Podcast Corner: Queen of the Con and the tale of the fake Irish heiress
Mair Smyth: Queen of the Con.
Like any episode of CSI [Insert City Here], it’s easy to listen to a true-crime podcast and try and predict the culprit or scam that’s caught out the protagonist this time. We know there’s a twist and of course we think it’s obvious.
For example, how can Johnathan Walton, the host of Queen of the Con: The Irish Heiress, not realise Mair Smyth isn’t who she says she is (an Irish heiress) by the time he’s loaned her around $70,000?
And how can Kirat, a 30-year-old radio presenter in the UK, not realise, after being let down multiple times by the title character of Sweet Bobby, that he’s not real and she is the victim of catfishing (fake persona scam) and that it’s been ongoing for eight years?
Queen of the Con has just concluded an eight-episode season, with bonus episodes to boot, while in the latter six-part series (the final episode is available on Thursday), presenter Alexi Mostrous, the former head of investigations at the Times, now Tortoise Media’s investigations editor, tries to explain our quandary.
“I’ve noticed that whenever I tell Kirat’s story to anyone - my wife, my friends - there’s a divide. Many people over the age of 40 struggle to see how she could become so close to someone she’d never met. But anyone younger, they get it. If you’ve grown up in an online world, it’s obvious that online relationships can be as close as any other.”
Sweet Bobby is a love story, a twisted one, wherein Kirat thinks she’s talking online to Bobby, not a close contact but not a total stranger. Bobby is soon revealing that his happy family life is imploding and as he opens up to her, she shares intimate details with him, even though she never meets Bobby in real life, never sees him (they spend whole nights on Skype, but he never turns his video on), and he gets angry when she goes out with other people or makes plans.
He supposedly gets shot - whole Facebook Messenger groups Kirat is part of pull together for him; meanwhile, Kirat’s life is falling apart because of this relationship. The reveal of ‘Bobby’ at the end of third episode, Confession, is akin to the surprise of Keyser Soze. What follows is even more shocking.
Queen of the Con is a little more kitsch. Mair Smith claims she has a $25m inheritance due from her family in America. Our first warning sign is her claim that her great-great-uncle was one of Ireland’s founders - she has his signed copy of the constitution hanging on her wall - and she says her family came to the US in the 1980s under political asylum. But while this con is instantly obvious, Walton can’t help but fall for Smith’s lies. What happens when he finds out the truth?
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