I never thought being a model meant getting your boobs out, cohabiting in fetid houseshares and spending days running to and from ‘go-sees’ where lewd men and catty gays would ogle and photograph you. To me, it meant a very important person had decided you were not just supremely attractive, but worthwhile. Being a model meant being chosen.

At 17, my best friend and I pranced about with a certain sense of superiority. We weren’t like the other girls, because we were into indie music, had fake IDs and were friends with boys in bands. We curated our coolness on MySpace, and one Reading weekend we ran into Peaches Geldof three times. So when a stranger approached us outside Oxford Street’s Topshop to ask if we’d ever thought of modelling, it felt like all our many efforts to be noticed had finally been noticed.

Now, we were savvy in a way no young woman should ever have to be. We’d been raised on diet fads, makeover TV, laddy radio hosts, and a rising tremor of fear around paedophiles from the very same newspapers that delivered Page 3’s teenage tits. Yet this time our confidence counted against us.

We remembered that Sarah Doukas found Kate Moss at JFK airport and Isabella Blow discovered Sophie Dahl crying on some steps. Now it was our turn to be plucked from obscurity and cast across a new lens. The man from the agency told us we’d get to style ourselves, and that the ‘studio’ wasn’t far away, so we gave him our absurdly phrased email addresses.

A couple of weeks later, we lugged bags of cool clothes up to the studio just north of Oxford Circus. We shared the dog-ends of a spliff then headed into the glass-fronted office. After some girls made us up with off-brand ghds and clumpy makeup brushes, we were led to the shoot just ten paces away. I remember the woman in charge being so thin I could see her hip bones from behind, and the camera flash hurt my eyes.

Shoot over, we met a man with a grumpy attitude and a large Mackintosh coat. He said the photos looked great and we could have one each for free, but that the rest would be £900. Each. We didn’t have that sort of money, we said. But maybe our mums did, he wondered, pushing a black landline telephone towards us.

We called, but neither mum budged. We walked away dejected, disheartened but also relieved. Finally, we could confide in one another about how weird we’d found the whole process. But we stayed cocky, agreeing that that tacky studio would never be our starting point, that fame would find us some other way.

Since then, I’ve spoken to other women who experienced this exact scam. One woman was ‘desperate to be scouted’ when she was approached by a scammer, also near Oxford Street’s Topshop, ‘I was unattractive at that age, but I think they spotted someone with some of Dad’s money to burn.’