Three months into 2019, it’s clear: This is the year of the fraud.

The college scam of two weeks back was a bombshell, to be sure, as is the saga of the infuriatingly defiant Jussie Smollett. Yet culturally we’re also obsessed with a two-year-old scandal: the story of Elizabeth Holmes and her epic sham company Theranos, recently the subjects of a bestselling book, an HBO documentary, a “20/20” special and a hit podcast — plus a forthcoming feature film that may star Jennifer Lawrence.

In Lower Manhattan, 28-year-old fake heiress Anna Delvey (real name Anna Sorokin) is currently on trial for swindling socialites, fashion people and fancy hotels out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Delvey’s remorseless predation has been the subject of dishy profiles in Vanity Fair and New York magazine, and Netflix has cameras in the courtroom.

Allegedly among Delvey’s social circle was Billy McFarland, founder-fraudster of the Fyre Festival — itself the subject of two docs. Alec Baldwin will star as the ’80s’ most dashing conman in the forthcoming film “Framing John DeLorean.” Former broker and bond analyst Pete Newman just launched “Fraud — The Game of White Collar Crime,” in which the goal is to swindle $150 million before your third indictment.

“Fraud never seems to get old,” Newman told Forbes. “There’s always a new scam out there, suckers who get duped, and the fraudsters just keep rolling.”

Newman traces his fascination to the dot-com bubble bursting in 2000, but the jet fuel was the 2008 financial meltdown and the resultant housing market crash — which revealed massive mortgage fraud on the part of big banks, which then got bailed out by the federal government. That year ended with the arrest of Bernie Madoff, now 80 years old and serving a prison sentence of 150 years.

Part of the allure here is schadenfreude — watching rich, famous, beautiful, greedy people scamming other rich, famous, beautiful people makes for great, glossy television. If most of us think the system is rigged — and the election of a self-proclaimed billionaire in 2016 was largely, perversely due to that overwhelming sentiment — stories like this prove it, with one super-gratifying outcome: These swindlers get caught.

And what’s more, they refuse to stop pretending, even as they become tragicomic figures. It’s like watching a morality play-cum-camp performance, and it’s endlessly enjoyable.

Delvey showed up to court last summer in Celine sunglasses, fresh from Rikers. Smollett teared up at his grand press conference the other day, giving the performance of his life. Holmes’ fraud was the most serious — her company actually put people’s lives at risk — yet she carries on, newly engaged and reinvented from a Silicon Valley wunderkind to a kind of “Burning Man” manqué. She faces a 20-year prison sentence but doesn’t seem fazed.

Is it any wonder we can’t look away? After all, we’re sliding into a reality where it’s hard to know what’s actually real. Alternative facts, fake news and truthiness are concepts that once seemed laughable; no more. Fake news, in fact, has seeped its way into the lexicon. We are through the looking glass.

Look at what’s happened just these past few days. Pre-Mueller report, one side believed its result would be a president facing impeachment or worse. Post-Mueller report, that same side refuses to believe its findings are real. Rachel Maddow, who should know better, spent the bulk of her show on Monday burrowing into all kinds of questions and theories that would make her preferred outcome the real one, even as it’s not. It sounded desperate, the pleas of someone not ready to face a factual outcome.

We are an increasingly atomized nation, in which everyone may cherry-pick their facts and truths to create their own reality. Ironically, it’s fakes and phonies like Elizabeth Holmes who bestow upon us a great gift: something the majority of us, with a true sense of morality, can agree upon — and a jolt back to reality.