"Are you at risk of being scammed? Former con artist and bestselling author of Catch Me If You Can Frank Abagnale shows you how to stop scammers in their tracks. Maybe you're wondering how to make the scam phone calls stop. Perhaps someone has stolen your credit card number. Or you've been a victim of identity theft. Even if you haven't yet been the target of a crime, con artists are always out there, waiting for the right moment to steal your information,...

"It's summer in the Dordogne. The heirs of a Périgordian sheep farmer learn that they have been disinherited, and their father's estate sold to an insurance company in return for a policy that will place him in a five-star retirement home for the rest of his life. But the farmer never gets his life of luxury--he dies before moving in. Was it a natural death? Was there foul play? Bruno begins the investigation that leads him to several shadowy insurance...

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, and What Is It?,...

"Connie Kelly thought she'd found her perfect man on an online dating site ... She fell so hard for M. Brooks Welles that she wrote him a check for almost three hundred thousand dollars, hoping for a big return on her investment. But within weeks, both Welles and her money are gone. Her therapist, Dr. Susan Silverman, hands her Spenser's card. A self-proclaimed military hotshot, Welles had been a frequent guest on national news shows speaking with...

When Ghana won its independence from Britain in 1957, it instantly became a target for home-grown opportunists and rapacious Western interests. A CIA-funded military falsely accused Kwame Nkrumah of hiding the country's gold overseas. Into this big lie stepped a con man to rival the trickster god Anansi. John Ackah Blay-Miezah declared himself custodian of an alleged Nkrumah trust fund worth billions. Over the 1970s and '80s, he and his accomplices--including...

"A canny young woman is struggling to survive by perpetrating various levels of mostly harmless fraud. On a rainy April morning, she is reading auras at Spiritual Palms when Susan Burke walks in. A keen observer of human behavior, our unnamed narrator immediately diagnoses beautiful, rich Susan as an unhappy woman eager to give her lovely life a drama injection. However, when the 'psychic' visits the eerie Victorian home that has been the source of...

"A volunteer Virginia Beach firefighter, Alayna Curry faces death every day--and is proud to carry on her retired father's legacy. But with cash always tight and her long-time boyfriend Levi pressuring her to give up what she loves to make more money, she knows she needs more cash flow to stay afloat ... All Alayna has to do is keep quiet about a scheme to burn down buildings for insurance-hungry 'clients.' And for a while she's on fire from the rush,...

Mark, Todd, and Zola came to law school to change the world, to make it a better place. But now, as third-year students, these close friends realize they have been duped. They all borrowed heavily to attend a third-tier, for-profit law school so mediocre that its graduates rarely pass the bar exam, let alone get good jobs. And when they learn that their school is one of a chain owned by a shady New York hedge-fund operator who also happens to own...

"One of the most notorious and bizarre mysteries of the Edwardian age, for readers who loved The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher. At the close of the Victorian era, as now, privacy was power. The extraordinarily wealthy 5th Duke of Portland had a mania for it, hiding in his horsedrawn carriage and creating tunnels between buildings to avoid being seen. So when, in 1897, an elderly widow asked the court to exhume the grave of her late father-in-law, T.C....