Johnathan Walton, who was a victim of Marianne ‘Mair’ Smyth, had helped UK authorities track her down
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.
