Tanya Smith fancied herself a folk hero, a kind of Robin Hood, using her powers of persuasion to buck the system and help the poor and needy.
It started innocently enough, with calls to celebrities’ houses alongside her teenage twin sister. Soon, Tanya Smith realised she could convince utility companies to amend the balances of her friends and neighbours, clearing elderly relatives’ overdue electricity bills with a single phone call. Eventually, as she tested the limits and realized she could get past any gatekeeper, this superpower, as she came to think of it, morphed into something else: she wanted access to the actual money herself.
By the time she was 18, Tanya had ‘confiscated’ some $40 million in cash and commodities from US banks, using hacked wire transfers. It didn’t take long before the FBI was on her tail. But when interviewing her, they made clear that they were using her to get to the person actually running things – clearly, she wasn’t smart enough to do this on her own (Blacks, she was told, rob people, they don’t hack computers).
Thus began a cat and mouse game with the authorities that would drive her to unthinkable limits, breaking the hearts of her parents, putting Tanya’s life in jeopardy, and costing her custody of two children before finally sending her to Federal prison (where she escaped twice) with the longest sentence ever given for a white-collar crime.
In the spirit of true crime narratives like Catch Me If You Can, Molly’s Game, and Ben Mezrich’s Bringing Down the House, SHEER CRAZY NERVE is a gripping caper, but it’s also the deeply personal journey of a young Black woman finding her way in a world that underestimated her brilliance. For fans of movies like Hustlers and The Bling Ring, SHEER CRAZY NERVE is a high-stakes, gritty tale of wild financial misdeeds.
