Con Artists, Hoaxes & Deceptions

From the prize-winning, New York Times best-selling author of Say Nothing and Empire of Pain comes 12 enthralling stories of skulduggery and intrigue, by one of the most decorated journalists of our time....

Belle Gibson convinced the world she had healed herself from terminal brain cancer with a healthy diet. There was just one problem: she'd never had cancer....

175 countries, four billion dollars, one scam: The Missing Cryptoqueen is the inside story of the world's biggest crypto con and the woman who got away with it....

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....

It was the most brutal corporate restructuring in Wall Street history. The 2015 bankruptcy brawl for the storied casino giant, Caesars Entertainment, pitted brilliant and ruthless private equity legends against the world's most relentless hedge fund wizards....

Cold-blooded murders, tragic kidnappings, cruel torture, ruthless abuse, devastating family dramas and a millennium robbery. Real criminal...

Two Wall Street Journal reporters investigate a man who Bill Gates and Western governments entrusted with hundreds of millions of dollars to make profits and end poverty but now stands accused of masterminding one of the biggest, most brazen frauds ever....

What can drive a young and seemingly innocent child to kill? Murder is horrible enough when perpetrated by adults, and yet the concept takes on a whole new level of chilling morbidity when a murderer is revealed to be a young boy or girl....

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....

If you’re a fan of true crime, you’re undoubtedly familiar with the big-name cases. In my books, I do my best to find stories you may not have heard of. I count on my fans to send me stories that may have gone forgotten and aren't found all over the internet....

Frank W. Abagnale, alias Frank Williams, Robert Conrad, Frank Adams, and Robert Monjo, was one of the most daring con men, forgers, imposters, and escape artists in history....

Drowning in debt and facing almost certain bankruptcy, John Darwin did the unthinkable—he paddled out to sea in his red canoe and disappeared. After a massive search and rescue operation failed to find his body, he was assumed dead, lost in the bleak North Sea....

Chrissy was an attractive, recently divorced 40-year-old, living with her three children in their family home in Cheltenham, when in 2003, she met 44-year-old ‘Alex’ in a local coffee shop. He claimed to be an international financier, Alexander Marc d’Ariken de Rothschild-Hatton....

A true-crime story that sounds like a thriller, Sleeping with a Psychopath is a blow-by-blow account of the power of manipulation and a testament to the human will to survive....

From whirlwind romance to gaslighting campaign: this is truth far stranger than fiction....

It's the late 1960s, and homosexuality has only just been legalised, and Jeremy Thorpe, the leader of the Liberal party, has a secret he's desperate to hide....

More than one-fifth of children want to become influencers, and it's easy to understand why. What if you could escape economic uncertainty by winning the internet's attention? But as Symeon Brown explores in this searing exposé, the reality is much murkier....

Eight true crime stories of murder and mayhem. In my first audiobook as a true crime author I've started with a few of the stories that have haunted me for some time. Some of these stories are unbelievable in their brutality while others are astounding in the stupidity of the killers....

That was the note handed to a stewardess by a mild-mannered passenger on a Northwest Orient flight in 1971....

Where does a moderately popular internet star who never leaves her house look for potential suitors? Online. Tinder, Bumble, Match.com, OkCupid - I tried them all. My 31-year-old self clicked and swiped her little heart out, leading to more dates than I could count....

The killing of six-year-old beauty queen JonBenét Ramsey - found in the basement of her family home in Boulder, Colorado, with a smashed skull and a garrote placed around her neck - remains one of America’s most shameful unsolved crimes.... 

In 2006 an oddball group of bankers, traders and brokers from some of the largest financial institutions made a startling realization....

"An engrossing microcosm of the internet’s Wild West years" (Kirkus Reviews), award-winning journalist David Kushner tells the incredible battle between the founder of Match.com and the con man who swindled him out of the website Sex.com, resulting in an all-out war....

By the age of nine, I will have lived in more than a dozen countries, on five continents, under six assumed identities. I’ll know how a document is forged, how to withstand an interrogation, and most important, how to disappear....

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....

If you’re a fan of true crime, you’re undoubtedly familiar with the big-name cases. Books, websites, podcasts, streaming television series, and magazines are filled with their abhorrent tales of mayhem. In my books, I do my best to find stories you may not have heard of. I count on my fans to send me stories that may have gone forgotten and aren't found all over the internet. This book is a box set of volumes 7, 8, and 9 of the True Crime Case Histories series. Inside you'll find 36 true crime stories from the last 100 years, many of which you may never have heard of.

If you’re a fan of true crime, you’re undoubtedly familiar with the big-name cases: Ted Bundy, BTK, David Berkowitz, Christopher Watts, Diane Downs, Casey Anthony. The list of well-known, notorious cases throughout history is seemingly endless. Books, websites, podcasts, streaming television series, and magazines are filled with their abhorrent tales of mayhem. They’re some of the most foul killers the world has ever known. In this volume, you’ll find 12 assorted true crime stories ranging in date from the 1950s to 2020.

Queen of the Con tells the true story of Cassie Chadwick, a successful swindler and “one of the top 10 imposters of all time”, according to TIME magazine. Born Betsy Bigley in 1857 in Canada, she first operated as Madame Devere, a European clairvoyant, and in 1890, was arrested for defrauding a Toledo bank of $20,000. In the mid-1890s, while working as a madam in Cleveland, Cassie met and married a widowed physician with a coveted Euclid Avenue address.

By the time she was in her teens, Diamond had lived dozens of lives and lies, but as she grew older, love and trust turned to fear and violence, and her family—the only people she had in the world—began to unravel. She started to realize that her life itself might be a big con, and the people she loved, the most dangerous of all. With no way out and her identity burned so often that she had no proof she even existed, all that was left was a girl from nowhere. 

Patrick Radden Keefe’s work has garnered prizes ranging from the National Magazine Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award in the US to the Orwell Prize in the UK for his meticulously reported, hypnotically engaging work on the many ways people behave badly. Rogues brings together a dozen of his most celebrated articles from The New Yorker. 

Chrissy was an attractive, recently divorced 40-year-old, living with her three children in their family home in Cheltenham, when in 2003, she met 44-year-old ‘Alex’ in a local coffee shop. He claimed to be an international financier, Alexander Marc d’Ariken de Rothschild-Hatton, the illegitimate son of multi-millionaire heir, Edmund de Rothschild. Charming and smooth-talking, it wasn’t long before he gained Chrissy’s love and trust, with marriage on the cards and a new baby on the way.

Having never had so much as a traffic ticket, Toby Dorr shattered her mold of perfection by helping a convicted murderer, a trainer in her prison dog program, escape in a dog crate. Her story is a lesson in perspective. Instead of focusing on everything she lost, Dorr made a conscious choice to use her 27 months in prison as a period to reflect on her life, heal emotional wounds, plot a course for the future, and embrace the sisterhood of women she encountered behind bars.

The Big Con: The Story of a Book to Film Scam, the Victims, Other Writer Scams, and How to Avoid Being a Victim is about the discovery of a scam and meeting the victims. The scammers created an elaborate fraud, in which authors with dreams of turning their books into films were duped into believing a company could pitch their projects to executives at top film companies. 

In 1977, Vera 'Toddie' Hays and Florice 'Beezie' Bessire thought they were about to embark on the trip of a lifetime when Vera's nephew, Vern Todd, offered them a campervan to drive from Germany to India. Little did the women know that Vern and his accomplices would secretly pack two tonnes of hashish into the vehicle along the way. This shocking inside story chronicles Toddie and Beezie's wild ride across continents and oceans to our shores, their arrest by Australian Federal Bureau of Narcotics agents and all that the women faced in the aftermath.

In 2019, veteran journalist Mark Seal began investigating the suspicious death of music mogul Peter Ikin. Just 32 days before he was found dead in his Paris hotel room, Ikin had married a handsome, debonair Frenchman named Alexandre, who would claim to be entitled to his late husband’s fortune. As Seal dug into the case, he had no idea that tracing the incredible life of Alexandre Despallieres would take him from Paris to London to Beverly Hills, and unspool a web of intricate plots and deceptions.