Last Night a Scammer Saved My Life
I needed help. The Illuminati slipped into my DM's.
A word of caution: this story mentions suicidal ideation and a period of mental health struggles in my life. If you’re contending with either, I beg you to get the help you need to stick around. You are needed, you are loved, and there are better times ahead. I know, I’ve been there.
This story starts with name-dropping. In 2019, the lowest moments of my life were spent crashing at the house of Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson, the eventual creators of Yellowjackets. That makes it sound like I’m friends with them, and that would be very, very cool, but I’m not, really - aside from my time as their very sad houseguest, I’ve seen them twice socially. I’m just someone who admires them for their phenomenal work as creators of television and their willingness to take in a stranger at rock bottom.
In 2019, when I crashed at Ashley and Bart’s, my marriage was falling apart. My wife hadn’t said the words “I want a divorce” yet, but she had said the words “I don’t think I can be married to a trans woman” and had very carefully avoided saying anything that made it sound like she wanted to be married to me, or even explore the possibility.
My childhood was defined by my parents’ slow-motion break-up, which started before my birth and continued until elementary school. All I wanted, since I could remember, was to have the opposite kind of family: a family that stayed together forever, not hopping from battle to battle, new house to new house. Proving to myself and, I don’t know - maybe God - that I could be “better” than my parents was a cornerstone of my identity. In every tearful conversation, that cornerstone was crumbling.
I also had the creeping feeling that I was unloveable. After the spectacular failure of coming out to my wife, I called my mom. She’d never been the easiest person to love, but she was my hero. She’d put herself through law school, faced horrible sexism from good ol’ boys in her early legal career, and worked late into the night for years to provide for my brother and me. She gave me the clarity my wife wouldn’t. My mom called me a “selfish pervert” and told me the only help she would offer was money to institutionalize myself to undergo conversion therapy.
The only unconditional love left in my life came from my two boys, then 8 and 6, my brother in Texas, and my dad and stepmom in Tennessee.
I was deeply, deeply losing my shit. I only got through it because of the generosity of a few incredible friends, friends of friends like Ashley and Bart, and an Instagram scammer offering me an opportunity to join the Illuminati.
When I opened my Instagram messages and found a DM inviting me to join the secretive global cabal of elites controlling the very fabric of society, I wasn’t sleeping or eating. Instead, I was - many times a day - finding a place to fall apart in tears and howls of pain. It was scary, but not as scary as the increasingly common moments of total peace.
My first experience of suicidality, nine months before, had come in the form of intense planning and had been a lot of work, if I was being honest. This time around, it felt relaxing, luxurious even. I might not make it to the end of the year. Maybe not even the summer. There were no plans, really. Just a loose sense that I could manifest an exit when it all finally fell apart. Freedom from a future made me feel happy, playful, even.
I was in this spirit of playfulness when I received my first message from “raphealilluminati”:
„Hello how are you doing, this is an open invitations for everyone do you wish to join the illuminati societv? This is an organization specifically for the betterment of humanity, makes life comfortable for every human and make you genuine among other, Do you wants to be wealthy, Famous and as well protected this are benefits you get in becoming a member. You wish to join this society?
And wrote back:
Yeah, let’s do it.
I took a screenshot of the conversation, blocked the scammer from my Instagram stories, and posted it. This was the start of a weeks’ long journey.
Meanwhile, my best friend Lee was introducing me over text to Ashley and Bart. I had told Lee that I couldn’t stand being in my own home anymore and was ready to move into my car if that was what it took to escape. I was stewing in rejection from my wife. I was still trying to act “manly” for my kids, which was awful but felt like the good kind of lie. I didn’t have the money to find another place, and my incessant, call-the-cops-level sobbing made me a terrible candidate for couch surfing. But Ashley and Bart were traveling and willing to let me stay in their house in their absence.
I packed some bags and told my kids I was feeling especially sad and needed a little time alone. We exchanged some teary hugs. My ex and I had a whispered argument equal parts couple’s fight and a loving attempt to make sure I was okay. We shared a little bit of the old love, holding each other in fear for our future. Then I drove across town to my temporary refuge.
Between these impossibly hard, heartbreaking moments, I was messaging my sales rep at the Illuminati on WhatsApp, where he’d moved the conversation.
With the scammer, I adopted a persona that was the ironic opposite of my increasingly trans femme nonbinary self: a kind of dumb dude-bro drug dealer and reseller of bootleg DVD’s with a tendency to jump to the wrong conclusions. I tried to be plausibly stupid, hoping that would make me attractive as a mark. It felt good to still be able to pass as a dude–bro, at least to a stranger in Nigeria.
All along the way, I took screenshots and added them to my Instagram story.
Between weed binges, crying jags, and crisis conversations with my therapist, I started an unhinged weeks-long process of long-distance improvising with my mark, trying to “yes, and…” him into some kind of satisfying punchline.
The scammer pushed me to send him money via Venmo, Zelle, or cryptocurrency so I couldn’t claw back the payments. I told him that as someone in the black market drug business, I couldn’t have a digital trail of my transactions. We went back and forth about this for a while.
As our conversations progressed, I started sprinkling in details about the crisis I was experiencing. My character’s marriage to his “smoking hot wife, Yvonne” (I sent pics of Anna Delvey) was falling apart, just like mine. He missed his kids, Arrow and “Lil’ Kev” (played by the kid who comes up if you google ‘8-year-old body builder’) just like I missed my own. He was crashing with strangers, just like I was. He needed someone to talk to, just like I did.
It wasn’t as though I thought the scammer was really my friend. We were both actively trying to cause harm to each other. Even though I knew this, when I got an alert that he’d messaged me, I was excited. It was a small excitement, but it still felt good and new. Not only that, I was laughing. It wasn’t all the time. I was still bursting blood vessels in my eyes and giving myself hives from my marathon meltdowns, but the right plot twist from the Illuminati scammer could pull from that into gleeful laughter. When was the last time I’d laughed?
My ex and I met for couples therapy. Waiting for the therapist, she saw I was a little better. “It feels crazy saying this,” she confided, “but I’m glad you’ve got your scammer. I think it’s good for you.”
The scammer became increasingly impatient with my attempts to misdirect him and keep the conversation going. He would threaten to drop me, I would tell him that I had a competing offer to join the Shriners, and he’d forgive me for a little while. Eventually, he demanded to see more than messages.
I agreed to send him $10,000. My kids and I went to a Rite Aid with a Western Union machine and sent $10 to Edo State in Nigeria. I took a picture of the screen and brought home the receipt. I photoshopped the pictures and let him know the money had been sent.
At the bank in Nigeria, the scammer had a meltdown when he was given $9,900 less than expected. He screamed at the staff, accusing them of robbing him. The police were called. He almost went to jail. He was displeased. A second supervisory scammer was brought in, this one based in Iran.
The Iranian scammer had less patience than his Nigerian counterpart. They fell into a kind of good cop, bad cop rapport. When it started to seem like they might be losing faith, I brought out the big guns. I purchased $50,000 in prop movie money and told them I had access to more cash as soon as my smoking hot wife Yvonne would let me return to the house to see Arrow and Lil’ Kev.
In real life, I returned to my real house to visit my real kids and hid the fake $50,000 in stacks in my 8-year-old’s Lego bin. We filmed him pulling the cash from the bricks and proudly stacking it in his arms and sent the video to the scammers. Suddenly, they were open to the possibility of receiving cash. They sent me information about a man in Wisconsin who could meet with me and take my initiation fee.
When I expressed concern about this new person, they had Mr. Wisconsin send a video of himself to show that he was “friendly.” The video captured a man in a bar staring emotionless and unblinkingly into the lens for 30 seconds with happy hour sounds in the background. He did not look friendly.
I had recently finished a Jackass-style stunt show for MTV called Too Stupid to Die and love the rush of that kind of production. The scammers gave me Mr. Wisconsin’s real name, and I ran a background check on him. It came up clean. What if I wondered, I turned this into a scene like the one in Nigeria, but this time caught it all on camera?
My producer friend Barry shut this down quickly. He listened to the whole pitch respectfully before asking: “You know, Jude, I say this to you as a friend and somebody who loves you: are you trying to get yourself killed?”
Get myself killed? I considered it. I didn’t want to get myself killed. I was having too much fun.
In the following days, I left Ashley and Bart’s house, and returned home. I kept the scammers going as long as I could but wound things down when they found another person who could take my money in person. This “nice person” was in California, which was starting to feel too close, and uncomfortably dangerous. I didn’t want danger; I wanted more fun.
The whole time I’d been messaging with my friends in the “Illuminati,” I’d been driving towards a fantasy punchline. I wanted to send a package to Nigeria or Iran that seemed tampered with before it even arrived. I would un-stuff a teddy bear, photograph it with $100,000 worth of fake bills, and then send them the empty bearskin with one lonely, crumpled dollar stuffed into the depth of a limb. They would cry, I would laugh, and this ridiculously complicated joke would be over.
I didn’t get this punchline. Instead, I let my contacts at the Illuminati know that I’d decided to join the Shriners after all. I enlisted my friend Rich Monahan to join me for a celebratory new-Shriner welcome, complete with a stack of cash and a bootleg DVD:
When I sent the video to the Illuminati with a goodbye message, my inbox was flooded with death threats. I blocked them and went about my life. Rich went on to write Season 2, Episode 7 of Yellowjackets (The wild one with John Cameron Mitchell). I am friends with him, and it’s very, very cool. One of the many perks of being alive.