The grift economy is going mainstream
2025 was the year the grift economy went mainstream. Are we doomed to repeat it?
On January 7th, Chris Hayes taped an appearance on The Late Show at 5:30 p.m.
A few hours later, before the episode even aired, a friend texted him a screenshot. Someone had created a betting market on Kalshi, the prediction market platform, asking whether Hayes would mention Trump, China, or affordability during his appearance.
The interview had already happened. It just hadn’t been broadcast yet.
The market grew to almost $900,000.
This is the rip-off economy — or the grift economy — in its purest form: a world where everything — your attention, your data, your daily activities, even events that have already happened — is a surface to extract value from.
Where the line between investing and gambling has dissolved. Where the business model is built around exploiting customers.
The Economist published a piece last October called “The End of the Rip-Off Economy,” arguing that AI will actually fix all of this scamming and grifting. Their thesis is that technology empowers consumers, removes information asymmetries, and — their words — “the days of the know-nothing consumer are over.”
I want to take that argument seriously. Because it’s not entirely wrong. AI can potentially help consumers compare prices, detect scams, negotiate better deals.
But I think it misses something fundamental about what actually happened in 2025.
The gamblification of everything
Prediction markets hit nearly $40 billion in volume in 2025, a 400% increase from the previous year. And Kalshi’s CEO has been quite honest about his ultimate vision: “The long-term goal is to financialize everything.”
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Everything. And they’re not kidding.
You can now bet on how long the famine in Gaza will last. Whether your favorite influencer will get divorced. Whether the second coming of Jesus is happening this year. (Traders give it a 3% chance before 2027, if you’re curious.) A gaming attorney called it what it is: “gambling, no matter what they call it.”
The line between investing, gambling, and... whatever this is... has completely dissolved.
And if you watched the Super Bowl this month, you saw it in real time. Americans legally wagered an estimated $1.76 billion on the game. But for the first time, prediction market platforms and traditional sportsbooks were in direct competition for that handle — with prediction markets arguing their bets aren’t actually gambling and therefore shouldn’t be subject to gambling regulations. Kalshi is now legal in all 50 states.
And the language is deliberate. 31% of prediction market users report encountering “trading” or “investing” language in platform messaging. You’re not betting. You’re trading contracts on a federally regulated exchange.
And it’s not just prediction markets. Americans now spend more on scratch-off lottery tickets than on pizza, movies, concerts, and sports tickets combined. In Massachusetts, adults average $1,037 per year on scratch tickets alone. Options trading — a form of stock market gambling, IMO — hit record levels in 2025. More than half of S&P 500 options were zero-day-to-expiration trades — bets that expire the same day they’re placed.
Warren Buffett, not exactly a pearl-clutcher, warned in his annual letter: “The casino now resides in many homes and daily tempts the occupants.”
When the casino has no rules
When you turn everything into a betting market, you also create new incentive structures for cheating. 2025 did not disappoint. When there’s no insider trading protection, no accountability, no way to know if the game is fair, people stop expecting fairness. They just try to get theirs before someone else does.
And that’s exactly what’s happening. In a single week in November 2025, the FBI met with the UFC about an allegedly rigged fight, and two Cleveland Guardians pitchers were federally indicted for a pitch-fixing scheme. Earlier in the year, 20 college basketball players were charged in a point-shaving scandal — the largest in NCAA history. An NBA coach and player were arrested on gambling-related charges.
And prediction markets? They have essentially no insider trading protections. None.
So when a worker at Google makes a million dollars betting on Google Search Trends (which they presumably had access to before the information went public), or a government insider makes $400K betting that Venezuelan president Maduro would be ousted hours before it happened, it’s all legal.
The people helping to build the casino are also the people in power. Donald Trump Jr. sits on Polymarket’s advisory board and is a “strategic adviser” to Kalshi. Truth Social is launching its own prediction market. And last week, the CFTC — the federal agency that oversees these platforms — announced it would drop its proposed rules to prohibit political and sports-related contracts. The new CFTC chair said the agency supports “lawful innovation in these markets.”
And as Kyla Scanlon wrote, major media outlets (including Dow Jones, CNN, CNBC) have announced partnerships integrating prediction market odds into their coverage. The news is now read alongside people betting on the news. When markets process political events before democratic institutions like Congress can even deliberate, market outcomes get treated as validation. As Scanlon put it: these bets “get laundered into legitimacy through the language of collective wisdom and truth machines, with a light touch of regulation.”
The Economist said information asymmetries would disappear. Instead, they inverted. Now the platforms know everything about us — our risk tolerance, our behavioral patterns, our dopamine responses — and we know almost nothing about who’s on the other side of the bet.
Also this advertising???
The price is watching you
The gamblification of everything is one way the grift economy works. But you don't have to place a single bet to get caught up in it.
Take surveillance pricing — the practice of using AI to determine a buyer’s “pain point” (the maximum they’ll pay before walking away) and adjusting prices accordingly. Not based on supply and demand. Based on you.
The technology to charge you a personalized price absolutely exists — the FTC confirmed that companies are selling these tools to retailers. Their staff report outlined four key concerns: privacy, discrimination, extraction, and algorithmic collusion.
And a Consumer Reports investigation with the Groundwork Collaborative found that 75% of products on Instacart showed different prices to different users — some paying up to 23% more for the exact same item. Instacart’s internal emails revealed a practice called “smart rounding” — using algorithms to squeeze extra cents out of every transaction. (New York’s Attorney General has since demanded answers.)
However, that doesn’t mean we’re in a surveillance wasteland, yet. The price swings people notice — and attribute to being tracked — are real, but they’re usually dynamic pricing: cheap seats selling out, fares changing based on overall demand. That affects everyone equally, not you specifically.
So is surveillance pricing a real threat or an internet paranoia?
Both. The capability exists and is being deployed in some contexts (grocery delivery, clearly). And the gap between capability and widespread deployment appears to be closing fast — Delta just announced it’s piloting AI-driven individualized pricing, and given how lucrative perfect price discrimination is, others will follow. Electronic shelf labels are spreading through grocery stores, making it possible to change prices by the hour.
The Economist said AI would empower consumers to compare prices. Instead, it empowered companies to charge each consumer the maximum they’d tolerate — and left the rest of us spending our evenings in incognito mode, trying to outsmart a system that has exponentially more data than we do.
The internet is mostly garbage now
“Slop” was named Word of the Year by both Merriam-Webster and the American Dialect Society. That feels right.
In case you’ve been blissfully offline: slop refers to AI-generated garbage flooding the internet. Content farms churning out hundreds of “articles” per day. YouTube channels posting AI-generated videos that earn millions. Fake reviews, fake news, fake everything.
AI-generated articles now make up over half of English-language web content. A study found that 20% of videos recommended to new YouTube users are AI slop. The top operators earn $4.25 million annually.
Even academic research isn’t safe. Nature reported that low-quality papers are flooding the cancer literature. Over 11,000 academic papers were retracted in 2025 alone — many of them generated by AI and rubber-stamped through peer review. On Amazon, 3% of front-page reviews are now AI-generated — 74% of them were five stars, and 93% had the “verified purchase” label.
Then there’s outright fraud. Deepfake fraud losses hit $1.1 billion in 2025 — triple the previous year. AI voice-cloning scams surged 148%. One in four adults has encountered an AI voice scam. It only takes three seconds of audio to create an 85% voice match. One woman lost $15,000 after scammers cloned her daughter’s voice and called claiming there’d been a car accident.
The internet — the thing we all depend on to navigate modern life — is filling up with garbage. And the garbage is getting better at looking real. The internet used to be a place where you could find information. Now it’s a place where you have to verify everything — and you can never quite be sure you’ve verified enough.
So about that Economist article …
So back to the argument — that AI is ending the rip-off economy by empowering consumers. That “the days of the know-nothing consumer are over”.
It assumes AI would be used for us. Instead, it’s being used on us — and increasingly, by us.
Because the grift economy isn’t just something that happens to people. It’s something we’ve started to participate in. Hustle culture turned “finding an edge” into a virtue. Influencers sell courses about selling courses and we call it entrepreneurship. We celebrate people who game the system — the crypto millionaires, the dropshippers, the kid who figured out how to arbitrage sneakers. “Get yours” stopped being a warning and became a business plan.
I wrote about this last year — the way we’ve culturally normalized grifting as a survival strategy. What’s changed since then is that the tools have gotten exponentially more powerful.
It’s one thing when a guy sells a $500 course about passive income. It’s another when AI can generate the course, the marketing, the fake testimonials, and the fake reviews — all for the cost of a monthly subscription. The same tools that let companies build surveillance pricing and flood the internet with slop are becoming available to everyone. AI-generated fake storefronts. Deepfake influencers. Automated scam campaigns that used to require a team and now require a laptop.
The grift is getting democratized. And when everyone has access to the tools of extraction, the arms race accelerates.
The grift economy isn't just a series of bad actors making exploitative choices. It's a byproduct of what happens when trust collapses — in institutions, in companies, in each other. When the game feels rigged, people stop playing by the rules.
What does it actually cost — financially and psychologically — to live in a society where nobody trusts anybody? More than you think. And you’re likely already paying it. That's where I'm going next week.
I think gambling and the grift economy as a whole arises from the fact that people don’t see a traditional path to prosperity or stability. The ‘not being able to pay rent’ tiktok is the perfect example; not only are they using gambling mechanics to hack dopamine but they’re also preying on the economic desperation of the younger generation
Are we increasingly feeling a level of desperation as a consumer yet, as we all turn to “gambling” to “win”? Nothing feels sacred anymore, everything is up for grabs! 😑 Amazing writing, thank you for sharing!