Showing titles in Con Artists, Hoaxes & Deceptions

Scammers are intelligent, professional, and well-trained. They have no heart or compassion. They will take your last penny if they get the chance. They knowingly put your finances, trust, and even your family in jeopardy. Most scammers work in packs, like wolves, and are after you. What is a scam? A scam is when someone takes money from someone else while not providing the promised service or product.

Carrie Jade is a chilling true-crime account of Samantha Cookes, a master manipulator who spent more than a decade reinventing herself across the UK and Ireland with an arsenal of false identities. From au pair and nanny to therapist, teacher, psychologist, even terminally ill author and...

Der Mann, in den ich mich verliebt hatte, und mit dem ich sogar verlobt war, war ein Betrüger, und als er durch einen dummen Zufall erwischt wurde, kam plötzlich sein Wahnsinn zum Vorschein. Mein Leben bestand nur noch aus Schikanen und es wurde immer unerträglicher. Je mehr ich nachforschte, desto mehr Scheußlichkeiten deckte ich auf.

Bunk traces the history of the hoax as a peculiarly American phenomenon, examining what motivates hucksters and makes the rest of us so gullible. Disturbingly, Young finds that fakery is woven from stereotype and suspicion, race being the most insidious American hoax of all. He chronicles how Barnum came to fame by displaying figures like Joice Heth, a black woman whom he pretended was the 161-year-old nursemaid to George Washington.

In Big Pharma, lives are secondary to profit margins. But Lisa Pratta stood her ground—risking everything to expose the lies of a billion-dollar pharmaceutical business mired in deception, greed, and the systemic abuse of both patients and employees As a rising star in pharmaceutical sales...

The dark web is the internet's evil twin, where anything can be bought and sold. Drugs, weapons, and hackers-for-hire are available at the touch of a button. Most who visit merely look around, happy to satisfy their curiosity before leaving, never to return. But some are sucked into the criminal underworld and find themselves doing things they would never have contemplated in the real world—ordering a hit on a love rival or bidding on an auction for a sex slave—like the people in this book.

“Spellbinding.” —Rick Perlstein * “A clever, fast-paced read of dazzling originality.” —William I. Hitchcock “An excellent new book, both important and unsettling” (The New York Times), Ghosts of Iron Mountain unravels the astounding origins and far-reaching impacts of a...

At the birth of the 20th century the advent of train travel throughout the United States brought assorted smooth-talking, quick-thinking con men. These men took people's money. Seasoned journalist Will Irwin chronicled the true confessions of a master swindler, card cheat, circus barker and master of persuasion. THE CONFESSIONS OF A CON MAN details one man’s apprenticeship into larceny and his journey as a criminal mastermind of daring swindles.

Paul Skalnik was a prolific and ruthless conman and abuser. For more than three decades, he passed himself off as a Vietnam veteran, a college football star, a high-rolling oilman, a criminal defence attorney, an undercover FBI agent and a terminally ill cancer patient. From 1977 to 2015 he was...

1982: Oregon businessman Phil Champagne, age 52, dies in a tragic boating accident off Lopez Island. He is survived by one ex-wife, four adult children, an octogenarian mother, and two despondent brothers. Phil didn't know he was dead until he read it in the paper. All things considered, he took it rather well. So did Phil's brother, Mitch, the beneficiary of a 1.5 million dollar policy on Phil's life.

Polygamy. Incest. Vampires. Murder. There are words you might expect to read together in the plot of a gothic horror novel, but not so long ago, in the usually quiet town of Fresno, California, those words were the headlines. What do they have to do with each other? The answer to that question is one man: Marcus Wesson. Chances are you have heard of cults, such as the Manson Family, and Jonestown, but this might be your first time hearing the story of a vampire cult led by Marcus Wesson. The members of this cult were members of Wesson’s own family.

A private investigator with a haunting past, Bill Edgar's life was never destined to be ordinary. Rising to international fame as the 'Coffin Confessor' - the man who crashes funerals on behalf of the deceased, giving voice to their last wishes - Bill dismantled many of the assumptions we hold...

Did NASA fake the moon landings? Did aliens build the pyramids? Is Finland really there? Dive down the conspiracy-theory rabbit hole with bestselling author and conspiracy buff Tom Cutler. Mingle with the millions who do not trust the official version and find out what THEY – the...

In this tantalizing true mystery of a stolen life, an acclaimed reporter and an identity theft investigator follow a series of incredible revelations about the actual identity of a wife, mother, and friend turned perfect stranger. Days after Lori Ruff’s suicide, her family discovered her hidden strongbox containing stunning evidence that her entire life had been invented. Her real identity was buried so deep it would take five years to unearth. Who was Lori Ruff?

A charismatic doctor claimed to have rediscovered the ancestral roots of “toad medicine,” becoming the face of a global psychedelic movement. But in his wake, he left a trail of destruction that embodies the maladies of our spiritually desolate age. “Entirely mesmerizing. . . . Richly...

On September 6, 1982, convicted murderer Leroy James Chasson made a daring break for freedom from the Massachusetts Correctional Institute-Walpole—one of the most infamous, escape-proof prisons in the country. But this wasn't just any prison break. It was a meticulously planned, five-year effort, made possible by an unlikely accomplice—Kathleen MacDonald, Chasson's former pen-pal turned wife.

The men on the SS Marine Electric sailed into a storm in February 1983 not knowing that they would make history - at a great cost in lives. Just three men survived the wreck of the Marine Electric off the shores of Virginia and they found that their struggle had just begun once they got back to shore. Blamed for the wreck, they fought back and broke a code of silence that had covered up sloppy ship inspections for decades and revealed the flaws in old World War II rust buckets that were still at sea long past their functional lifetime.

Murderous Minds: Stories of Real Life Murderers That Escaped the Headlines offers a look into the lives of individuals who committed heinous acts of evil but managed to avoid the media storm that usually accompanies them.

On a bitterly cold afternoon in December 1986, a Michigan State trooper found the frozen body of Jerry Tobias in the bed of his pickup truck. The 31-year-old oil field worker and small-time drug dealer was clad only in jeans, a checkered shirt, and cowboy boots. Inside the cab of the truck was a fresh package of expensive steaks from a local butcher shop, the first lead in a case that would be quickly lost in a thicket of bungled forensics, shady prosecution, and a psychopathic star witness out for revenge.

In Los Angeles, a series of murders occurred during the summer of 1980 that left an indelible mark on countless individuals. This string of brutal and bloody crimes would make the already famous Sunset Boulevard aka the Sunset Strip infamous and a place forever synonymous with the word evil. This true story blends statements to law enforcement and trial testimony with personal accounts from those who experienced the events firsthand. The psychology behind these violent crimes is explored, along with a look at the psychological state and the possible motives of the individuals.