Why would anyone lie this elaborately for nothing? Money explains most cons, and the absence of money is the unnerving engine of this one. In 2011, three educated, professionally successful women each fell into an intense online relationship with Ethan Schuman: witty, accomplished, generous with his attention at two in the morning, and never once able to get a webcam working or board the flight he had booked. He asked none of them for a dollar. What he wanted, and extracted for months, was intimacy itself, and Akbari's book is the anatomy of that extraction, written by one of the people it happened to.
Her central argument, stated early and tested throughout, is that the women were not fooled because they were careless; they were fooled because they were behaving normally. Online courtship runs on text, patience with scheduling disasters, and the benefit of the doubt, and a person willing to exploit those conventions full-time can simulate a soulmate with nothing but a keyboard and stamina. Akbari, a sociologist by training, is at her best when she slows down over the mechanics: the escalating disclosures timed like a syllabus, the manufactured crises that reset the emotional clock, the way each inconsistency arrived pre-wrapped in an excuse just plausible enough to carry it.
The investigation is the book's most propulsive stretch, and it reads like a heist run in reverse. One woman's doubt finds another's, the two find a third, and the comparing of notes, timestamps against timestamps, the same endearments recycled across inboxes in the same hour, has a grim comedy the book is smart enough to let breathe. The detective work is genuinely satisfying, all of it conducted by the victims themselves, because no one else would take the case. That is the second argument underneath the first: they discovered other targets, years of them, and also discovered that a deception this cruel, run without financial theft, sat outside anything the law was built to stop.
The strangest accomplishment here is that Ethan himself becomes a fully realized character, a man the reader gets to know intimately while knowing from the title that he is nobody. Akbari reconstructs his charm honestly enough that you feel the pull yourself, the erudition, the wit, the flattering intensity of his attention, and that honesty is what elevates the book above a cautionary pamphlet. You are not watching fools; you are watching the con from inside its warmth, where it looks exactly like luck.
The reveal of who was behind Ethan lands hard, and Akbari handles it with more restraint than the material invites, staying with the question of why rather than parading the answer. The aftermath chapters carry real weight too. Nobody hands these women a clean ending; what they get is the truth and each other, and the book is honest about how unequal that trade feels.
Weigh a couple of things before committing. Because the courtship happened in text, the book must reproduce a lot of it, and the middle section repeats its evidence past the point of persuasion; the pattern is established well before Akbari stops illustrating it. And when the final chapters widen into commentary on identity and reality in a screen-mediated world, the analysis is competent but thinner than the case study, gesturing at big questions the specific story had already dramatized better. The material is strongest when it stays close to the inboxes, and there are enough of those pages that the detour is forgivable.
Why you should read
- True-crime readers tired of body-count stories
- Fans of con-artist anatomy like Bad Blood or The Confidence Game
- Anyone who has navigated modern online dating
- Readers who like victims running their own investigation
What to expect
- A text-message courtship reconstructed in detail
- A gripping middle act of collaborative detective work
- Some repetition of evidence in the midsection
- Sociological framing that stays mostly readable, briefly thin
Still, this is a rare document: an intelligent victim's-eye view of a con with no purchase price, told with the receipts attached and without the self-exoneration that usually softens such memoirs. Akbari lets you watch her own judgment fail in real time, which takes a variety of nerve most writers never have to find. The next plausible stranger who is always about to arrive and never does has a book waiting to describe him exactly.
