Mair told me that an uncle, the patriarch of her family, recently died and her cousins were dividing up an estate worth 25 million euros. She said she was supposed to receive 5 million euros ― the equivalent of $6.5 million at the time ― as her share of the inheritance. As months passed, she’d frequently show me angry text messages and emails from her Irish cousins threatening that she wouldn’t get a dime of the inheritance.
I didn’t realize that Mair actually created those phone and email accounts herself to impersonate her “cousins” as part of her scheme.
Mair told me she had taken a lot of family money with her when she left Ireland many years ago, so she never needed to work. However, she claimed she enjoyed working, so she got a job selling luxury vacations at a travel agency in Los Angeles that her family did a lot of business with. She said her family’s association with the company made it easy for her to secure employment there.
Fourteen months into our friendship Mair and I were like sister and brother. We even began ending our phone calls by telling each other “I love you.” She told me that her “barristers” (I had to google what that word meant) were having trouble trying to secure her inheritance and that they had warned her about a clause in her uncle’s will that stated that if any family member was convicted of a felony, they would forfeit their share of the inheritance.
Mair was building up the framework of her con in such enthralling detail that I became an actual player in scamming myself. Instead of her telling me the next step in her deceitful story, she got me to tell her!
“You better be careful!” I cautioned her. “Since your family does a lot of business with the travel agency you work for, one of your disgruntled cousins might try and set you up to get you convicted of a felony to keep your share of the inheritance from you!”
I’d read news stories about husbands knocking off their wives for million-dollar insurance policies. We were talking about $6.5 million here. And according to the emails and texts I saw, many of her family members certainly appeared to hate her. Why wouldn’t they set her up? I thought.
On July 8, 2014, my phone rang.
“You have a collect call from ― It’s Mair ― an inmate at the Century Regional Detention Facility. … Press one to accept,” the computerized voice instructed me.
I quickly pressed “1.”
“You were right!” she sobbed. “I was arrested today. My family set me up to make it look like I stole $200,000 from my job.”
“I told you this would happen!” I yelled into the phone. I was distraught. I quickly found a bail bondsman and paid him $4,200 to get her out of jail. That’s when I first learned that her legal name was Marianne Smyth, not Mair Smyth.
She paid me back the $4,200 the very next day when she was released from jail. Or, rather, the married man she was dating at the time paid me back the next day. Little did I (or he) know it, but she was in the process of scamming him too.
As the months passed, Mair showed me emails from her “lawyers” assuring her that the criminal case against her was falling apart. I had no idea those emails were also from fake accounts she had created herself.
Then, almost three years into our friendship, she told me the district attorney prosecuting her case had frozen her bank accounts. She was devastated. So I started lending her money. She had immediately paid back the $4,200 I used to bail her out of jail, so I felt confident she’d pay me back any other money I loaned her.
But that’s the thing: The term “con artist” is short for “confidence artist” because these individuals are skilled at gaining your confidence ― and then, once they’ve attained it, they use it to scam you out of your money.
Over the course of several months, I loaned Mair nearly $15,000. You’d think I’d be worried about giving her that much money but I wasn’t. At all. She was not only my best friend but she claimed she was about to inherit millions of dollars ― at least that’s what all the emails from her “barristers” said ― so I never even considered the idea that anything sinister could be taking place.
