How I Got Scammed, A Cautionary Tale

A few weeks ago, I tried to write a post about the scandal that surrounded Homework, the home design show currently streaming on the Magnolia network, in which people who were featured claimed they were scammed by the show’s star designers. I wanted to talk about how what we see on television and Instagram looks nothing like real life, which is true as much for perfect family dynamics as it is for impeccably designed homes. That post became a post about my own experience with the now defunct Home Polish, and as has happened so many times when my writing goes to that awful two year period of my life, I couldn’t finish it. I was too bitter and it dredged up too many vengeful feelings. Over the past few years, I have started and abandoned countless posts about Home Polish for that reason, but now that TV shows featuring scam artists and their victims are coming out every other day (and I find myself watching all of them), I think it’s time to finally get it out. Not so that I can unleash an online mob on Noa Santos. Nope. I’d prefer to keep all reactions strictly to my own comment section. This is just for me to get some closure and perhaps offer some words of wisdom about how it happens. Thank you all for always having my back.

As a New Yorker with a New Yorker subscription, I remember when the Anna Delvey story was published. It was about a young woman who fooled NYC elite into thinking she was a wealthy German heiress and was then arrested for countless unpaid bills. I remember skimming the article and not getting it. She seemed too plain to fool people in Manhattan into thinking she was a big deal. But I guess when you throw cash around (I still don’t understand where it came from) and have a big enough ego (sociopathic maybe?), plus an accent (New Yorkers love an accent), people pay attention.

I decided to watch Inventing Anna, the Netflix series which dramatized the story, because everyone else was watching it. It was fun at first, but then it got repetitive. How many times was this woman gonna tell people she was waiting for the check to clear before they stopped believing she had money in the bank? I pushed through because I thought maybe it was leading somewhere. At one point, in Episode 7, when Vivian finally published her article, I thought the series had reached its natural conclusion. Then it rolled over to the next episode. There’s more??? We’re traveling to Germany to meet her family now? And sitting through the court case? What’s the point? Then, I got confused. Why were Vivian and the lawyer suddenly rooting for Anna? Why were Vivian’s older and wiser office buddies cheering when it looked like Anna might get away with her crimes? Was I watching a series where the scam artist was supposed to be the hero? How did that allude me up until the end? Were they also conned into believing her? Or was the series saying she wasn’t actually that guilty?

Fake it, ‘til you make it. The American Way.

I made the mistake of listening to Julia Fox’s podcast interview with the real life Anna Delvey (real name: Anna Sorokin) which basically amounted to Julia condoning all of Anna’s actions by saying, “Doesn’t everyone do this in NYC?” Ummmm, no. While Anna was leaving a wake of unpaid hotel bills, everyone around me was busy actually trying to earn a living and paying for it. When I was in my 20s, we didn’t go to bars we couldn’t afford hoping someone wealthier would buy us a drink. But maybe we were doing it wrong?

Scam artists, free loaders, and fraudsters seem to have caught our collective attention lately. As soon as Inventing Anna was over, Netflix told me to watch the Tinder Swindler. I asked my followers on Instagram if it was worth my time. 83% said “yes.” Those who told me “no” said I should watch The Dropout about Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos instead. Others told me I should watch We Crashed about the rise and fall of We Work (I always wondered how a new company could afford to buy so much NYC real estate!) or Super Pumped, the one about how Uber basically killed the taxi industry by offering way lower fares and then as soon as they were the only game in town, raised them way up, past what taxis cost originally.

“Bad Vegan will make you lose your mind,” someone else DM’ed me. That’s the one about the beautiful owner of a fancy raw food restaurant in NYC (I used to go to Pure Food & Wine all the time) who somehow got conned by a guy on twitter into marrying him, handing over all her password info and giving him over $2 million, including money she owed her employees, effectively bankrupting herself and her business, until she was finally jailed for being his accomplice. If you were confused by someone as plain as Anna Delvey scamming people, you were even more confused by someone as attractive and successful as Samra getting scammed.

And of course there was Billy MacFarland’s Fyre Festival which captivated our attention through three separate documentaries during the pandemic. (Sidenote: Inventing Anna reveals that her and Billy were in the same circle of friends. Of course they were!)

All of these docs have a similar story arc— egomaniacs who somehow convince unsuspecting people to bank roll them, even when common sense would tell you to run in the other direction.

How can people be so stupid???

Or in the case of Theranos, Uber and We Work, the founders convinced investors to fund their brilliant business ideas, even when those ideas hadn’t proven they could turn any kind of profit.

Is a business idea really that brilliant if it can’t make any money?

Well, maybe. Uber and We Work ended up earning their owners billions of dollars based on name cache alone. And also, sometimes smoke and mirrors can fool the best of us. I will always side with the people who got conned (even Rachel and Samra), because I count myself as one of the idiots who got fooled by a scammer.

This is the part where I talk about Noa Santos and his company Home Polish, the interior design company that promised clients a more accessible route to professional home design through a roster of top tier designers, experienced contractors and the allure of a dedicated project manager. Most people who follow me know about my Home Polish renovation disaster, but beyond publicly posting pictures of the insanely shoddy work in a last ditch attempt to get the company to fix the problem and posting an infuriating update about how they promised to fix it, strung me along and then ghosted me, I have never explained how it got that far, why I didn’t notice any red flags, and why we failed to get any of our money back.

So, let’s do this. How I got scammed. I’ll start with how expensive it is to get your home renovated in Manhattan.

Our goal was to renovate our 1200 square foot apartment. Nothing major like moving a wall or adding a bathroom. Just aesthetics. We wanted to resurface the cabinets in our tiny kitchen, get new appliances, redo both bathrooms, restain the floors, paint the walls, create some built-ins and get new furniture. I researched NYC home designers and made some calls. What I found is that most of the reputable NYC designers had fees that were way out of our league. Two of the designers wouldn’t even entertain a project that had a budget below $400K. So then we started looking at designers with less experience, but they had very little to show in their portfolios. While we might not have had $400K to spend, we were still dealing with a number that we considered very large and was a huge chunk of our savings. The smaller designers seemed like too big of a risk.

They say that you have to hear about a company eight times before it converts you to a customer and once we decided we were renovating our apartment, Home Polish was coming at me from every direction. When I brought up our desire to renovate to friends, I can’t even tell you how many people recommended them, although it occurred to me later that most of those recommendations were probably made by devoted followers and not actual clients. People liked Home Polish because they claimed to solve for the inaccessibility of quality home design. Plus, they had a stellar online reputation. They worked with celebrity clients (big names like Lena Dunham and Karlie Kloss, as well as influencers I followed like Manrepeller and Cup of Jo all posted photos of rooms they had redesigned by Home Polish), they had glowing reviews on their website from publications like the NY Times and Architectural Digest, and they had an impeccably designed Instagram account with 2 million followers that acted as their portfolio. Everything that you could possibly want for your home was sitting there in perfect little squares on their Instagram feed.

When I decided to fill out the contact form on Home Polish’s website (after following their account for a few months), they listed several budget buckets. I got to click off the highest budget, so I thought that meant I would be a top priority client, which was a good thing. In retrospect, it meant they had way more experience doing smaller jobs. Home Polish claimed they could adapt to any design aesthetic (you just checked which decor pics you liked and they matched you with a designer accordingly; their ability to pull off multiple aesthetics was backed up by their instagram account) and they said they had no problem completing my project within my timeline. If that wasn’t enough to woo me, they offered a “happiness guarantee” in their contract, where they would return all your money if you were unsatisfied.

Does that all sound too good to be true? Of course it does!

Lesson #1! Anybody can put together a website, promise you the world and take your money. It’s delivering the goods that’s the hard part and people who get scammed usually don’t realize the goods aren’t coming until much later down the road, when they are already way out of pocket.

I believe Noa Santos had good intentions when he first started his company. I believe he had a roster of talented designers who bought into his vision and executed beautifully when everything began. I believe Home Polish did outstanding work for their celebrity clients. But I don’t believe any of this made Noa’s company any money. Much like Theranos and We Work and Uber, Home Polish got investors but couldn’t turn a profit. The only way for Home Polish to make money was to take a cut of what would usually be going towards the finished product or from the people who were actually doing the work. Maybe Noa thought he could make a small cut meaningful by taking on an unusually high volume of clients, but that made it impossible to serve them all correctly. Maybe he decided to take a bigger cut from his designers and contractors, which led to using people with less experience because they were the only ones who would take the job. Maybe the people with less experience couldn’t deliver on what Home Polish promised. By the time Noa realized his idea was tanking, I imagine his ego was too big to pull the plug. After all, Noa had just sunk his seed money into designing gorgeous new Home Polish offices so that all his employees would feel like the company was on top, all while burying the ugly truth underneath his wide planked white oak floors.

The truth was that by the time I hired them, Home Polish had a growing list of unsatisfied customers demanding their money back, employees who hadn’t gotten paid, and an Instagram account that was more inspiration found on Pinterest than actual jobs completed by the company. They had also expanded their offering from home decorating to home renovation, because that brought in higher dollar clients (myself included), without creating the infrastructure to support the upgrade. From what I’ve pieced together, they were taking on new clients to pay for previously botched jobs and hiring inexperienced designers and subpar contractors for less money to make up the difference. Those contractors were so underpaid (if they were even getting paid at all), they started cutting corners by using lesser materials and hiring cheaper labor, but none of this was shared with the clients. That’s why the chevron tile in our bathroom looked like it had been done by a third grader. The guy had absolutely no experience. And why our designer didn’t factor the size of our TV into her plan for an entertainment center. Her experience was more in line with a designer’s assistant. And why our kitchen counter was made with marble remnants instead of a solid block. Someone could pocket the difference. And why the project manager never showed up. That person didn’t actually exist. It’s also why, when Mike tried to visit Noa at his office to see what was going on, he got escorted out of the building.

When I first posted about our renovation disaster, a lot of people asked why we didn’t see the red flags sooner. How did it get that far? There are a few answers to that question. First, we were naive in how much oversight we needed. We thought we were paying Home Polish for the oversight, so we trusted them on their choices for designer and contractor even though we wanted to see other options. The first red flag came when I found out the designer they assigned was getting married during our project. Keep in mind, this was after I had met the designer, signed the contract, gave them our first payment and started the planning process. I asked for someone new, thinking they had a whole list of designers to choose from. They took two weeks to come back to me and say, “Great news! We figured out a way for you to keep your designer! We’re giving her an assistant so that she can keep you on track during the wedding.” At the time, I didn’t understand why they were so adamant I used her, but now I think it’s because they were severely underpaying her (I was shocked when she told us what she was making on our job, compared to what we paid Home Polish) and didn’t have anyone else who would do it for so little.

The next red flag was when I wanted to use a contractor my sister had worked with. Home Polish insisted I use their guy. Up until that point, I didn’t realize the money for the contractor was funneling through Home Polish. I thought that was just for the designer. I agreed to meet with their contractor and he didn’t show up. So I said no, I wanted to use my guy. That’s when my designer put me on the phone with someone from the Home Polish offices, who told me that they couldn’t guarantee “the Home Polish look” unless we went with who they recommended. When I still didn’t agree, they moved my concern up the chain, losing precious time, until a higher up could convince me to trust them. They told me that they needed to use someone they’ve worked with before so they could guarantee the kind of results they know I want. “I do want the Home Polish look,” I conceded. “And I do want to stick to our timeline.”

The first few months of working together consisted mainly of decision making (choosing finishes, paint colors, fixtures, etc.), and our designer was great at putting together mood boards. The second stage was demolition which always looks like a disaster. The third stage was painting the walls, sanding the floors and re-staining, all which went fine. Then we waited for the main the event— the delivery of four large built-ins, which were all made off-sight, as is typical. They were all brought into the apartment at once, when they were mostly completed, several months into the project.

That’s when I first noticed something was very wrong. They didn’t look like the drawings I approved and when we went back to compare, I realized the built-ins were drawn alone, without taking into account the specifications of our apartment— the height of our windows, the length of the walls, the size of our television, the width of a standard bench so an adult could sit on it comfortably, the location of the outlets, the ventilation for our air conditioning units, etc.

Lesson #2! If you are shown any design plans to approve, ask for a rendering in color, 3D and in context— how it all works within the space. They showed me a black and white line drawing which gave me no actual indication how it would look in the room. I falsely assumed the length of the built-in would match the length of the wall, that the top of the dresser would match the bottom of our window, etc. because who in their right mind would design it otherwise? Lesson #3! Ask questions even if you think they sound stupid.

Next, the gaslighting started. Although, at the time, I don’t think I had ever heard that term before, much less known how to identify it, and so I was convinced that I was being too particular and that I didn’t understand the design process and that I had made choices that didn’t give off as polished of a look as I thought they would. I had numerous workers standing around me, sighing with exasperation as if I was the problem, asking if I wanted them to move forward as planned so that they could finish on time or bring in other opinions that would hold everything up. I deferred to our designer who was supposed to know how this stuff worked and she assured me that I was just seeing things in an uncompleted phase and that everything would come together when it was finished. “It’s going to look great! I promise!”

Everyone in the room agreed that the things I was having major issues with were actually easy fixes. I nodded along, even though it looked like a complete redo to me. Maybe they knew something I didn’t and I didn’t want to be labeled as difficult when we still had so much of the project left to complete. When you have so much of your savings already invested, it’s easier to doubt yourself and continue to “trust the process” and the people you hired, rather than admit you’re in the process of getting screwed.

Lesson #4! Don’t let people pressure you into second guessing yourself.

It wasn’t until a couple days later, when I walked in on them laying the tile in the bathrooms, that I knew we had made a big mistake. It looked laughably bad. Beyond question. And even then, they tried to convince me that it was fine. That no other clients pay this close attention to detail. That the tile was handmade and so it would never lay flat. That the mislaid chevron could be easily fixed, even though I couldn’t imagine a scenario where it didn’t require the whole wall being taken down. They told me to put a piece of blue tape on every tile I had an issue with and I spent that afternoon putting blue tape on practically every single tile.

The next day I came back and happened to walk in on the plumber having a heated argument with one of the workers. He was refusing to do the job because, and I quote, this was “the worst tile job I have ever seen in my life.” I followed him into the bathroom, where he pointed out all the things that were wrong and said, “I feel badly for whoever lives here.” I told him it was me. He apologized. I told him, “No, thank you, because I’ve been screaming about how messed up everything is for two days and everyone is making me feel like I am crazy.”

At that point, we were hoping someone from the Home Polish corporate offices would step in and fix things. Where was that project manager that they had promised? Wasn’t that person supposed to be checking in? The designer and contractor had failed us, but surely the big wigs at Home Polish wouldn’t find this level of work acceptable. That’s what took so long between when the project started and when I finally posted on social media. We stopped the work, but we tried to give Home Polish corporate enough time and ample opportunity to make it right.

While we went back and forth with the company over email and conference calls, we decided it was time to move back into our apartment, even in its unfinished state. It had simply been too much upheaval for our family and we needed our home base back. To move back in, we needed things like plumbing and electricity to work. When we tried to contact the workers to get these items checked off, we were told that they couldn’t come because they hadn’t been paid. “But we paid Home Polish,” we told them. It didn’t matter if they had never seen the money.

That reminded us of a story our contractor had told us a few weeks prior about another Home Polish job, which now, after watching countless TV shows about scam artists, sounds very familiar. It was a story about an uncleared bank check. He said that Home Polish owed him $30K. When he asked for the money, Home Polish said it had already been sent to the bank. When the contractor said the money never reached his bank account, Home Polish blamed the contractor’s bank, saying basically “well, we sent it” and it was therefore out of their hands. At the time, I really didn’t understand the story. How could that just be the end of it? Clearly, this was just one side of the story. But now I know that’s exactly what Simon did to Cecilie in the Tinder Swindler. And what Anna Delvey said to Rachel after she shelled out $60K for that Moroccan hotel.

After numerous conference calls, it became clear that Noa Santos and Home Polish felt no accountability for the shoddy work in our home. They claimed it was between us and the contractor, even though Home Polish forced me to use that contractor and was supposed to be managing the job. As a last resort, I told Home Polish that I would have no choice but to show my followers what my apartment looked like on social media, which is something I really didn’t want to do. They said fine. I think they thought I was truly small potatoes and whatever clout I had was no match for their 2M followers.

Well, they were wrong. The Mommy Shorts Squad isn’t responsible for destroying Home Polish’s business (they were already going bankrupt on their own), but we did put the nail in their social media coffin. Thank you all for that. But, just like Cecile and Pernilla and Sarma, we never got our money back.

That’s another part of the scammer doc genre that unfortunately sounds very familiar— everyone’s inability to recoup their money. How is the Tinder Swindler not in jail paying off his debts? Why can’t Sarma’s mom sue for the $400K that Anthony extorted? I’ll tell you why— they’ve just been cheated out of their life savings and they don’t want to risk losing even more money by hiring a lawyer, especially since most lawyers will tell them they don’t have a case.

When the whole Home Polish thing went down, so many people doubted my story because we didn’t sue. The truth is, we talked to a few different lawyers, two of which were family. They all told us the same thing— you are going to pay money to fight this battle and then even if you win, Home Polish could claim bankruptcy and you won’t see a dime. At that point, which might be years down the road, you’ll be out what you paid Home Polish originally, you’ll be out what you paid to sue them, you’ll have all the emotional stress of a super long court battle and you’ll still have to pay to fix the shoddy work to get your home finished. That happiness guarantee? Even though it was attached to the contract, technically, it came after the signature. It would not stand up in court. In the end, it just wasn’t worth the heartache and the financial stress. We wanted to move on and be done with it.

So I guess the point of my story is, yes, I understand why Rachel and Sarma and Cecilie look like idiots. They were promised something that was too good to be true and they bought it. Then it became harder to walk away because they were already invested. But I also can’t really pass judgement on them because I did something embarrassingly similar. Looking back, the red flags were there, but I wanted to believe. And if any streaming services are looking for another scam artist to make a show about, after the bigger fish have been sucked dry of all entertainment fodder, I’d look into a little known scam artist named Noa Santos.

Let’s call the show: Home Demolish.

It’s an infuriating tale about a Stanford grad with impeccable taste and celebrity connections who got investors to give him $20 million to start a home design company that promised an Instagram worthy pad to the average joe. Then he used the money to hire top notch designers to build out his office space, while using complete novices to design his clients’ homes, all while posting faux inspo pics on Instagram. The episode where Home Polish has a pop-up collab with Goop in the Hamptons at the same time that his newest client’s dining banquette falls off the wall is going to be riveting entertainment. Can Noa continue to ghost unsatisfied customers while he takes on new ones? Can he convince his designers to work for free while he works on lining up more investors? How’s it going to end????

Well, Home Polish may have gone under (thanks in part to an angry online mob of moms), his employees may have revolted and there may be some embarrassing articles that pop up in a google search, but Noa Santos is currently living in a beautiful home in the Hamptons (which was recently featured in the NY Times) and sold his Instagram account for what was surely a hefty price tag.

That’s just the American way, am I right?

But I’m good. I learned I have an amazing community who supports me, I learned that my kids could give a shit about what their home looks like, I learned to trust my gut and I learned that you should never trust the guy with the lowest price. I also learned that letting go is sometimes the best medicine. I think we would be in a way worse place if we had sued. Still fighting that battle probably. Feeling ugly and vengeful. Often, to really take someone down, you have to sacrifice yourself in the process, and we just weren’t willing to do that.

I guess that’s why we don’t want the Netflix series after all. We’re good with this ending.

Have you ever been scammed? Gaslighted? How about fooled by someone’s Instagram feed? Tell me about it in the comments below!

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