Deep Cover · Pushkin Industries

Shame, Scams, and The Stories We Tell Ourselves (with Ollie Wards)

December 22, 2025·44 min·2 clips

Ollie Wards discovered his family's con artist story while interviewing his dad before a quadruple heart bypass.

The conversation starts at the end of Snowball. Jake Halpern treats the interview as a chance to ask Ollie Wards how he made the show, what it felt like to report on his own family, how he sees the series now, and where everyone landed once recording stopped. Wards places himself first: he grew up in Auckland, is speaking from Sydney, and says this is the first time he has been in a studio for the project. Snowball comes through as more than a case. It is a family story told by someone still sorting through the damage. The interview keeps coming back to shame. Wards says people who lived through similar frauds wrote to him because the series made them feel less alone. That small detail widens the whole thing. One family's ordeal starts to look like part of a pattern: emotional access, private humiliation, then silence. Wards calls it love fraud, though he handles the phrase carefully. The bond can be romantic or friendly, but the trick is the same: attachment becomes leverage. The lie begins with truth. In The Truth About Sarah, Wards says Sarah worked at the VA, which helped her understand veterans' stories. He connects that to the idea of a dream reflector. Snowball had its own version too: someone reflecting a person's ambitions, skills, strengths, and weaknesses back at them until they leaned in. Sarah's power, to Wards, came partly from humility, from seeming like someone pushing through hardship. Leslie was different. He describes her as charismatic, shiny, flashy, and magnetic. Jake gives him space to compare the cases without forcing them to match. The ending stays open, with Wards leaving room for Leslie to tell her side, own some of it, challenge some of it, or even make room for one more bonus episode.

As heard by us

A measured Snowball afterword on love fraud, shame, and why the most effective lies borrow from the truth.

Deep Cover ends its Snowball run with Jake Halpern questioning Ollie Wards about making the series, reporting on his own family, and what stayed unresolved after the recording stopped.

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