Euphoria’s main timeline takes place in Los Angeles in 2026, 5 years after the original high school characters graduated. Part of last Sunday’s episode left that timeline entirely and went back to the 1970s.
The flashback followed young Alamo Brown and his mother on what seemed like a beautiful summer with a man named Preston, a chemical factory accident survivor who had a future solution. A sea voyage. A marriage proposal. Family dinners. The ice cream is running. They came home from the sea and found the house empty. The “robbery” was Alamo’s mother’s staff.
Almost every bit of that storyline is a government fraud episode written. The target profile is tracked. The layout of the play is recorded. Legal mechanics allow the con artist to get away with writing the law.
Abraham Shakespeare won the Florida lottery in 2006. The jackpot was $30 million. Within 3 years he was dead. A woman he befriended after the victory, Dorice “DeeDee” Moore, was convicted of murder in 2012. He had appointed himself as her financial advisor, took control of her assets, shot her in the chest, and buried her body under a concrete slab in her backyard.
Shakespeare’s case is central to the play. Euphoria’s flashback adds an exception that is difficult to prosecute: the child.
A trickster finds a newly minted yokel undersized. Lottery winners are the most photogenic version. The main category is the payees. Settlement of wrongful damages. Wrongful death payments. Total employee income. Inherited estates going through probate. The federal IC3 received nearly 23,000 fraud complaints by 2025, and the FTC’s number of consumer complaints is rising significantly. Most of those reports are strangers behind a keyboard. In-person cases, within months, often appear in federal court records and filings.
The mark is usually an adult. Usually a person who lives alone. Usually a person with a family who has not grown up watching someone handle real money. Preston fits all. An accident at a chemical factory gave him a scary face and landed him in an unfamiliar target class.
Adding a child to the game is emotionally beneficial and legitimate. The emotional benefit is loyalty. A family bonding session reads more believable than a one-on-one romance, and Mark relaxes more quickly around a parent and child than a single woman whose interest in him is suddenly felt.
A legitimate payment is hard to see. When prosecutors try to charge the singer with fraud or grand theft, the prosecutor says the relationship was real because there is a child to identify. Judges rarely return convictions in those cases. The standard of fraudulent inducement requires proving that the relationship itself was fraudulent. A child at home makes that almost impossible to prove.
Documented cases of fraudsters with children specifically to gain access to brand assets exist in criminal court records, family court records, and petty fraud cases that never make a phone call. Financial losses are included privately. The victim is embarrassed. A criminal case is not opened.
A planned heist at the end of the game is also written. The cleanest way out. The scammer’s team enters the home while the sign is out. They remove anything liquid. The cheater himself “gets” the hack when he and the tag get home. The police took a report. Insurance pays for what is covered. The trickster disappears into the chaos with the others. Marks in real-life situations described coming home to an empty house and an empty bank account in the same week, with the woman they were going to marry nowhere to be found.
Preston at Euphoria gets just that. A sea voyage. The marriage proposal is ready to go. Return to the clean house. The woman he loved left with everything he had.
The information Sam Levinson has discovered is that there is almost no other television character who plays the role of a child. Most of the fictional stories of artists treat the child as an innocent pawn. The audience knows what’s going on. A child does not. A flashback of Euphoria shows a mother taking a child to play in real time. To train him in manners. Looking at you with your eyes. Not blinking in the man’s face. A mother in the bedroom is teaching her son a job.
That tracks the written version. A child in family fraud cases is sometimes a participant. Older children are drawn into the game. They read the text. They see what their job is. Some of them grow up using the same con on someone else.
The reason for believing that it is not common is that the standard of the organization treats the promises of marriage and building a family as private matters. The singer’s defense is always that he loves her. A child at home makes that defense valid in front of a judge, regardless of what bank records show.
Alamo Brown spent his entire life on the other side of that game. In season 3 of Euphoria she is the driving force behind the evil. A flashback is an explanation.