Atrocious.

It must have seemed pretty fucking good to the author to have been able to publish a "book" where 80% of the content (yes, I counted) simply consisted of copying and pasting a collection of spam e-mails. For the purposes of being an archive of scam e-mails one might use for citation, this book gets a quarter of a star. There is little to no personal input or analysis. This is borderline plagiarism, only no scammer will claim credit and the pithy listicles that are cited in the book are almost common knowledge to anyone who knows anything about scams.

Nothing is informative, very little is original, it is all poorly formatted and has errors. At one point the reader is encouraged to take advantage of ads that prey on viewer insecurity to act immediately, simply if it "seems legit."

That this was written by a Ph.D graduate shakes my faith in academia to the core. That it was allowed to be published, independently or otherwise, shakes my faith in allowing people to do so at all. No one in their right mind should go anywhere near this book.

It's written in a bit of a contradictory style, with its very approachable language contradicting what feels like university-focused chapter summaries at the end of each section as if intending to use this for a university program. I'm not sure that I would, personally. It also feels like it has a slight bias towards entertainment over informativeness, and an attempt to ascribe the author's own moral code in order to define scammers, victims, and whistleblowers. It is an interesting proposition and undertaking, but I don't know if such a thing can be prescriptive.

Additionally, however briefly it occurs, I take issue with the author's illustration of scammerlike traits being reflective of "toxic masculinity" (technically, it is a student of theirs that the author merely agrees with, but all the same) and that complacency in more well-meaning scam perpetrators are inherently feminine. It harms the overall thesis to split things into a gender binary: anyone can be a victim, and anyone can be a scammer. Obfuscating one and gently chiding the other will result in a lowered guard if these ideas are taken to heart.

Moreover, stressing that women are more frequently whistleblowers (on page 192, under an unsourced "research has shown") does not contradict the previous point necessarily, but I find that it contradicts the complacent "people pleaser" narrative from before. Were someone to be a toxic adherent to these binaries, in an extreme case one may decide that to report a crime is feminine. Other social issues like racial and LGBTQIA+ discrimination are handled very respectfully while not being so straightforwardly pitying, so I genuinely don't know why these points were thrown into the final draft.

More of a reference than an actual book to read cover to cover

Tends to be a bit of a slog. Will try again in audiobook format.

Generic forgettable TV script trash. One review in the beginning called it like a bag of barbecue chips, and y’know what? I couldn’t agree more.