Scamfluencers

Lauren Malloy was a baby when her mother, Lori, was murdered in East Providence, Rhode Island. For thirty years, no one told her. Everyone said Lori died of natural causes. Then a stranger sent Lauren a message — and the lie collapsed. Now Lauren is investigating her own mother’s murder. She’s recorded hundreds of hours of interviews with law enforcement, family, childhood friends, and people who won’t stop ...

David J. Friedland spent the 60s and 70s climbing the ranks of New Jersey’s Democratic political machine – greasing palms, brokering backroom deals, and making sure every spotlight in Hudson County was pointed directly at him. David wasn’t picky about his allies: the Mafia, Ponzi schemers, and even… Republicans. But when his quid-pro-quo hustle proves too shady for even New Jersey politics, the Feds come kn...

Before he was a bestselling author and late-night TV fixture, Kevin Trudeau was hustling his way through multilevel marketing schemes. He worked his way onto infomercials, then into bookstores, building a fortune by peddling easy, feel-good answers to some of life’s hardest problems – your health, your weight, your money. He cast himself as a fearless whistleblower, the one guy brave enough to expose what doctors, banks...

For centuries, Dracula has evaded capture. Enter Mina Harker. 

 Audible presents Dracula, a brand-new, full-cast adaptation of Bram Stoker's masterpiece starring Ella Purnell, Jonathan Bailey, Aimee Lou Wood, Louis Partridge, David Jonsson, and Maggie Gyllenhaal. 

When her fiancé vanishes in Transylvania, Mina pieces together letters, diary entries and chilling testimony to hunt the predator stalking those she loves: o...

The Bridgegate scandal was a prime example of New Jersey political corruption at its most ridiculous. At the center was Chris Christie – the brash Republican governor riding a landslide re-election and a fast track to the White House. But when the mayor of a small town refused to endorse Christie’s re-election, someone in the governor’s orbit decided to retaliate by weaponizing traffic. Four days of gridlock ...

Carl Rinsch had everything Hollywood loves in an up-and-coming director: talent, charisma, and the ability to make people believe. His obsessive perfectionism was written off as the mark of a visionary. But when Netflix handed him millions for a TV series and the pandemic kept everyone at a distance, Carl went on a spree – cars, crypto, luxury mattresses – torching the money and every relationship he’d ever built....

When news broke that Milli Vanilli were lip-syncing frauds, it was a defining moment in pop-culture. Forty years later, their name is still synonymous with fakery. But Rob and Fab weren’t the masterminds. Behind them was a Svengali producer named Frank Farian, who’d built his entire career on a simple formula: recruit talented artists to make the music, then cast beautiful people to sell it. But when the truth came out,...

We’ll be back next week with a brand new episode of Scamfluencers. In the meantime, enjoy the conclusion of Martha Stewart: the Homemaker Hustler: 

In the summer of 2003, Martha Stewart is indicted for obstruction of justice and lying to investigators. She stubbornly maintains her innocence and vows to fight the charges, but her cover-up falls apart during a messy and humiliating public trial. She and her stockbroker are ...

We’ll be back in two weeks with new episodes, but in the meantime, we’re revisiting an episode about one of America’s most famous lifestyle moguls:

Martha Stewart spends decades building her lifestyle empire from the ground up. Her cut-throat business savvy helps make her America’s first self-made female billionaire. But when she becomes embroiled in an insider trading scandal in 2002, it’ll spark a med...

This is part two of our series about Sam Israel – a wealthy hedge fund manager whose company starts quickly hemorrhaging money. Rather than admit defeat, Sam lies to his clients, and when they start asking questions, he bets everything on a conspiracy theorist named Roberth Booth Nichols. What follows is stranger than fiction, involving buried treasure, fake identities, a plot involving the President of the United States &nda...

Sam Israel was born into wealth, but he wanted to prove he could make it on Wall Street on his own. So he started a hedge fund – and almost immediately started losing money. But instead of admitting failure to his investors, he decided to lie. Eventually those lies spiraled into a $450 million fraud, a faked suicide, and a wild descent into a secret world of black-ops and dangerous con men. In a last ditch effort to dig his c...

T.M Landry was a small independent school in Louisiana that gained national fame for sending kids from disadvantaged backgrounds to Ivy League schools. The viral videos were inspiring. The acceptance letters were real. But behind the scenes, the school doctored transcripts and fabricated personal stories to get students in – and behind closed doors, students endured psychological and physical abuse at the hands of the school&...

Juliette D’Souza had no medical degree and no spiritual training – but she convinced her clients she was a gifted healer and shaman. For more than a decade, her natural charm gave her control over her followers and their life savings. But when one victim stumbles onto the truth while trying to feed Juliette’s pet monkey, her spell starts to crack. Her victims band together to bring her down – and discover th...

Martin Armstrong is a Wall Street outsider who builds a financial prediction model with a hidden connection to the number pi. And whether it’s fortune-telling or just a fluke, Martin’s system really does predict some major economic events. His discovery attracts billions in investor funds and gives him the confidence to make bets no rational person would make. But when those bets fail, Martin faces a choice: admit the m...

In our last episode, we followed the Wildenstein family over the span of four generations as they came to dominate the art world. The family prized success – and secrecy – above all else. But when the Wildenstein men attempt to cast aside the women they brought into their fold, leaving them with nothing, these women are going to fight back using the one thing the family fears most: publicity. As the Wildensteins make he...

For over a century, the Wildenstein family has quietly dominated the art world, amassing one of the largest private collections ever assembled while most people have never even heard their name. The anonymity isn’t an accident; it’s a strategy. Because what they are hiding is enormous: a sprawling fortune built on secrecy, tax evasion, stolen masterpieces and alleged Nazi collaboration. Four generations of Wildenstein m...

Bill Mize always believed he was destined for fortune – he just couldn’t figure out how to get it. After flaming out as a restaurateur and drug dealer, Bill finally found his calling: orchestrating a sprawling fraud ring of staged slip-in-falls and car wrecks for insurance money. He recruited his closest friends and family into the scheme, then skimmed some of their portion of the payouts. His obsession with control ove...

Trevor Milton called himself a serial entrepreneur and his playbook was simple: pick a futuristic idea, promise it will change the world… then talk about it constantly online. His biggest pitch was an emissions-free semi-truck that would make diesel engines obsolete. Investors poured in billions of dollars. But Trevor spent far more time selling the dream than building the truck – and soon, a scorned business partner, ...

John McAfee was a brilliant but volatile programmer who helped pioneer antivirus software, making himself a fortune in the early days of personal computing. But he had an addictive personality and a short attention span, so after walking away from cybersecurity, he spent his life chasing bigger thrills, taking wilder risks, and getting into trouble in multiple countries. Behind the scenes, a lifetime of relentless self-indulgence w...