What Does It Take to Become a Prodigy Scam Artist?

NEVER SAW ME COMING: How I Outsmarted the F.B.I. and the Entire Banking System — and Pocketed $40 Million, by Tanya Smith

When Tanya Smith was in high school, spending time with her upwardly mobile father in 1980s Minneapolis, she developed a kind of class consciousness — a curiosity about money and race and a desire to know just how much income qualified someone as “rich.”

Most people would probably just try to guess; Smith had a different solution. Deploying what we now term “social engineering,” she would call banks and trick workers into revealing exactly how much was in someone’s account. This led to more experiments with low-level scamming, some of it, she says, for a good cause. “Between the ages of 15 and 16, I managed to void people’s utility bills, at least temporarily, at least 300 times,” she writes in her memoir, “Never Saw Me Coming.” Smith “also handled overdue mortgages.”

In recounting her childhood, Smith conveys a certain admiration for this younger self. She was, by her own account, both smart and fearless.

But as the story unfolds, the mood darkens. Smith has a twin, Tammy, who gets into drugs as Smith becomes further involved in her white-collar crimes and moves to live a glamorous life in Los Angeles; her parents, rendered as saintly figures, recede into the background, and a series of flashy and obviously ill-intentioned men enter the picture. Smith’s educational promise evaporates as her biggest scam — basically, finding ways to tap into a bank’s reserve funds to send phony wire transfers — becomes her full-time job.

The initial glamour of cavorting around with celebrities gives way to the more depressing (and familiar) picture of a young woman losing control of her life. By the time we’ve reached the book’s final third, Smith is in prison. She breaks out twice. She also gives birth twice while incarcerated.