They thought that they’d found the perfect New York apartment. They weren’t alone.

Authorities say Ramon Abbas, aka Hushpuppi, perfected a simple internet scam and laundered millions of dollars. His past says a lot about digital swagger, and the kinds of stories that get told online.

“You’re preying on someone’s hopes, you’re preying on someone’s dreams. You’re preying on a particularly vulnerable population who all have artistic sensibilities.”

A jailhouse interview with Steve Washak, who made millions selling “natural male enhancement” pills.

How much would you pay to remove a curse on your family?

An Iowa sports radio pioneer turns scammer.

The story of a dream come true.

It turns out “Madame Giselle” wasn’t any of these things, couldn’t make her Chevy Chase, Maryland, neighbors rich, and may have been at the center of a massive scandal in Colombia.

She turned to Google for help getting sober. Then she had to escape a nightmare.

A tech support scammer makes the mistake of engaging a talkative podcast host. [Transcript]

Meet the giant green rock that seduces and destroys.

It took Nav Sarao a long time to accept that he might have been scammed out of $50 million.

The untold story of Napoleon Hill, who practically invented the self-help scam through his 1937 book Think and Grow Rich.

Inside a pageview scam.

Shakiya Robertson thought she had found a way get her family a home. She moved in, fixed the place up, made all the payments. Then she, like thousands of others in Detroit, was told that the house she thought she had purchased wasn’t actually hers.

The fall of PCCare247, an Indian company in the business of selling fixes to problems that didn’t exist.

A reclusive hacker wages a shadow war against payday loan cyber-extortioners.

The strange saga of Sarah Phillips, who went from message board commenter to ESPN gambling columnist and hid her identity from editors, scamming many of the people she met along the way.

Before the market crashed and home prices tumbled, before federal investigators showed up and hauled away the community records, before her property managers pled guilty for conspiring to rig neighborhood elections, and before her real estate lawyer allegedly tried to commit suicide by overdosing on drugs and setting fire to her home, Wanda Murray thought that buying a condominium in Las Vegas was a pretty good idea.

A Denver businessman’s revolutionary green energy company turned out to be nothing but a Ponzi scheme built to fund a lifestyle of booze-soaked hotel orgies with flown-in prostitutes.

How an aging trio of Irish ‘travelers’ criss-crossed America in a mobile home conning Home Depot out of over $1 million.