International

When Netflix released 'The Tinder Swindler' in February 2022, it introduced international audiences to one of modern romance fraud's most audacious schemes. An Israeli con artist exploited women across Scandinavia and beyond, posing as a diamond heir and extracting millions through psychological manipulation on Tinder.

On 2 March 1998, 10-year-old Natascha Kampusch vanished on her way to school in Vienna, Austria. She had been abducted by Wolfgang Přiklopil and imprisoned in a secret basement cell beneath his house. Eight years later, she escaped—and her captor took his own life the same day.

The Mørkeland podcast released Episode 303 on December 14, 2025, examining two distinct true crime cases: the disappearance of a 9-year-old girl from a remote forest and the mysterious death of a woman whose body was discovered naked in a compost heap.

In 2024, a young man named Max was lured from the Philippines to a remote scam camp in Myanmar with promises of a high-paying casino job. Instead, he found himself trapped in a modern slavery operation run by international criminal syndicates. The Scam Factory podcast, hosted by Denise Chan, documents his ordeal and his sister Charlie's desperate efforts to secure his release.

Frank Abagnale Jr., arrested in Georgia in November 1970 for passing fake payroll checks, built a decades-long career on claims of elaborate cons that investigators say never happened. The gap between his memoir and the documented record reveals how a real criminal became fiction's most celebrated impostor.