Starter episode: “A Veteran Rebuilds His Life After a Scam Takes Everything”
A true-crime anthology series from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, “Unravel” chronicled an unforgettable scam story in its fourth season. Ollie Ward, a radio producer in New Zealand, is both host and subject, recounting how his family lost everything after becoming entangled with an alluring California “entrepreneur” named Lezlie Manukian. Ward recalls feeling uneasy on the day of his brother’s wedding to Manukian without quite knowing why — but within months, she had vanished along with their parents’ life savings, leaving behind only a mysterious warning: “The snowball’s about to hit you.” It’s strange details like this, along with Ward’s personal stake in the mystery, that make these seven episodes so gripping.
Starter episode: “The Girl With The Dragonfly Tattoo”
Now in its sixth season, the Campside Media podcast “Chameleon” has explored stories about impostors and charlatans of various stripes, including the “Hollywood Con Queen” who wreaked havoc in the film industry, and a so-called doctor who hypnotized victims into giving up their fortunes. The ‘Scam Likely’ season is a little different, focusing not on one particular con artist but on a group of people dedicated to stopping them. The investigative journalist Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, who originally reported out the story for The New York Times Magazine, shadows a small team of government investigators who are tasked with tracking down the perpetrators of one of the largest tele-fraud scams in American history, in which tens of thousands of ordinary Americans lost a combined total of more than $300 million. “Scam Likely” has a thrilling on-the-ground feel, with Bhattacharjee interviewing victims and investigators before ultimately traveling to India to hunt down the culprits on their home turf.
Starter episode: “Follow the Money”
Though it ran for just one season back in 2017, this Panoply series is well worth the listen, delivering detailed portraits of 10 highly successful grifters. Maria Konnikova, a journalist and author who wrote about the psychology of deceit in her 2016 book “The Confidence Game,” sets out to understand why so many of us still fall for fraudulent schemes despite being convinced that we’d never be so naïve. In each episode, Konnikova profiles a different fraud (the lineup includes an art forger, a card shark and a psychic) and allows them to tell their own stories, laying out the architecture and power dynamics of their cons with a level of detail that’s both unsettling and oddly mesmerizing.
Starter episode: “Fast Jack, the Card Shark”
Munchausen syndrome by proxy, a rare and once little-known psychological condition with potentially devastating consequences, has gathered mainstream coverage in recent years because of high-profile cases like that of Gypsy Rose Blanchard. In a typical case, a parent or caregiver will either feign or deliberately cause an illness in their child, often subjecting the child to unnecessary medical tests and procedures and inflicting psychological trauma. “Nobody Should Believe Me” is a rich and harrowing chronicle of the condition, hosted by a novelist, Andrea Dunlop, whose own family was deeply impacted by allegations of medical child abuse. More than a decade later, she interviews doctors, law enforcement officials and victims to finally understand the condition that devastated her family, homing in on the recent case of Hope Ybarra, a Texas mother who spent 10 years in prison for the medical abuse she inflicted on her daughter.
Starter episode: “Sisters”
