The United States of Fraud

I always get a kick out of people's reactions when I bring up what I've come to think of as "mini crimes" against big businesses — small acts of deviance that average shoppers commit without really even thinking about it. At first, there's usually denial: "No, I would never engage in the slightest level of fraud." But pretty quickly, the confessions start to roll in. "OK, I sometimes ring up my organic apples as regular at the grocery store, and sure, I've returned an item after wearing it a time or two. Honestly, I'd forgotten sneaking snacks into the movie theater was a no-no."

Ask whether people feel guilty about it, and the answer is generally, not really. It's tough to lose sleep over a bit of rule-bending amid the state of corporate power and inequality in America.

Our economic machine is more impersonal than ever. Having a friendly local grocer and corner store guy who's known you since you were a baby is increasingly rare. They've been replaced by ever-larger, colder conglomerates that are willing to ax workers on a dime, pad executives' pockets, and focus on little other than profits. Corporate America's favorite new toy — AI — promises efficiency and riches for them and precarity and anxiety for us.

Against that backdrop, some people have turned to petty fraud, policy abuse, and small acts of sabotage as a means of getting back at their economic overlords. They're engaging in spurts of shoplifting, taking part in return shenanigans, and using their credit cards for "friendly fraud" that's anything but. They see — or at least excuse — these acts not as stealing but as small moments of deserved vengeance in a system that violates their sense of basic fairness at every turn.

For this story, I spoke to one man who once paid his rent in quarters, nickels, and dimes after the apartment management company dragged its feet on making a needed fix in his bathroom. "I don't know if I'd do it again," he told me, "but in the moment, it felt fun." I heard from one woman who is still working through a pile of forever stamps she took from an old job that mistreated her years ago. "Every single time I mail a note, a birthday card, a bill, etc., I think about how that company will pay for my mail probably for the rest of my life," she said. I talked to another woman whose dad would regularly sneak the family into the same hotel's breakfast buffet to eat for free after church.

These minuscule attempts to even the score may be ethically dubious, but they're also a sign of the times: The context doesn't excuse the behavior, but it makes rationalizing it a hell of a lot easier.

"If Elon Musk is negotiating a trillion-dollar pay package, and I'm fighting for an extra 50 cents per hour to work at the poultry processing plant, well, what really is going on here, and how high and mighty should I be about someone stealing some chicken tenders from the freezer?" says Stephen Mihm, the author of "A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States."

Eyal Elazar, the head of market intelligence at Riskified, an e-commerce fraud prevention platform, has noticed a rise in what he calls a "Robin Hood mentality" among shoppers. Many of them aren't your typical "bad" guys — they're middle-class, middle-aged consumers who engage in some white lies. And they don't dispense their convoluted justice equally: They differentiate between retailers they view as being able to absorb the loss and deserving of it, and brands they feel a connection to and some level of loyalty. Basically, they're much more prone to slighting behemoths like, say, Nike or Walmart than they are Chewy, he says.

People view certain big companies as "having enough money or making a living off our backs," Elazer says. By contrast, it's hard to be too mean to a company whose whole purpose is to be nice to your dog.

This is a story partly about the evolution of modern-day consumer culture and partly about human psychology. Mass production is a relatively recent phenomenon, dating back to the 20th century, when technology made it easier to manufacture goods cheaply and distribute them on a large scale. The marketing machine, in turn, ramped up to convince people they needed to buy the new and discard the old in order to keep up with the Joneses. This was accompanied by an increasingly widespread corporate attitude that treated work like little more than a commodity to be bought and sold, and a growing understanding that employers feel they owe employees nothing beyond exact (and often meager) compensation for their inputs. Twenty-first-century developments have kicked all of this into high gear: The internet makes everything even more distant; megacorporations have mushroomed; shareholder primacy reigns. Loyalty is dead, and customer service is an avenue for constant cost-cutting.

Trust in institutions has declined, and while Americans tend to think small businesses are good, they're often suspicious of the big guys. A 2024 PwC survey on trust in US business found that while 90% of business executives believe customers highly trust their companies, just 30% actually do. While people may feel OK about a particular brand, they are under no illusions about their business practices. Many consumers are well familiar with — and frustrated by — corporate tactics such as roping people into unwanted subscriptions, engaging in shrinkflation, and piling on inexplicable fees.

"The idea that consumers feel exploited is just on people's minds a lot," says Kathleen Vohs, a professor of marketing at the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management. "If you couple that with consumers feeling insecure about their own financial futures, I think then that can provide the perfect storm for people to feel like it's time to take back a little bit."

This breakdown in the social contract leads many Americans to feel that everyone is trying to pull one over on them, so why not return the favor? When everything seems like a scam, it's easier to justify becoming a scammer.

Human beings are hardwired for fairness, and when we see an injustice, we instinctively want to rectify it. Evolutionarily, that's served as a deterrent for bad or antisocial behavior — if I'll suffer more than I'll benefit from acting unfairly, I'll think twice. Fairness-driven justice isn't always rational for the avenger, and sometimes, we undercut ourselves in the act. The ultimatum game — a popular experiment in economics — gives two players $100 and asks the first to decide how to split it, and the second to decide whether to accept it, knowing that rejecting it will result in neither player receiving anything. If the second person feels the offer is too small, they say no to it, even though rationally, it would be better to accept the money, regardless of the amount.

"There's an amount that people are willing to say, I'm willing to cut my nose to spite myself, right? I'm willing to lose money to punish you," says Dan Ariely, a professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University. In the consumer context, the issue is that Player One — the business — is playing a very technically rational game and doesn't concern itself as much with fairness. "They don't understand the emotional component," Ariely says. "Companies do things to hurt people under the general guidelines of, 'It's only business, that's how business is done, it was written in small letters in the fine print.'"

Attempts to teach businesses a lesson for perceived unfairness can take many forms and come with various excuses. Reporting on other "mini-crime" stories over time, I've heard all sorts of justifications. People defend stealing at self-checkout because companies use the technology to cut workers. They request credit card chargebacks because there was a slight hiccup in a transaction, or simply because it's been a minute since they've asked for one, and figure they'll get away with it. Many of them claim to target major corporations and said they'd never intentionally hurt the small guys. The system is rigged, and they feel validated in doing some rigging of their own.

It's clear that much of this sentiment boils down to rationalization, often done after the fact. The reason you swiped a fancy cheese from Whole Foods was because you wanted to make a cute little charcuterie board after work, not because you were on some noble crusade against Jeff Bezos and wealth inequality. There's an inherent selfishness to this conduct: Many of us are open to engaging in dishonest behaviors when we think we can get away with them and have something to gain, explains Christian Miller, a professor of philosophy at Wake Forest University. At the same time, we hold moral values that tell us those things are wrong, and we want to consider ourselves honest people. These small fibs allow us to maintain that frame.

"You don't see people in life often cheating in dramatic ways or stealing in dramatic ways, because they think they're going to get caught, and also, it's hard to continue to think of yourself as an honest person if you do," he says. "When the opportunity arises to cheat or steal in some minor way, we're willing to overlook that, because we can still think of ourselves as honest people, rationalize it, and benefit in the process."

Criminologists call these rationalizations "techniques of neutralization" — tactics offenders use to mitigate their feelings of guilt and evade accountability. These include denial of responsibility (it wasn't in my control), denial of injury (nobody was harmed), denial of the victim (they had it coming), condemnation of the condemners (it's somehow your fault, or you did it too), and appeal to higher loyalty (to help a friend). It's not hard to see how some of these small-scale consumer revolts fit into this. You don't see who you actually hurt when you snatch a shampoo from a major pharmacy chain. If you keep making up email addresses to take advantage of a streaming service's free trials, aren't they doing the same thing when they charge people after they forgot they signed up? Plus, there's some thrill to it.

"The people who are doing these kinds of low-level stuff, none of them will see themselves as criminal," says Nicola Harding, a criminologist based in the United Kingdom who specializes in fraud and financial crime. They can tell themselves a story that "paints them as the hero."

Just because the victim of a crime is hard to see or even empathize with doesn't mean they're not there. If enough people shoplift, companies will raise prices, hurting families already on tight budgets. Increased return fraud and shady credit card chargebacks mean businesses will eventually tighten their policies, a headache for consumers who aren't eager to jump through even more administrative hoops. People swapping out a broken three-year-old coffee machine for a brand-new one in an Amazon return may not notice that the ultimate casualty of the transaction is a small business that's just trying to scrape by. Jumping the subway turnstile means less money to fund the strapped transit system, and calling in sick to play hooky further stretches the exhausted coworker you generally like. Retail workers probably aren't shedding tears over lifted mascara, but watching customers blatantly shoplift all day is demoralizing, and they'd rather not have to run around unlocking anti-shoplifting display cases.

It's hard to wrap your head around how we've gotten here. The economy feels more complex and overwhelming than ever. The veneer of big business caring about people or communities fades more every day. Citizens are stressed and frustrated as prices rise, and inequality has become increasingly impossible to ignore.

Americans' identities are intertwined with consumerism — we see what we buy as an expression of our values, of who we are. And, sometimes, the value we want to express is, "I hate you, internet company," by refusing to return a modem, "You're price-gouging me, stadium," by slipping in our own beer, or "You're the worst, boss," by grabbing some extra avocados from the office kitchen.

There's also a layer of entitlement to this — we've long been told the customer's always right, which some customers have interpreted as they can do no wrong.

Marianna Sachse, the founder and CEO of Jackalo, a sustainable children's clothing company, thinks a fair amount about the time a customer sent back pants with spaghetti and tomato sauce caked on them, expecting a full refund. She understands that people have become accustomed to dealing with e-commerce giants with hyper-generous return policies, but they don't realize she can't offer the same terms. To combat some of the depersonalization, she tries to run a "founder-forward" operation, ensuring that communications feature her name and face to drive home the fact that she runs a mom-owned business. "Sometimes, I think people don't really understand that there are real people behind businesses," she says.

Or they do, and they don't care.

There's a pervasive sense of nihilism shared by a growing number of Americans. It manifests in rampant gambling and speculation, where people feel that the economy presents such limited opportunities that there are few avenues besides taking irresponsible risks. It shows up in people cheering on Luigi Mangione despite a horrific crime and vandalizing Teslas out of anger toward Elon Musk.

Our politics are an increasingly consequence-free zone. While the elites may trade barbs in public, in private, they know their interests are ultimately aligned. Watching the ultra-rich hobnob at the White House and take frivolous trips to space while you're figuring out how to swing your grocery bill for the week can be infuriating. Of course some people are going to lash out, even in misguided, unethical ways.

If everything feels like a game where only one side has all the chips, knows all the rules, and rigs the outcome, it's only natural that the other side might be inclined to do some cheating.

Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.

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