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A US podcaster and author who helped UK authorities convict a woman derisively known as the “Queen of the Con” of defrauding a group of Northern Irish mortgage advice customers has expressed disappointment in her being sentenced on Friday to only four years in prison.
“She scams or tries to scam everyone she meets, and she will never change,” Johnathan Walton said in a statement after Marianne “Mair” Smyth’s sentencing closed the books on a transatlantic case against her.
Walton chronicled his own victimization at the hands of Smyth in both the podcast Queen of the Con: The Irish Heiress as well as a recently published book titled Anatomy of a Con Artist: The 14 Red Flags to Spot Scammers, Grifters and Thieves. His reporting as laid out in both projects triggered a tip about her whereabouts in Bingham, Maine, in February 2024 that led to a 5 September guilty verdict in Downpatrick, Northern Ireland.
The American-born Smyth was convicted of swindling more than $155,000 (£115,000) from four people to whom she served as a mortgage adviser between 2008 and 2010. Yet that was only a small part of a history that includes one episode in which she sought to impersonate actor Jennifer Aniston to bilk a producer out of millions of dollars, as Walton has documented. And it frustrated him that the court in Downpatrick legally could not weigh any of that as Smyth was prosecuted and then sentenced Friday.
“This is a woman who deserves to live the rest of her days in confinement – away from the public and away from the opportunity to scam anyone ever again,” Walton’s statement said. “I know that’s not the way things work with regard to the legal system. But it’s definitely how they should work with regard to an inveterate con woman like … Smyth.”
One of Smyth’s victims in Northern Ireland testified during a four-day trial that he gave her £72,570 for a buy-to-let house meant to finance his children’s college education – yet she never bought the property, as the UK’s Times newspaper reported.
Three other victims, including a couple, reportedly testified that they gave Smyth £43,000 to put in investment accounts that never invested.
After she was reported to authorities and they moved in to arrest her, Smyth allegedly killed more than a dozen dogs living with her and fled Northern Ireland for Los Angeles.
She befriended Walton in LA while he pursued a career as a reality television producer, and she persuaded him that she was a wealthy Irish heiress locked in a legal dispute with her family. Walton gave Smyth nearly $100,000 that she claimed she needed to collect her inheritance – but instead she used many of those funds dispensing with a 2016 guilty plea to charges of stealing from a travel agency that once employed her.
Ultimately, Walton investigated Smyth’s background. He said he learned that she started a satanic church to fiscally prey on people who were unlikely to report her to police as well as raise money for fake cancer treatment. And, among other things, he has spoken about how she impersonated Aniston – of Friends and The Morning Show fame – over text and email to try to convince a producer to hand her millions for a nonexistent business deal.
Walton eventually persuaded Los Angeles authorities to charge her. She was convicted of grand theft by false pretense, but spent less than two years in prison as California officials sought to minimize the state’s incarcerated population amid the Covid-19 pandemic.
In 2021, Walton released Queen of the Con: The Irish Heiress, detailing what he and those in Northern Ireland endured because of Smyth. A listener alerted Walton to where Smyth was residing in Maine. Walton then told police of Smyth’s whereabouts, and they arrested her on 23 February 2024 in connection with the charges in Northern Ireland that were still pending.
Smyth, 56, was flown to the UK from the US by early July 2024, leading to her conviction at trial.
A statement from Mark Anderson, a Northern Ireland police detective constable, said Friday’s sentence “should send a clear message to those involved in scamming hard-working people that they will be vigorously pursued and brought before the courts to face the consequences of their actions, no matter how long it takes”.
But Walton separately called the length of Smyth’s punishment a “disappointment”, saying he fears many people lack the “complete and accurate picture of just who [she] really is and the devastation she is capable of wreaking on innocent, unsuspecting people”.
