An Excerpt from Charlatans: How Grifters, Swindlers, and Hucksters Bamboozle the Media, the Markets, and the Masses
An excerpt from Charlatans by Moises Naim and Quico Toro, published by Basic Books and longlisted for the 2025 Porchlight Business Book Awards in the Personal Development & Human Behavior category.
For centuries charlatans have been bamboozling victims. But today, charlatanry is more lucrative and global than ever. Using the power of digital technology, our age’s charlatans have spun a worldwide web of exploitation on an unprecedented scale.
In Charlatans, global affairs experts Moisés Naím and Quico Toro investigate how charlatans fool us and why they’ve become so influential today. They argue that modern charlatans exploit the same weak points in human cognition as the snake-oil salesmen of the old West. They earn our trust, trick us into believing they have some special skill or knowledge, then exploit us. In some ways, nothing has changed. But, today, charlatans are digital, viral, and global. Whether they’re health gurus pushing pseudoscience or crypto bros orchestrating Ponzi schemes, modern charlatans rapidly amass worldwide audiences on the internet and social media using a common set of strategies. These hucksters swiftly swindle unsuspecting victims, as our slow-moving institutions struggle to respond.
Packed with insights on how to avoid being duped by charlatans, this is an eye-opening journey through the brazen deception and brutal victimization at the heart of this new global scourge.
Charlatans has been longlisted in the Personal Development & Human Behavior category of Porchlight Book Company's 2025 Business Books Awards. The excerpt below is the book's conclusion, but we believe it to be a great introduction to a book about charlatans and how not to be taken in by them.
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Governments and tech giants both have a role to play in introducing friction into charlatans’ schemes, but they’re limited roles. The more important lines of defense come closer to the individual.
In many of the cases we’ve looked at, what the victims really could have used is a second opinion: a reality check from a reliable outsider able to warn them they were at risk of being scammed. Social isolation, lack of access to those reliable reality checks, looks very much like a hidden risk factor for victimization. No one is better positioned to warn potential victims away from dangerous charlatans than those nearest and dearest to them. Friends, colleagues, coworkers, classmates, and family members may be the people best positioned to protect those close to them from victimization.
People need to look out for one another and learn to intervene, tactfully, at the earliest sign that someone is coming under the sway of a charlatan. Training people to spot the signs of victimization and intervene with their loved ones to interrupt the process may be one of the most promising avenues for preventing victimization by charlatans.
But these answers are partial. In the end, the only one who can really protect you from a charlatan is you.
It’s natural to assume it is governments’ job to protect us from charlatans. Or maybe it’s the courts, or Google and Facebook, or even our friends and family. We are skeptical.
The ultimate line of defense, the battleground where it’s all to play for, is inside each and every one of us.
That’s why the oldest, most stereotypical advice about charlatans is still the best: if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
Everyone has heard that old chestnut, and yet people keep falling for charlatans’ tricks. Why is that? Why is the lure of charlatans so difficult to resist? Why do things that sound good to us sound so good? Why are they so powerful that we’ll set our lives on fire to pursue them?
When we’re urged to reflect that something is “too good to be true,” we’re being urged to use slow thinking, to engage our critical thinking abilities and subject the claim in front of us to scrutiny.
Charlatans know the power our dreams have over us. That is why they go to great pains to make sure they are speaking to us in the language of our dreams. Few of us are willing or able to “think slow,” to think genuinely critically, about the things that, deep down, we feel must be true, because those are the kinds of beliefs that define us. Connect with someone’s dreams and you connect with them.
Charlatans know this, and they exploit it ruthlessly.
To protect yourself from a charlatan, to actually spot the thing that’s “too good to be true,” you have to keep just a bit of distance between your dreams and who you are—that tiny bit of critical distance between what feels true and what you can trust.
This is incredibly difficult. It is asking us to run against the grain of HumanOS—doing the effortful, slow thinking it takes to seek to falsify our beliefs, rather than looking for reasons to confirm them. It’s asking us to use reason not only to come up with arguments to support our intuition but also to have critical insight into them. It’s asking us to remember that the people we look up to can be wrong, and we shouldn’t interpret the fact that our peers believe a thing as reason to believe it ourselves.
None of this is easy. Hearing someone championing our dreams and keeping our guard up anyway will never come naturally.
We know it’s a big request. Of anyone. Young or old, rich or poor, Black, brown, or white. Most of us can’t manage it—not consistently, anyway. When times are tough, when we are isolated or stressed or depressed, when we are vulnerable, we lapse. We grab onto the beliefs we need to be true if the world is to make any sense to us, the beliefs our dreams are built on. And that’s when they get us.
In today’s world, the charlatans out to prey on us at that moment are everywhere: digital, viral, scalable, and global. To protect ourselves from them, to keep our ability to notice when something really is too good to be true, we need to keep a measure of healthy skepticism pointed at our own dreams.
We need to do this at all times. That’s incredibly hard. But it’s an indispensable survival skill for the twenty-first century.
THREE IDEAS TO TAKE AWAY
So far, you’ve come on a wild ride with us through some of the seedier parts of the modern attention economy. What we have learned has often been ugly, but we hope it will also prove useful. What should you take away from this book?
Everybody Is at Risk from Charlatans
Charlatans target vulnerabilities written deep into HumanOS, turning features of the way we think into weapons against us. Pretty much everyone prefers to have their ideas confirmed than refuted. All of us actively look for reasons to believe in our most cherished beliefs and ignore reasons to doubt them. Everyone finds it uncomfortable to question their dreams. And everyone is of a mind to follow the herd, assuming that if trusted people believe something, it must be right. These biases are universal and inescapable, products of fast thinking that take place before we’re even aware of it. This is why, even though many charlatans will strike you as ludicrous, the charlatans who address themselves to you in particular will always be tricky to spot.
Charlatans Are a Threat in Every Aspect of Life
Back when charlatans relied on their voices from the top of a soapbox, they had to limit themselves to a few tried-and-true paths. Most of them specialized in quack medicines and get-rich-quick schemes, because the dreams of health and wealth are so widespread. Today, technology allows charlatans to target much narrower niches. As a result, charlatanry has exploded across the spectrum of human activity. Once, having a quirky dream protected you from exploitation. No more. New charlatans arise all the time, aiming at dreams as niche as Turkish city dwellers’ nostalgia for rural living, or the quest for your one, unique “twin flame” for love. With algorithms becoming ever more sophisticated at matching media consumers to the thing they most long to hear, the scope for charlatanry continues to expand.
Technology Tips the Scales in Charlatans’ Favor
Today’s charlatans push grifts that are digital, viral, scalable, and potentially even global. They take in the world’s most sophisticated investors as well as the voters of the most advanced democracies. They can lay waste to a once-prosperous nation’s economy, as they did in Britain, and take on even the world’s most powerful corporations, as Baba Ramdev has done in India. Using the increasingly sophisticated tools the internet makes available for matching people with their interests, their impact is hugely magnified. And as charlatans begin to experiment with the potential that artificial intelligence has for expanding their reach even further, all bets are off.
One thing we’re sure of: the upcoming cohort of AI-enabled charlatans can only be that much more destructive than the last.
This may all feel daunting, but it ought not to. Becoming cognizant of the challenge in front of us is always the first step in rising to it. We can’t help carrying with us the vulnerabilities that are built into HumanOS, but we can turn our understanding of those vulnerabilities into a shield to protect us.
This is vital work because our dreams are who we are: to protect them is to defend our truest selves.
Excerpted from Charlatans: How Grifters, Swindlers, and Hucksters Bamboozle the Media, the Markets, and the Masses by Moises Naim and Quico Toro, in agreement with Basic Books. Copyright © 2025 by by Moisés Naím and Francisco Toro. All rights reserved.
About the Authors
Moisés Naím is distinguished fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He was the editor in chief of Foreign Policy magazine for over a decade, and his column on global affairs is syndicated to dozens of publications worldwide. Naím is the author of Illicit, What Is Happening to Us?, and the New York Times bestseller The End of Power. He is based in Washington, DC.
Quico Toro is a writer and editor who serves as the global opinion columnist for the Washington Post. He is based in Tokyo, Japan.
