'Disgusting': This 18-year-old from Houston racked up debt for business ventures and says she kept getting scammed — some loans have interest rates of 30% or more. Caleb Hammer responds

“This is disgusting,” Caleb Hammer told the woman, who used the pseudonym Adeline, after looking through her finances on an episode of his YouTube show “Financial Audit.”

Adeline’s journey highlights how it’s possible for Americans to fall prey to unsustainable debt in pursuit of an unachievable lifestyle.

Family debt

Besides being a student, Adeline describes herself as a model, voice-over actor and online entrepreneur. Unfortunately, she claims to have been the victim of at least two scams in the pursuits of these ventures.

She and her family traveled to New York for what she thought was a modeling audition but “turned out to be a scam,” she told Hammer. The agency instead asked her to spend over $5,000 for a photoshoot and other expenses.

In a separate venture, Adeline turned to dropshipping — a retail strategy to sell goods online without holding inventory. Unfortunately, she says that she was scammed here, too, when she signed up with a company that convinced her to “invest” $3,000 in USDT (a type of cryptocurrency) to hold as a deposit on the platform that she’s now unable to withdraw.

Online scams related to cryptocurrency are on the rise. Investment scams linked to crypto increased from $2.57 billion in 2022 to $3.96 billion in 2023 across the country, according to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center.

To make matters worse, Adeline’s $3,000 investment in this dropshipping pursuit was funded by $1,700 in loans from her mother, uncle and a family friend.

BNPL debt

Adeline’s pursuit of success wasn’t just fueled by loans from friends and family. To pay for the flight to New York, among other locations in pursuit of her modeling and acting career, she used buy now, pay later (BNPL) platforms such as Uplift and Affirm.