On a very special Christmas episode of My Name is Earl, everyone is celebrating at the Crab Shack by decorating the drunks. (One catches fire.) Outside, Joy is asked for some money by a bearded man who claims his car has broken down, but she and the other Camdenites laugh at his weak scam. That reminds Earl that karma wants him to help a man whom he and Joy ran a scam on years earlier.

Apparently, one day a few weeks before he discovered karma, Earl was sitting around eating ribs with Joy when they saw a commercial for starving African kids. Realizing that it could be a good way to make money, they began handing out flyers in the street, telling people not to give them money now, but to send it to them later if they had trouble sleeping at night. (The trick to getting people to not sleep? Don’t tell Randy it’s a scam, and let him help convince people. He really makes people feel bad for those kids.) When the first check arrives, Joy and Earl celebrate, and reveal to Randy that it’s a scam. Randy laughs, thinking about all the nightmares he had and all the crying he did. They sure got him!

Going to the house of an old man who sent them a check back in the day, Earl finds out that the man is still sending checks to little M’Bongo, and getting photos and drawings in return. Flipping through the photo album, Earl sees Earl Jr., posing with “a hot American tourist” (Joy). Confronting Joy, he finds out that not only is Joy still running the scam, but she got two of her trailer park friends in on the action: one is pretending her family are flood victims, the other is pretending she and her son were caught in a wildfire. The man sends them all checks, so Earl decides to stop it.

When the old man’s obituary turns up in the newspaper, Earl reads that he was leaving his money to the charities he supports, so Earl goes to tell the man's lawyer about the scam. Stopping by the man’s house to find the lawyer’s name, Earl and Randy instead find the old man’s will, which gives $280,000 to the charities. Realizing that Joy and her friends are on their tail, they split up, but Randy loses the will to a crafty Joy. When the girls go to see the lawyer and demand their money, they find that Earl has beaten them there and tattled on them. The lawyer won’t pay them... until Earl leaves, at which point he’s willing to work something out. In exchange for $5,000 cash and sex with one of them (he’s lonely), he’ll write them all checks for their share. The ladies have to get the money from a loan shark, and Joy narrowly avoids being the one who has sex with him.

Astoundingly, this has been one big scam, perpetrated by Earl. The old man wasn’t dead, he was out of town. His “lawyer” was just the bearded scammer guy from earlier, clean-shaven. The checks were bogus, and Earl goes to give the five grand to the old man as repayment for the money the girls swindled out of him. The man still feels like a total fool, and won't thank Earl, so Earl takes him to the trailer park to laugh at the scammers. There, they see that the loan shark has taken appliances and vehicles from all three of the ladies as repayment, leaving them in dire straits. (Ironically, as a result, one trailer has actually been flooded, one had a fire, and Joy’s food has all spoiled.) Joy is furious at Earl, but the old man writes them all checks to solve their problems, telling Earl that he feels better when he gives to people in need, whoever they are. Earl sees his point, and buys Joy a new refrigerator.

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