Master Manipulator and Commander: Trust Your Gut

Michael was 16, lonely, and stuck in a small Southern town when he met someone called Dennis on a vampire-themed online message board. What began as a thrilling, romantic connection soon spiraled into something darker. We follow Michael’s journey as he tries to make sense of the many layers of deception two decades later.

When an Arizona reporter starts looking into a flurry of closures at country music-themed restaurants, he thinks it’s just another boring business story. But he uncovers a collapsing franchise empire and millions in fraud, all linked to a mysterious character with mob connections living a double life.

What's it like to have your image used as the bait in thousands of online romance scams? This is what happened to Janessa Brazil—whose image has been hijacked and used to con hundreds, maybe thousands, of lonely people out of hard-earned cash. This is a story of love, lies, and the faces behind a billion-dollar catfishing industry.

They were a hot new band and storming up the charts. But something seemed off about Velvet Sundown. Was this the work of AI? When someone behind the band came out denying it, this looked like mystery solved. But this was only the beginning of an internet hoax with many layers.

When one tech founder tweets a warning about a seemingly prolific engineer named Soham Parekh, it sets off an avalanche. Turns out, Soham has been hired and paid by dozens of start-ups, sometimes working at several at once. He dazzled founders with coding tests, then vanished into a fog of excuses.