Wanna Marchi: La telestafadora de Italia

In the age of scamming, nowadays from especially India, it's interesting to follow the early days of modern scamming. I always find to ask myself who actually buys into these scams, and as almost most of the time it's women and a bit older. This scam is no different, but the scammers themselves are women, mother and daughter.

TV shop was available here in Sweden back in the 90s as well but we didn't have any "celebrities" within that genre. Things sold were of course attracting mostly women and to some it became a religion. Can you put the whole blame onto Wanna Marchi and her daughter? I'm not so sure.

This is the story of a lady who became quickly the queen of the teleshopping in Italy during the 80s, famous for her unorthodox selling style and capacity to generate a mass of 'followers' in a pre-social network era. Everybody knew her, and soon moved from local tv to country notoriety, invited to the most popular tv shows.

At one point, she decided to shift from selling products to sell 'good luck', meaning numbers supposed to be winning ones for the lotto. This is when she became a scammer, and her fraudulent sales ruined the life of thousands of people who believed in her or were afraid of her threats.

By that I mean that it covers pretty well how a scammer is created and how they capture their audience.

To me it looks like a a dirty toxic cycle of a personality cult and people looking for shortcuts to their problems.

Look at the scammer she sold something at the beginning and then people keep buying her act not her product, they didn't care if she sold them a jar of dirt as long as she sold them the lie that the dirt would bring flowers in their gardens and they wouldn't have to lift a finger to work on it.

She deserved what she got but I can't help but think: have the people learned anything from it? Will the next scammer find the perfect environment that Wanna Marchi found? Hopefully not but looking at the internet, we have potentially more scammers today than ever.

This is a squalid docuseries like the story it tells. First proofs are: the presence of Zurlo and Gomez, two well known very bad italian "investigative journalists", as well as the continuous repetitions of seen footage on the editing level. It seems to be a low-grade Mediaset product, only crime news and no reflection or connection on the historical content in which mother and daughter Marchi have operated. Bad photography, direction and editing. The interviews are pathetic and show how the interviewers were clearly intimidated by the two hags. So not to talk about the "scoop" of having found do Nascimiento, which practically does not say a word. Bad soundtrack, unnecessarily dramatic. It just smells rotten like the topic it deals with. The potentially "Italian Tiger King" is nothing but a superficial and boring crime news chronicle, without any real deepening. A missed opportunity to dissect one of the many by-products of the Berlusconian culture.

I watched this as an American and can only relate it to some "religious" leaders here who tend to yell a lot on TV every Sunday, all day. And they want our money as well for different things.

Seems that as long as there have been people, there have been and will be scammers who will try to separate us from our hard earned money.

I wanted some of the phone people interviewed to find out why and how they could do what they did to people - not how as the one woman they did interview said. To me, they are as much a part of this scam as the three front people - the "personalities". They were absolutely as sleazy and creepy and vile in their actions.

My heart went out to the victims of these women. All they wanted was hope.