She has crisscrossed the US saying she is an Irish heiress, a psychic and good friends with a movie star so as to run scores of scams, her victims say, but now Marianne Smyth is in a Maine jail awaiting a hearing next month that would decide whether she can be extradited to the UK over a scam dating back more than 15 years in Northern Ireland.
The 54-year-old American is accused of stealing more than US$170,000 from at least five victims from 2008 to 2010 in Northern Ireland, where a court issued arrest warrants for her in 2021, according to legal documents.
She was located and arrested last month in Maine.
Photo: Johnathan Walton via AP
Her case has similarities to Anna Sorokin, a grifter convicted in New York of paying for a lavish lifestyle by impersonating a wealthy German heiress.
“She’s a master of disguise, completely changing her appearance and her grift to suit each mark,” said Johnathan Walton, who started a podcast in 2021, Queen of the Con, to warn others about Smyth after he said he was fleeced out of nearly US$100,000.
She was always dressed in designer clothes, but said she needed the money for things like a frozen bank account and to post bail, he said.
She told him she was due an inheritance of US$7 million from her wealthy family in Ireland, Walton said.
They grew close over several years in Los Angeles, when she bought him expensive dinners and luxury vacations, he said.
However, her story began to unravel when Walton realized she was jailed for stealing US$200,000 from a luxury travel agency where she worked. She was later convicted of stealing from him and briefly served time in prison.
“She has no shame, and she has no conscience,” the 49-year-old reality television producer, author and public speaker said. “She revels in casting countless victims as unwitting actors in her elaborate schemes to defraud.”
Smyth’s attorney did not respond to a request for comment. From jail, Smyth referred questions to her attorney.
The podcast has drawn tips from dozens of victims from California to New York, Walton said.
The tipsters described a fake charity for Ukraine, as well as lies that she was an emissary for Satan, a witch, a hockey coach, a cancer patient and best friends with Jennifer Aniston. She often changed her name and appearance, her victims say.
“She honed in our vulnerabilities, and got all our information and bank accounts,” said Heather Sladinski, a costume designer in Los Angeles who said she was scammed out of US$20,000 for psychic readings, fake life coach sessions and cult-like retreats that included rituals, breathing exercises and yoga.
Smyth was funny, smart, and had credentials and other documents to back up her claims, Sladinski said.
The 50-year-old from Los Angeles blocked Smyth after she wanted to do a bizarre ritual involving a chicken to win back her ex-boyfriend, who had a restraining order against her, Sladinski said.
Smyth then started making threatening telephone calls and Sladinski “was so scared” that she moved homes, but after connecting with Walton, Sladkinski filed her own police report against Smyth and testified at Walton’s trial.
Tess Cacciatore, who owns a production company and nonprofit charity, never lost money to Smyth, but met her in 2016 through a business partner who had employed her as a psychic.
Smyth claimed to be a cancer patient, even sending her a photograph of her in a hospital gown, and said she was set to get a US$50 million inheritance. Smyth also showed Cacciatore e-mails purportedly from Aniston and, at one point, invited her to join them at the Golden Globe Awards before abruptly canceling.
In Northern Ireland, government officials said Smyth stole money that she had promised to invest and arranged to sell a victim a home, but took the money.
She remains in the Piscataquis County Jail pending the extradition hearing on April 17.
“She should have been an actress,” Cacciatore said. “She would have worked a lot and not gone to jail. She is so good at what she did.”
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
Russian hackers last year targeted a Dutch public facility in the first such an attack on the lowlands country’s infrastructure, its military intelligence services said on Monday. The Netherlands remained an “interesting target country” for Moscow due to its ongoing support for Ukraine, its Hague-based international organizations, high-tech industries and harbors such as Rotterdam, the Dutch Military Intelligence and Security Service (MIVD) said in its yearly report. Last year, the MIVD “saw a Russian hacker group carry out a cyberattack against the digital control system of a public facility in the Netherlands,” MIVD Director Vice Admiral Peter Reesink said in the 52-page
RSS