Con Artists, Hoaxes & Deceptions

Now a number-one international best seller, Billion Dollar Whale is "an epic tale of white-collar crime on a global scale" (Publishers Weekly), revealing how a young social climber from Malaysia pulled off one of the biggest heists in history....

In the 1990s, when Abdul Kareem Telgi spent more than eighty lakh rupees on a dancer in a dance bar one evening, he came under the target of the police, politicians and the underworld....

From a famous actor and an experienced journalist, a wildly entertaining debunking of cryptocurrency, one of the greatest frauds in history and on course for a spectacular crash....

The horrific and disturbing nature of these stories often makes you question everything you thought or believed about humanity. Yet they are engaging and fascinating at the same time....

Two New York Times-bestselling psychologists explain the science of cons—and how we can avoid them....

Derek DelGaudio believed he was a decent, honest man. But when irrefutable evidence to the contrary is found in an old journal, his memories are reawakened and Derek is forced to confront - and try to understand - his role in a significant act of deception from his past....

After parting ways with the eponymous McAfee Antivirus software company in 1994, John McAfee embarked on innumerable business, political, and criminal enterprises....

This gripping true crime classic tells the story of life on The Rock and of 14 ingenious escape attempts by the prisoners....

The case of D. B. Cooper is a modern legend that has obsessed and cursed his pursuers for generations with everything from bankruptcy to suicidal despair. Now, with Skyjack, Geoffrey Gray obtains a first-ever look at the FBI’s confidential Cooper file, uncovering new leads in the infamous case....

The world’s most renowned art forger reveals the secrets behind his decades of painting like the masters—exposing an art world that is far more corrupt than we ever knew while providing an art history lesson wrapped in sex, drugs, and Caravaggio....

In 1971, Go Ask Alice reinvented the young adult genre with a blistering portrayal of sex, psychosis, and teenage self-destruction. The supposed diary of a middle-class addict, Go Ask Alice terrified adults and cemented LSD's fearsome reputation....

Jen Beeny is leaving her turbulent past behind and now it's time to start living. Or at least she's trying to. Between her dead-end job, live-in-landlord and disastrous dates, life in London is not quite turning out as she'd planned....

In the world of high finance, multibillion-dollar Wall Street banks greedily guard their secrets. Enter Robert Kerbeck, a working actor who made his real money lying on the phone, charming people into revealing their employers’ most valuable information....

In 1911 two British heiresses, Claire and Dora Williamson, read a brochure about a revolutionary fasting treatment that promised a lifetime of good health....

A look into the dark side of the internet's secret underbelly....

A bizarre, rollicking trip through the world of fringe medicine, filled with leeches, baking soda IVs, and, according to at least one person, zombies: Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling examines the growing universe of non-traditional treatments....

Someone in the U.S. is an identity-theft victim every four seconds. Stealing Your Life is the reference everyone needs, by an unsurpassed authority on the latest identity-theft schemes....

FINLAND TRUE CRIME - TRUE CRIMES - REAL CRIME CASES. n this sixth volume of his True Crime series, Germany's bestselling True Crime author Adrian...

A legal analyst for NPR, NBC, and CNN, delves into the facts surrounding what has been called the “worst intelligence disaster in US history”: the case of Robert Hanssen—a Russian spy who was embedded in the FBI for two decades....

After her father died in 2003, Susan Fensten turned to a genealogy message board to search for surviving relatives. Days later, she was delighted to receive an email from someone claiming to be a distant cousin. In fact, Susan had just been ensnared by a relentless sociopath....

Using modern biology and history to investigate a series of grisly deaths in the countryside of 18th-century France....

It takes just seconds for someone to die....

At 5:02 p.m. on June 5, 1986, an emergency call came into the local sheriff’s office in the small town of Auburn, Washington State. A distressed housewife, Stella Nickell, said her husband, Bruce, was having a seizure....

Leonardo DiCaprio. Alex Rodriguez. Tobey Maguire. Affleck. Damon. Cassavetes. What do these people have in common? Not just fame and fortune; all these men are also alumni of the ultra-exclusive, high-stakes poker ring that inspired Aaron Sorkin's Oscar-nominated film....

Marilyn Monroe died under suspicious circumstances on the night of August 4, 1962....

Hold Fast is the uncompromising story of Backpage.com, the world’s most scandalous website, and the rise and fall of alternative weekly newspapers nationwide.

As a string of high-profile jewel thefts went unsolved during the Swinging Sixties, the press dubbed the elusive thief the King of Diamonds. Like Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief, the King was so bold that he tip-toed into the homes of millionaires while they were home, hiding in their closets and daring to smoke while they were sleeping. Rena Pederson, then a young reporter with UPI, started following the elusive thief while she managed the night desk. With gymnastic skill, he climbed trees and crawled across rooftops to take jewels from heiresses, oil kings, corporate CEOs.

The most famous man in South Carolina lives jailed in the state capital. He stands accused of a staggering amount of wrongdoing—ninety-nine crimes and counting. Once a high-flying, smooth-talking, pedigreed Southern lawyer, Alex Murdaugh is now disbarred and disgraced. For more than a decade, prosecutors claim, Alex was secretly a fraud, a thief, a drug dealer and an all-around phony. On the night of June 7, 2021, they claim, he also became a killer.

Just before the small-time bootlegger Max Gerlach died, he tried to reveal his secret: he was the inspiration for the mysterious Jay Gatsby. It’s a nice story, but was he telling the truth? Veteran reporter Joe Nocera and producer Poppy Damon investigate this century-old literary mystery and uncover untold secrets about the Great American Novel.

When Mark Kilroy vanished while on spring break in Matamoros, Mexico, the search for the missing pre-med student led to a gruesome discovery on a lonely stretch of land called Rancho Santa Elena: a mass grave containing Mark's mutilated corpse along with the remains of thirteen other people. The investigation uncovered how the victims were brutally killed at the hands of drug trafficker and cult leader Adolpho Constanzo, known by his followers as El Padrino, or The Godfather.