Every so often, a headline pops up that makes you do a double take. “Nevada Named Most Deceitful State in America.” It sounds like something out of a late-night comedy show, or maybe a very on-brand tourism slogan gone wrong. People shared it, laughed about it, debated it. News stations picked it up. Local Nevadans reacted with everything from indignant fury to sheepish amusement.
But here is the thing most of the coverage skipped entirely: what is actually behind that ranking? Who made it, how did they measure it, and does it tell us anything real about honesty in America? The answers are far more interesting than the headline. Let’s dive in.
Where the Ranking Actually Came From
The study was conducted by Tarotoo, an interactive tarot card reading website, which analyzed a variety of metrics to determine its rankings, including self-reported lying frequency, rates of fraud, romance scams, identity theft, and the prevalence of fake doctor’s notes. Yes, you read that right. The organization producing America’s definitive “deceit index” is a tarot reading platform.
Notably, the research also considered Google search trends related to the controversial extramarital affairs website Ashley Madison as an indicator of deceptive tendencies. Measuring moral character through someone’s search history is, to put it gently, a creative methodological choice. Honestly, it’s like judging a city’s health by how many people Google “stomach ache cures.”
What the Scoring System Actually Measured
The website examined how often residents lie, fraud rates, romance scams, identity theft, fake doctor’s notes and IDs, Google searches for the notorious online affair service Ashley Madison, and residents with “deceitful” star signs – looking at Scorpio and Gemini. That last one deserves its own paragraph entirely.
The study identified Geminis, Libras and Scorpios as the most dishonest signs based on perceived personality traits. Geminis were characterized as two-faced and prone to distorting the truth, Libras as people-pleasers who may spin different stories to keep the peace, while Scorpios were noted for keeping secrets and withholding information. Including astrology in a behavioral data study raises serious questions about whether this is research or entertainment. I’d argue it’s closer to the latter.
Nevada Sits at the Top, But How Did It Actually Score?
A recent report identified Nevada as the state with the highest levels of dishonesty in the United States, ranking it first for behaviors such as lying, cheating, and forging documents. The state’s overall “deceit score” placed it ahead of every other state in the combined index.
Researchers at the online tarot site Tarotoo found that Nevada has the second-highest rate of romance scams. Meanwhile, Florida was identified as the third most deceitful state, trailing only Nevada and Rhode Island. While Rhode Island and Nevada topped the list of “most deceitful” states, other states fared better in terms of trustworthiness, with North Dakota, Montana, and South Dakota identified as the most trustworthy, suggesting a regional variation.
The Las Vegas Effect: Tourism and the Data Problem
Las Vegas welcomed nearly 41.7 million visitors in 2024, a 2.1% rise from 2023. That is an enormous number of people moving through a relatively small geographic area. Think about what that actually means for any kind of behavioral or search data collected at the state level.
One fair question is whether all those searches for tips on lying, bluffing, having an affair, and similar topics are from people visiting Nevada or from those who actually reside in the Silver State. As one local commentator noted, that study does not appear to take that into account. That is a critical flaw hiding in plain sight. If millions of tourists are running Google searches inside Nevada’s borders, the state’s search data looks very different from what its residents actually think or do.
What Fraud Data Can and Cannot Tell Us
Florida reports the highest rates of fraud, with 2,179 cases per 100,000 people, and also records significant incidents of identity theft at 528 per 100,000 people. Arizona claims the top spot for romance scams, with reported losses exceeding 53 million dollars in 2024 alone due to love-related fraud schemes. These are real numbers from real federal consumer reports, and they carry far more weight than search trends or astrological signs.
Still, even legitimate fraud statistics do not straightforwardly equal “dishonesty” in the moral sense. Fraud rates reflect reported crimes, and reporting rates differ by state based on local awareness campaigns, law enforcement resources, and population demographics. A state with more fraud reports might simply have a more robust system for capturing them. Correlation is not causation, and a high fraud rate in a state does not mean its residents are collectively more devious than people elsewhere.
How Survey Methodology Can Shift Rankings Dramatically
Let’s be real about how these kinds of indexes are built. Studies like these typically utilize five different metrics, weighted equally, to come up with a final score, involving monthly Google searches per 100,000 people for various terms, the state’s overall divorce rate, and integrity scores from organizations like the Center for Public Integrity. When you weight five variables equally and mix behavioral data with lifestyle data and search behavior, the result is sensitive to minor shifts in any single category.
Change the weighting even slightly and the entire ranking reshuffles. The bottom of the Center for Public Integrity’s integrity rankings includes many western states that champion limited government, like Nevada, South Dakota and Wyoming, but also others such as Maine, Delaware and dead-last Michigan, that have not adopted the types of ethics and open records laws common in many other states. Institutional transparency scores measure government accountability, not whether ordinary residents are personally dishonest. Blending those into a single “deceit” score is a significant conceptual stretch.
How Similar Surveys Have Ranked States Before
This is not the first time someone has tried to rank American states by honesty. A prior study from Gambling.com also conducted research to determine the most dishonest states in the United States, and found that states with smaller populations were among the most dishonest in the nation. BonusFinder conducted a separate survey of over 6,000 U.S. residents to find out which states have the least trustworthy residents, examining everything from lying on a CV to harmless untruths to cheating at casino games.
Survey findings from that study showed that Americans are most likely to lie to authority figures, with lying to one’s boss being the standout result, appearing in a majority of the states surveyed as the most common target of dishonesty. Interestingly, Montana, Nevada and Rhode Island residents all admitted to lying to those they work with the most. Nevada keeps appearing in these studies, which raises a real question worth examining: is there a pattern, or is this partly a consequence of how the data gets collected in a state defined by its entertainment industry?
What Trust Research Actually Shows About States and Regions
Academic research on trust paints a much more nuanced picture than any composite “deceit index” can capture. Trust and social cohesion tend to be linked to community stability, income equality, and civic participation rather than individual moral failings. States with high residential mobility often show lower social trust scores simply because neighbors know each other less well. It is harder to trust a community you only recently joined.
On a national level, the average high-ethics rating across core professions tracked by Gallup decreased from routinely above 40% in the early 2000s to closer to 35% during most of the 2010s. It rose slightly in 2020 amid the pandemic, then declined each year through 2023 when it reached 30%, and it held there in 2024, mirroring the long-term decline in Americans’ confidence in U.S. institutions. In other words, declining trust is an American phenomenon broadly, not a Nevada one specifically.
Why Headlines Outrun the Data Every Time
Here is the uncomfortable truth about viral survey stories: the headline always wins. “Nevada Named Most Deceitful State” is infinitely more shareable than “Composite Index Based on Partially Weighted Variables Including Astrological Signs Produces Statistically Questionable State Rankings.” Media outlets are not entirely to blame. Human brains are wired for simple, dramatic comparisons. We love a list, especially one that lets us feel superior to another state or laugh at our own.
To put the reliability of these types of surveys in perspective, even rigorous national polls like Gallup’s annual honesty survey, conducted with a random sample of over 1,000 adults across all 50 states, carry a margin of sampling error of plus or minus four percentage points at the 95% confidence level. If a well-funded, methodologically careful organization operates within that margin of uncertainty, imagine how much wider the uncertainty band is for a tarot reading website drawing on Google search volume and birth chart data.
Conclusion: The Real Takeaway From Nevada’s “Crown”
Nevada did not suddenly become the deception capital of America. What happened is that a creatively constructed composite index, built by a company whose core business is tarot cards, produced a ranking that journalists and social media users found irresistible. The “What happens in Vegas” tagline practically wrote the headlines for them.
The more meaningful story here is actually about how we consume data. Rankings feel authoritative. Numbers feel factual. A score out of 10 feels like science. None of that makes a methodology sound. Las Vegas alone welcomed nearly 41.7 million visitors in 2024, which means that any data captured within Nevada’s borders is heavily shaped by people who do not live there, who are on vacation, and who are arguably more likely to Google “how to bluff at poker” than the average Tuesday-night Nevadan at home.
Before you decide your state is more honest than Nevada, it is worth asking: did you read the original report, or just the headline? What would you have guessed if nobody told you the source?
