US woman who scammed hundreds of thousands by posing as Irish heiress awaits extradition

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A US-born woman is awaiting extradition to Belfast on charges she swindled multiple people out of hundreds of thousands of pounds while she lived there.

Marianne “Mair” Smyth was exposed on a podcast after she feigned being the heiress to a $30m fortune while scamming nearly $100,000 from a television producer who later sent her to prison and created the podcast.

According to the Guardian, Smyth is now faced with charges stemming from the time she spent in Belfast between 2002 and 2009.

She was arrested in connection with the charges on February 23 while staying at a rented property in Maine in the US. It was shortly after she was released from a prison sentence she was serving for defrauding the podcaster Johnathan Walton.

His podcast Queen of the Con: The Irish Heiress told of his experience with Smyth as well as several of her ruses – including her impersonation of Hollywood’s Jennifer Aniston.

According to court records reviewed by the Guardian, the PSNI said Smyth worked at several UK-based mortgage companies. She is accused of convincing five people whom she met through that work to give her a total of about £135,570 (or $172,000) that she promised to invest on their behalf in a non-existent, high interest-bearing bank account.

Today’s News in 90 seconds – 21st March 2024

His podcast Queen of the Con: The Irish Heiress told of his experience with Smyth as well as several of her ruses – including her impersonation of Hollywood’s Jennifer Aniston.

According to court records reviewed by the Guardian, the PSNI said Smyth worked at several UK-based mortgage companies. She is accused of convincing five people whom she met through that work to give her a total of about £135,570 (or $172,000) that she promised to invest on their behalf in a non-existent, high interest-bearing bank account.

However, she kept the money for herself.

The PSNI planned to arrest Smyth in 2009 after the five people whom she allegedly victimised came forward.

But she was tipped off in advance and fled Northern Ireland with her family.

She facilitated the escape by arranging for the killings of more than a dozen dogs who were living at her home, according to what Smyth’s daughter, Chelsea Fowler, said on the Queen of the Con podcast.

“We had about 15 to 17 dogs in our house,” Fowler said on the podcast. “My mom made my stepdad put all the dogs down… put them down because there wasn’t time to re-home them.”

The Queen of the Con podcast said Smyth disappeared but eventually re-emerged in Los Angeles, where she eventually befriended podcast producer Walton, who worked in reality TV, portraying herself as a glamorous Irish heiress locked in a legal battle with her family over $30m that she was supposed to inherit.

Walton gave her just under $100,000 over five years between 2013 and 2017 after she said she needed the funds to secure her inheritance. But the inheritance was non-existent.

Walton also discovered Smyth had not only had impersonated Aniston, but she also convinced people to surrender money to her by impersonating a psychologist, a court-appointed child custody investigator, a psychic, a cancer patient, a witch and an NHL hockey player. She had also blackmailed money out of men with whom she’d had affairs.

After publishing his findings on a blog, he was contacted by nearly 50 other people across the US who claimed Smyth collectively conned them out of a total of about $1m.

Walton said authorities in Northern Ireland also came across the blog and informed him that they had been hunting for Smyth for years, had no idea where she was hiding after her 2009 disappearance, and were going to seek her extradition.

In LA, Walton persuaded police to arrest Smyth in April 2018 and a conviction was later won against her for grand theft by false pretense – with a five-year prison sentence.

Smyth was released in December 2020 – less than two years later – as California prisons officials freed thousands of non-violent offenders from custody early in an effort to stem the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic.

After Walton’s podcast was publicised, listeners informed him of Smyth’s most recent address in Maine, which he then shared with the PSNI.

They then worked with US marshals to arrest Smyth in Bingham, a small town in the state.

Federal prosecutors argued that Smyth should be held without bail while UK authorities pursued her transfer to their jurisdiction, arguing that she was a flight risk – even if she posted a bond ostensibly meant to ensure her presence in court moving forward.

The federal judge John Nivison on March 7 granted prosecutors’ request to detain Smyth without bail.