Voices for the Victims
We are living in a golden age of deception. It feels like everyone has an angle and that, everywhere you turn, someone’s trying to scam you. Chameleon is a new weekly show from veteran journalist Josh Dean (co-creator and host of The Clearing, Hooked, White Devil, and the original Chameleon season, Hollywood Con Queen) that takes you inside an incredible, stranger-than-fiction story about someone—or some people—pretending to be something they aren’t. Are you obsessed with cons, frauds, and impos
26 most recent episodes
Visit website →As a lonely, grieving teenager in the early days of the internet, Celeste Mott is drawn into a secretive message board called "The Looking Glass": a place where self-proclaimed vampires demand total belief, reward devotion, and punish doubt. What beg
Gay Talese thought he’d landed a once-in-a-lifetime story every journalist dreams about: a motel owner who built a hidden viewing platform so he could watch guests in their most private moments and kept meticulous “research” notes for decades. But wh
The unsettling story of Leslie Wexner—the Midwestern retail billionaire who built Victoria’s Secret, then gave Jeffrey Epstein extraordinary access to his money and credibility. But how much did he know?
The rise and spectacular fall of Eddie Antar, the electronics mogul behind the Crazy Eddie brand. Who scammed his way from the streets of Brooklyn to Wall Street and then vanished without a trace.
Shortly after Christmas, Sharon gets a terrifying call. A stranger tells her the pelvic mesh inside her body has been recalled. It's a “ticking time bomb," and she needs emergency surgery to remove it. So Sharon flies to Florida. What she’s walking i
For 563 days, Harry believed the love of his life was dying of stage-four cancer. Then Rachel’s husband called, and everything Harry thought he knew collapsed. A pattern emerges, revealing a woman he no longer recognizes and a trail of emotional wrec
In 2001, Harry meets Rachel in Houston. And so begins a complicated and uncertain kind of love story. An on-again, off-again connection that would stretch across two decades of tragedies, lucky breaks, and relentless second chances. Sometimes the har
Syed Arbab looked like the next financial prodigy—a frat house day trader who turned beer-soaked bravado into a successful hedge fund. Except that wasn't exactly the whole truth. When the SEC came knocking, Syed doubled down, lied, and kept going.
She thought she'd met the real deal: a decorated Navy officer, stationed at the Pentagon, opening hospitals in war zones. But what begins as a whirlwind romance slowly unravels into a portrait of compulsive deception. In the aftermath, this seasoned
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
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
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 i
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 inte
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 c
When the book The Salt Path was published, readers were moved by the story of a couple who, after losing everything, rebuilt their lives through nothing more than determination, their love for one another, and a very long walk. A decade later, journa
Brent Crane is being chased through a mall in the Philippines. He's on the trail of Page Turner, the company that has been accused of stealing $44 million from hopeful writers in one of the most brazen scams the book publishing world has ever seen.
Michael Esposito hired 50 journalists, promised them a dream job, and disappeared without paying a dime. Years later, he resurfaced under various new names, taking tens of thousands from couples on their wedding day. But one of his early victims neve
In 1985, a priceless painting vanished from a university museum in Arizona. The FBI had no leads. 32 years later, it turned up behind a bedroom door in a suburban New Mexico home. Turns out the retired couple living there may have pulled off one of t
The story of a Syrian-American blogger whose posts during the Arab Spring captured hearts around the world—including a woman in Montreal who believed she was falling in love. But Amina Arraf, the author of Gay Girl in Damascus, wasn’t real. She was a
In 2012, a Ukrainian man enrolled at a high school in Pennsylvania, pretending to be a teenage prodigy named Asher Potts. He made the honor roll and became a local hero. Until the day police showed up in class and arrested him. The immigrant who scam
For years, someone was tricking publishers into handing over yet-to-be-published manuscripts—from bestselling authors and total unknowns alike. There were no ransom demands. The books were not leaked. The motive was unclear. An international mystery
Colton Harris-Moore was just a teenager when he began breaking into homes across the Pacific Northwest. But soon, he was stealing cars, boats... and then planes. This is the unbelievable true story of a kid outrunning the cops to become one of the fi
A British band called The Zombies had a smash hit single in America with ‘Time of the Season’ in the late 60s. Shortly afterwards, four handsome Texans hit the road pretending to be the Zombies. This is the unbelievable true story of rock’s most braz
A gifted, mysterious young man with a tragic past and talent for long-distance running is admitted to Princeton. He dazzles everyone from admissions officers to elite dinner clubs. But behind the alias “Alexi Santana” was James Hogue, a serial impost
In 2009, Vincent Richardson walked into a Chicago police station and reported for duty. No one noticed he wasn’t actually a cop. No one noticed he was 14 years old. This is the story of the teenager who fooled the system time after time. Was it a pra
He dated a Hollywood princess and claimed to be the Vatican’s man in America. But Raffaello Follieri wasn’t all he appeared to be. He convinced some of the world’s richest people to hand over millions — before it all came crashing down. How did a cha