves Black patients in severe pain. Threatening legal action got her the care she needed.“Black women, get yourself a fake lawyer. Google some law firms around the area,” she recommends.
Scarcity myths disproportionately impact single Black women leaving them vulnerable to one of the biggest scams – romance.
Mosley advises people to move slowly and put their own needs first when describing how she worked to unravel her heart from an abuser. “A lot of times when you’re pressed for time, your whole focus is on the other person, what they need, how they’re going to retaliate, how they’re going to feel if you’re not doing it. It’s all about them. So I think it’s about taking a pause and asking yourself what you need. And assessing how desperate you are to get it because a lot of times we make rash decisions out of fear,” she says.
According to the iCarly actress, it’s not about being nefarious or inauthentic, it’s about self-defense. One chapter finds her forced to cater to the emotional needs of someone trying to scam her into staying in an uncomfortable situation. Unable to go off on the liar, she scams her way to safety.
“Unfortunately, that’s another huge scam that Black women face; people love to throw rocks and then hide their hands and make us the aggressor. And so in order to protect myself, sometimes I have to lean into that scam,” she says. “I don’t like it, and I hope that there is change.”
Her goal continues to be acquiring power and using it to help herself and others with minimal suffering.
“I want to be one of God’s weakest soldiers when the army of the Lord shows up. I want to be in the back, keeping the pace with the drums, like I’m not trying to be on the front lines,” says Mosley.
Scam Goddess: Lessons from a Life of Cons, Grifts, and Schemes is now available where books are sold.