There’s A Fake Chelsea Handler Trying to Scam Stand-Up Comedians
Any comedian who thinks that they’re booked on Dear Chelsea should probably double-check their bank statements and change their Facebook password. Basically, pretend you’re a Boomer who just found out that their “grandson” wasn’t really in a car accident.
In the decades since the many thousands of Nigerian princes on the internet first caused the public to grow aware of email scams, the keyboard kleptos of the world have grown much more capable in their schemes and significantly more niche. Sure, there are still plenty of amateur fraudsters sending out mass emails from their AOL.com burner account warning strangers’ spam folders that the DMV is going to cube their car if they don’t respond with their Social Security number in the next 24 hours. However, the real heavy hitters of the online crime world have moved past the scattershot approach to scamming and are drawing up custom email signatures after trawling the directory lists of podcast production studios, or so says one would-be Dear Chelsea guest.
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According to stand-up comic Jim Norton, a person claiming to work for comedian, TV host and podcaster Chelsea Handler reached out to his reps to try and book him as a guest on Handler’s advice podcast Dear Chelsea, only to try and steal Norton’s Facebook login information. As such, until the scammers start going after Instagram accounts, comedians under the age of 45 should be safe from the Handler Hustle.
While fraud and identity theft are detestable crimes, you have to give the fake Chelsea Handler some credit here — this absolutely reads like an email between two management/PR professionals working in entertainment, down to the forced exclamation points bookending the message. And although many less advanced scammers will intentionally put spelling/grammatical/syntax errors into their scam emails to weed out the more detail-oriented and less gullible targets, this fraudster clearly proofread their phishing message to make sure that it was in perfect MLA format.
Still, it feels like an oversight that the scammers are trying to trick the managers of comedians using Gmail instead of coming up with a believable domain name. After all, Dear Chelsea is an iHeartRadio production, so it strains credulity for this so-called “Lucas Wilson” to be running his management team from an email address that looks like it belongs to an ambitious open-micer who is still months away from launching their adorably misguided Patreon.
At the same time, I’m not a professional comedian scammer, so I don’t know whether the Gmail address was some sort of insider move to identify the rubes, similar to the typos in the less targeted scams. Additionally, Norton never clarified whether or not this scheme actually worked. In fact, are we sure that he’s running his own Twitter account? More than that, is Norton outside the iHeartRadio studio right now wondering why Handler isn’t buzzing him in?
