Grifter: the meaning, and the law underneath the word.
A grifter is a confidence operator - someone who takes money through charm instead of force. The word is slang; the conduct it names maps onto very specific statutes, and this firm has defended the most famous alleged grifter of the era.
The word and its lineage.
“Grifter” surfaced in early-1900s carnival slang - grift meaning the con games worked alongside the midway - and settled into American English as the term for small-time confidence operators: the short-con artist, the check kiter, the sweetheart swindler. The modern usage broadened into an insult for anyone monetizing pretense. But beneath the slang sits a precise legal architecture: the confidence game is, in statutory terms, obtaining property by false pretenses - and the moment it touches a phone, an email, or a bank, it acquires federal names.
The statutes behind the slang.
What culture calls grifting, prosecutors charge as: wire fraud (§ 1343) and mail fraud (§ 1341) - a scheme to defraud plus a wire or mailing, twenty years per count; larceny by false promise or false pretenses in state codes (New York’s grand larceny ladder prices it by amount taken); identity theft where the persona borrowed a real person’s name; and bank fraud where the con ran through deposits and checks. The common element everywhere is intent to defraud - which is also the battlefield, because the line between salesmanship, self-invention, and criminal deception is where these trials are actually fought.
The case study this firm knows personally.
When the word “grifter” dominated headlines in 2019, it was attached to Anna Sorokin - the Soho socialite the press called Anna Delvey - and the lawyer defending her was Todd Spodek. The defense he built became a Netflix series (Inventing Anna, with the trial scenes drawn from the real record): the argument that ambition, image-making, and a city eager to believe are not the same thing as criminal intent - that New York runs on fake it till you make it. The jury acquitted on the most serious counts. The case remains the reference point for where self-invention ends and fraud begins - and the full file is here.
If the word is being aimed at you.
“Grifter” in a demand letter, a lawsuit, or an agent’s question means someone is building the intent narrative already. The counter is the record: contemporaneous documents showing genuine intention to deliver - drafts, invoices, effort, partial performance - assembled before accounts close and memories curdle. Failed businesses and broken promises are civil problems; the government must prove the promise was false when made. That distinction is this firm’s home turf - ask the client Netflix made famous.
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