Scamfluencers
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Описание
You never really know someone…especially online. In today’s world, the power of influence can be the quickest path to money and fame, and it often ends in ruin. These are the stories of the world’s most insidious Scamfluencers. And we are their prey. On Wondery’s new weekly series, join co-hosts Scaachi Koul and Sarah Hagi as they unpack epic stories of deception from the worlds of social media, fashion, finance, health, and wellness. These influencers claim to be everything from charismatic healers to trusted financial insiders to experts in dating. They cast spells over millions. Why do we believe them, and how does our culture allow them to thrive? From Black Swan Murder to a fake social media influencer to an audacious Hollywood Ponzi schemer, each season will take the listener along the twists and turns, the impact on victims, and what’s left when the facade falls away.Need more Scamfluencers? With Wondery+, enjoy exclusive episodes, early access to new ones, and they’re always ad-free. Join Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Start your free trial by visiting wondery.com/links/scamfluencers/ now.
Singer-actor Earl Washington turns out to be a triple threat when he takes up carving wood blocks to make ends meet while hustling to make a life as an entertainer in Los Angeles. But just like any ot...
In Evangelical homes across the United States, sex outside of marriage is a sin against God. So, when Abbi becomes pregnant at 16, her devout parents hide her away at the Liberty Godparent Home, a lit...
Polish immigrant Hershel Geguzin fled to the U.S. from the faltering Russian Empire at the turn of the 20th century. And like many scammers around this time, he adopts a fabulous new identity: as Prin...
Rocky Aoki, the son of a vaudeville performer and a tango dancer, grows up in the wreckage of post-war Tokyo. With his natural flair for entertainment, he opens his first Benihana restaurant in Manhat...
Multi-level marketing businesses like Mary Kay, HerbaLife, and Amway are so ubiquitous, it's almost hard to imagine where they started or how deep their influence goes. In this special episode of Scam...
We’ll be back next week with all-new episodes, but in the meantime, we thought it was the perfect time to revisit our grossest-ever Scamfluencer: Brian Johnson, aka The Liver King. Brian grows up a sc...
Teal Swan’s self-help empire is on the rise, and so is the backlash to some of her most controversial techniques. Teal fights back against her critics, releasing long rebuttals and detailed explainers...
We’ll be back in two weeks with all-new Scamfluencers episodes. In the meantime, we’re returning to one of our favorites. After surviving a difficult childhood, Teal Swan starts a family and reinvents...
Paul Bragg used showmanship and outrageous claims to grow his health food company into a wellness empire. But after he died in his 90s and passed the company to his daughter, Patricia, people started...
Michael Milken is known as the King of Junk Bonds. In the early 80s, he pioneered a novel way to finance companies that traditional investors normally wouldn’t touch. His high-risk, high-reward invest...
Francois-Marie Banier is facing an uphill battle in French courts when he learns he’s being sued by Liliane Bettencourt’s only daughter, Francoise. When the French media learn of the accusations of fi...
Francois-Marie Banier overcame indifferent parents to reach the heights of the Parisian art scene. His novels, plays, and photography gained him famous friends like Salvadore Dali, Princess Caroline o...
Conrad Black turned ownership of a single Canadian newspaper into a global media empire, and he used his wealth and status to cozy up to conservative superstars like Magaret Thatcher and Henry Kissing...
After her latest biography flopped, Lee Israel was hard up for money to buy booze and cat food. So, she used her research skills to access celebrity letters in prominent archives, stealing them and ad...
When Thelma and Louise was being made in the early 1990s, production was in and out of financial trouble. Behind this shortage of cash was an Italian businessman and epic scammer named Giancarlo Parre...
Billy Mitchell became the king of arcade games when he achieved a perfect Pac Man score, and held the highest score in Donkey Kong. But in the early 2000s, a documentary about an upstart trying to be...
We’ll be back next week with all-new episodes but in the meantime we’re bringing back a very timely episode. In 2024, President Biden commuted the sentences of nearly 1,500 people in one day… includin...
The Matharoo sisters have gone from globe-trotting tastemakers to detained prisoners. Stuck in an airport hotel without their passports or phones, they decide to take matters into their own hands – an...
While we work on some brand-new episodes, we’re returning to one of our very first episodes about two jet-setting sisters from Canada, Kiran and Jyoti Matharoo. In 2016, a mysterious apology video sur...
When Priscila Barbosa moves to Boston from Brazil in 2018, she sets out to pay off her debts and send money back home by driving for rideshare platforms like Uber and Lyft. Eventually, she decides her...
During the early 2000s Brian Wansink made his mark as a “food psychologist” with quirky studies backed by the USDA and Cornell. His research led to the 100-calorie snack pack, the side plate for dinne...
In the early 80s, a German magazine thought it had the scoop of the century: access to Adolf Hitler’s secret diaries. But as soon as excerpts of the diaries were released, critics pounced. Soon, the m...
In the early 2000s, Brazilian billionaire Eike Batista was seen as the ultimate mining mogul: he was a speedboat-racing showman and a playboy who liked to show off his wealth. To expand his empire, Ei...
In the midst of the Great Depression, out-of-work salesman Charles Darrow sold the board game he created, Monopoly, to Parker Brothers. The game was an overnight success, and Charles became a hopeful...
In 1997 Beverly Dollarhide hears miraculous news: her missing son, Nicholas, has been found in Spain. But the person she thinks is her teenage son is actually a grown man, a well known French identity...
When Apollo Nida joined the cast of The Real Housewives of Atlanta in 2009, he’d recently been released from prison and was expecting a child with his superstar lawyer wife, Phaedra Parks. Apollo had...
Joe Francis created an empire of spring break smut with the “Girls Gone Wild” video series. But the story behind the alcohol-fueled antics is darker than you think. Scaachi interviews Jamila Wignot, d...
In the second part of this two-part epic, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker go their separate ways and carve out very different paths — but they both still love being in the spotlight. Tammy becomes a fixture...
This month a musical featuring a Scamfluencers alum closed its doors on Broadway. Tammy Faye featured music by Elton John and told the story of a televangelist who stole America’s heart with her humor...
Dr. Oz has been making headlines again – but not for a scam. Now that he’s been tapped to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, we’re revisiting how this former TV doctor survived scanda...