Caroline Calloway Is Offering a Discounted Scam for the Holidays

In the eleventh hour of this distressing year, we’ve been visited by the Ghost of Scamming Past, Ms. Caroline Calloway, and are being offered one final scam before closing the books on 2022. Calloway hopped back on Instagram yesterday, after swearing it off in March of this year, to announce a lifeline for the last-minute Christmas gift buyers: Caro Card Readings.

Calloway, who made a disreputable name for herself by using her influencer status to sell poorly planned writing workshops that she never showed up to, is selling tarot card readings. That’s a decent deal if you ignore the fact that what she is offering is not actually a tarot card reading. For the price of one Sweetgreen salad, you can get a tarot card in the mail with her signature on the back. “In the past, I’ve usually stuck to scams with extremely high price points,” she wrote on Instagram. “For the first time ever my business model is to make a ton of something at a really low price point,” the caption continues. Freakonomics alert!!

While I would love to imagine Calloway is leaping into this new venture for her pure love of half-baked schemes alone, it seems she simply is in need of some extra money. In her Instagram stories, she says she needs money to buy the people in her life presents. You see, a documentary that she has coming out next year hasn’t paid her yet. If you’re wondering, “Is someone paying her to be in a documentary? Isn’t that unethical?” then you’re already overthinking it. Between sharing antisemitic cartoons and backing out of book deals that have already paid lucrative advances, ethics are murky in the Calloway extended universe.

In true chaotic scammer form, it was only six months ago when Calloway all but disavowed currency at large. “I’m just not that interested in money,” she told Julia Fox on Fox and Niki Takesh’s Forbidden Fruits podcast. This was about a month after it became public knowledge that Calloway owed $40,000 in rent to her West Village landlord. I mean, who amongst us hasn’t gone on an anti-capitalist tirade on a Brooklyn-centric podcast when rent is due?!

While I’m glad that Calloway has downgraded the size of her scams, I am curious if this will actually make her any money. Between the nice cardstock envelopes adorned with stickers, and the guaranteed promise that her gifts will get to recipients, even international ones, by Christmas (only two business days away) it seems like she’ll be fielding a lot of overhead costs. Of course, there’s always the option to not follow through on the cards and just pocket everyone’s money. That, after all, is what they call the Caroline Calloway special!