Scam Queen Faces justice: Fraudster caught by TV producer

This week on Scams, Hacks, and Frauds, we unravel the web of deceit spun by Marianne Smith, a seemingly ordinary woman who became a master con artist. s we delve deeper into Marianne's life, we discover her connection with Jonathan, a television producer who unknowingly became embroiled in her schemes. Their friendship led to a series of shocking revelations, including Marianne's true identity and her history of manipulation. Jonathan's quest for the truth takes him down a dark path, revealing the extent of Marianne's fraudulent activities and the numerous victims she left in her wake.

Tune in to learn about the red flags that can help you spot a scam, the importance of verifying information, and how trust can be weaponised against you. This episode serves as a cautionary tale about the dangers of misplaced trust and the lengths some individuals will go to deceive others.

If you want to learn more we recommend checking out Queen of the Con, where Jonathan goes into much more detail about his adventures with Mair in Season 1:   https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-irish-heiress-ep-1-the-best-friend/id1583019312?i=1000537077148

We publish new content every other Monday. The  10 minutes our episodes may save your wallet, and help protect your family.

If you like shows like "The Perfect Scam" or "Darknet Diaries" then this show might be for you.  

On our website you’ll find more computer hacking, identity fraud, impersonation, consumer rights and Romance Scams.  To find these and to access our transcripts, visit us at www.scamshacksandfrauds.com.

The transcript and spoken audio are available under the Creative Commons, Share Alike, With Attributions license. For more information on this visit creativecommons.org.  

Transcript

We start this week's episode in 2008, in Northern Ireland.  Marianne Smyth is working as a Mortgage adviser.

Marianne is fascinated with Ireland, and has been since a young age - she’s so fascinated in fact that in the year 2000, following an online relationship, she married a local, Steven Smyth so that she could stay as long as she wanted.

Now, you can make good money as a mortgage adviser, but for Marianne, it's not quite enough, so she’s developed a bit of a sideline gig.  She has also been offering investment advice, although it's not immediately clear if she’s legally authorized to do so.  She’s been discussing a high-interest bank account offered by the Commonwealth Bank of Australia and has an amazing deal: if a  client invests £20,000, they’ll receive £400 in interest payments every month - that's an annual interest rate of 24%.  

An astounding deal with no risk, why wouldn’t you jump at the chance?  and Marianne would offer similar deals to other clients over the next year.

In 2009, the interest payments stopped, and by October 2010, Marianne was gone.  Investigators found no evidence that the Commonwealth Bank accounts ever existed, and the money, well, Marianne had kept it.

This week, we’re talking about the so-called Queen of the Con because this is the true crime podcast that helps keep you safe from Scams, Hacks, and Frauds.

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If you enjoy true crime scam stories, please like, subscribe, and leave a review.

We’re going to fast forward now to May 2013, to a Los Angeles apartment complex that's home to Jonathan Walton.  Jonathan is in the Television industry. He has worked as an offbeat reporter for morning TV, and has been a producer for Shark Tank, as well as worked on other reality shows. So, he has some experience in knowing when someone’s being genuine or not, and knows how to do his homework.  Jonathan’s hosting a get-together for the people in his building. A legal dispute with a neighbouring building has denied them access to a pool and the residents want to take action.

One of the attendees was Mair.  Mair encouraged Jonathan to keep fighting for pool access, and the pair soon became friends.  Mair was from Ireland and had come to America in the 1980s, fleeing violence - her family members had been threatened, some even murdered.  Despite those threats, the family members who remained in Ireland were well-connected and wealthy, and so was Mair. She didn’t have to work, but she chose to, working for a Travel Agency where she generated revenue of over $1 million per year, a job she secured through her family connections.

What do Mair and Jonathan have to do with the Northern Ireland story?  We’ll get to it, I promise.

Jonathan and Mair’s friendship continued to deepen.  Now, this wasn’t a romance, Jonathan is gay, and he lives with his husband, but they got close enough over the next 14 months that they were saying “I love you” the phone, but only in a platonic way, of course.  They had shared a lot of personal details, so Jonathan felt comfortable telling Mair that he’d been disowned by his family… “So have I,” Mair shared! Her uncle had recently passed with an estate of 25 million euros, and her family was trying to get her disinherited of her 20% share… And they’d identified a particular clause regarding felony convictions that made people ineligible to inherit as their target.

Maybe it was the reality TV producer in him, but Jonathan became convinced that the family would strike through Mair’s job, although Mair dismissed this…  whether it was happenstance or something else, Jonathan was right.  A couple of weeks later, he received a call from the Century Regional Detention Facility; it was Mair.  She had been accused of stealing $200,000 from her job.  For Jonathan, this felt like confirmation that his friend was indeed being targeted by her family.

Jonathan had to arrange a bail bondsman to get her out… Mair had a boyfriend, but he was not only married but also in political circles. If you pay someone’s bail, it goes on the public record, so he couldn’t do it out of fear that it would be reported in the news. Most Bail bondsmen wanted about $7k, but that boyfriend was able to use his connections to find someone who could do it for $4200.  Jonathan paid, and the boyfriend quickly paid Jonathan back.  Mair was out of jail, but now she’d lost her job, and the case proceeding against her could derail her inheritance.

Mair showed Jonathan numerous letters from lawyers over the next few months, suggesting that there’s no evidence, or that crucial evidence hasn’t been turned over as required, which should lead to a dismissal.  Meanwhile, Jonathan and others rallied around Mair.  Mair discovers she’s actually Psychic and, with a little help from Jonathan, starts selling services as a psychic - Jonathan with his TV skills helped with the production of a video for her new website.  Meanwhile, the case is still rumbling on in the background.

At the three-year point, a dispondent Mair turns to Jonathan, the District Attorney has frozen her bank account, but she needs to pay $50k to see the case dismissed.  Jonathan, of course, doesn’t have that kind of money, but he does have Credit cards, so he allows Mair to charge his credit cards, and that’s the end of the story, right?  Surely the charges go away, Mair gets her inheritance, and everything is all square.

No, how can it be? I haven’t told you how that Northern Irish Mortgage broker fits into things yet.  We’ll get there.  

Apparently, the judge was not pleased with this payment to the DA and declared it to be money laundering, but classified it as a misdemeanor rather than a felony; It resulted in Mair being imprisoned for 30 days.   Jonathan decides he’s going to visit Mair and tries to book a visit online; it's only then that he learns the real reason why Mair is in prison, and it's not Money Laundering.  It's Felony Grand Theft, and Mair isn’t Mair at all; she’s Marianne.  Yes, the American who traveled to Northern Ireland and married a local so she could stay; Yes, Marianne Smyth, the Mortgage broker.

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This discovery, that Marianne, Mair, whatever we call her, had lied about her case, was just the beginning for Jonathan.  He delved into the court records, utilizing all his reporter and TV skills, and learned a great deal.  She really had stolen $200k from the travel agency she worked for, and the money he paid for the DA?  Well, that was part of a plea deal to avoid 5 years in prison, and it was only $40k that was needed; she’d presumably kept the rest for herself.

There was no Irish inheritance.  She was born in Bangor, the American one in Maine, not the Northern Irish one, and pretty much everything she’d ever said had been made up.  Still, Jonathan picked her up from the prison and drove her home.  On arrival, he confronted Mair and told her that he only wanted to hear from her if she had a payment towards the money she owed him.

Jonathan, however, wasn’t finished. He tried reporting to the police, and after overcoming initial indifference from an officer, he eventually managed to file a report. Despite having mountains of evidence showing he was tricked into giving her money, the officer remained indifferent. "You gave her the money," the officer shrugged. "It's not a crime." Jonathan disagreed, pointing out that obtaining money by deception is indeed a crime - its the very definition of the word Fraud - but the officer dismissed him with a wave of a hand, saying, "It's simple advice: don't give money to strangers." But Mair was no stranger, or so he thought.

Mair or Marianne became Jonathan’s obsession.  Over the next few years, he would comb records, hire private investigators, and even put his marriage and financial health at risk to get to the bottom of who Marriane Smyth was and what she’d done.  He’s written books, and even a podcast, “The Queen of the Con” about his adventures - You’ll find Jonathan and Marianne in Season 1.

But his tenacity paid off.  Jonathan started making contact with all sorts of victims of Marianne Smyth.  She had over 23 pseudonyms, she’d run fake cancer scams and used her natural low iron levels to help her get photos to sell the con, and at one stage she impersonated Jennifer Aniston.  She’d been a sugar baby who’d gone on to extort her sugar daddies and ran the psycic con more than a few times, victims who found his online blog kept reaching out.  What we’re covering here only scratches the surface of what he discovered.

Eventually, his blogs readers would include the Police Service of Northern Ireland, who were very keen to find Marianne, and those scams at the top of the show she did as a  mortgage broker? Those were just the tip of the iceberg of what she’d gotten up to whilst there.  Eventually, Police forces in the United States also got interested.  So much for not a crime.

In 2018, she was arrested for the scam she’d run against Jonathan, not that she’d been quiet for the time.  She’d managed to poison many of the other residents of their still shared apartment complex against Jonathan, describing him as crazy, and even scamming them for money she said was t to make him go away, and during her trial she tried to file for a restraining order against him, in the hope that it would make himunable to testify.  A year later, she was convicted and sentenced to 5 years.

But it didn’t end there for Mair.  In 2024, she was extradited to Northern Ireland, and just a few weeks ago, in September 2025, she was convicted again.  Not the way she had imagined staying in Ireland.

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One of the more alarming things revealed by Jonathan is just how few scam victims reported this to the police - and given the initial lack of interest from them, who can blame them?  However, Jonathan’s success in tracking down Mair’s other victims demonstrates the importance of sharing your scam story. Please email us yours so we can include them in future shows.

There are two other things to remember however from Marianne, or Mair’s scams.

First, remember this: "Scams feed on trust." Anyone can fall victim to a scam. It's not about being gullible or elderly; anyone can have their trust and confidence exploited. Confidence tricksters, or con artists, live up to their name precisely because they manipulate trust. Jonathan wasn’t foolish  his ability to track down the whole story when the police wouldn’t or couldn’t is proof of that.

Second, if something sounds too good to be true, it’s because it's too good to be true. It's hard to apply skepticism to someone you think of as a friend, but a little wariness is wise, especially when dealing with extraordinary tales.  In the back of your mind, always ask yourself “Is this really true” - no matter if it's a friend, a news report or anything else.  Look for ways to confirm what you’re being told is true, rather than just accept it's true... That applies to us also, which is why we put references and further reading on our website for each episode.  You’ll find that at www.scamshacksandfrauds.com  - check it your for yourself if you don’t believe me.

I’ve been Cee, and this has been Scams, Hacks, and Frauds.  Please remember to send us your scam story at cee@scamshacksandfrauds.com