iHeartPodcasts and AYR Media
66 episodes listed below
Scams with warmth, teeth, and witnesses.
Queen of the Con tracks con artists, fences, shoplifters, and people caught in their orbit. Its recent arcs move from a retail theft network called The California Girls to West Texas culture and Eric Kramer’s improbable football comeback story.
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Queen of the Con is built around scams, but its best material is about the ecosystems that let scams keep breathing. The show is warm without going soft. It spends time with low-level participants, authorities, and people who only slowly realize what kind of story they are inside. Recent episodes center heavily on The California Girls, a retail theft arc where shoplifting is treated as both crime and survival economy. The details are concrete. Drivers are offered daily cash. A fence rents rooms by the day. Stolen products become payment. Homelessness, hotels, showers, and pressure sit beside the cleaner language of organized crime. Michelle Mack is framed as the person benefiting from work done by people far closer to the street. That imbalance gives the season its force. The show is also alert to the absurd. A Seal Beach Police sergeant explains how body-cam clips, store footage, pop songs, and a dark sense of humor turned theft arrests into unusually engaging police social media. The host’s reactions are part of the texture: surprised, amused, skeptical, and openly changed by what sources say. Other arcs widen the frame. In The Quarterback and The Con Artist, Eric Kramer’s football path includes a last-ditch round of calls to NFL teams and a kitchen visit from an herbalist with strange remedies for a separated shoulder. In The Handyman of West Texas, Midland appears through oil work, church culture, dry counties, and Texas Sunday alcohol rules. These digressions do not feel ornamental. They make the con stories feel lived-in, local, and socially specific. The show suits listeners who like true crime that stays close to voice, motive, class, and power rather than racing through a case file. It can be funny. It can turn grave quickly. Its recurring question is not only who lied or stole, but who had leverage over whom.
Made for: For true-crime listeners who prefer character, context, and interview texture over sterile case summaries. It especially fits fans of con-artist stories, organized retail theft reporting, and morally complicated source-driven narration.
What sets it apart: The show pairs intimate interview tape with narration that keeps asking who benefits, who gets used, and who pays the price. Its scam stories feel less like puzzles than social maps.
From her Southern California mansion on a hill, Michelle Mack sends out a team of 12 young women that authorities call 'The California Girls' to steal millions of dollars in merchandise from high-end stores all over the country. Her neighbors think she's in the wedding business but in reality, she's a true Queen of the Con, raking in millions of dollars by selling her stolen loot on Amazon. And she's been getting away with it all for more than 10 years. But one of her California Girls is turning on her and things are about to get really interesting.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
It makes confidence schemes legible by tracing the people, relationships, and practical machinery that allow them to operate.
Queen of the Con follows fraud and theft through serialized stories, slowing down to show how trust, money, and criminal logistics intersect. The host focuses on how a scheme operated: who moved stolen goods, what a fence did, and how professional shoplifting became a business.
Professional shoplifting sounds alarmingly organized once you hear how fences fit the business model.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A Midland story where oil, faith, and local rules shape the telling.
The episode gives Midland and the Permian Basin real shape. Oil money, dry counties, and Sunday alcohol rules do more than color the setting, and the religious backdrop lands too, from the Texas Bible Belt and churches everywhere to a Catholic school upbringing and a skeptical…
A football story built on 28 calls, one callback, and a very strange recovery plan.
Eric Kramer is the kind of football story that runs on hustle, luck, and stubborn patience. He calls all 28 teams himself, gets mostly silence, and still lands a callback from the Lions, who make him their starting quarterback in 1991.
A sharp, oddly funny look at how one Seal Beach police page turned theft busts into public-facing stories.
This episode takes a police department's social media page, which could easily sound dull, and finds a much better angle in theft, humor, and public image.
A small-time hustle grows loud enough for the whole neighborhood to notice.
The episode turns a fence's house into the center of a small, oddly organized side hustle, where stolen goods, daily cash, and a steady stream of strangers make ordinary logistics feel bigger than they should.
A tight scam story that uses one sharp question to expose the scheme.
This episode follows Michelle Mack and the alleged California girls shoplifting-and-fencing operation with a steady, procedural eye. The host does his best work when he sets court records, the criminal complaint, and interview answers beside each other, then lands on the pointed…
A messy con story where family damage matters as much as the lie itself.
This episode treats a mother-in-law sabotage story as something rougher than a neat scam. A woman moves in, leaves a mess, pounds on the bedroom door, and later calls the son-in-law's workplace with a fake medical emergency.
A sharp look at a con artist who weaponized care and credibility.
Peggy comes off less like a simple grifter than someone who knows how to wrap control in concern. She presents herself to Ricky Williams and Chantel as a Harvard educated Wall Street success, offers to manage the money for free, and keeps insisting she is the person who can keep…
ABC Audio's Theranos fraud series that also introduces its other true-crime podcasts.
Patrick Radden Keefe investigates whether the CIA secretly wrote a Scorpions hit.
Jake Halpern and the Snowball team track a con artist who defrauded a family.
A city-by-city true-crime documentary, from Detroit's Kwame Kilpatrick scandal to mob confessions.
A murder rumor in rural Alabama unravels into a clockmaker's suicide and estate feud.
Midland runs on oil, church, and rules.
Then the Detroit Lions call back, and one desperate reach opens the odd path to his 1991 starting quarterback job.
Jonathan Walton spends this bonus episode of Queen of the Con with Sergeant Jordan Marakian of the Seal Beach Police Department, a 20-year cop who says he was once wrongfully accused of stealing $55 and later cleared.
This transcript contains only promotional content and advertisements for various iHeart podcasts, with no substantive episode content from 'The California Girls'.
This episode features promotional clips for various podcasts including interviews with Will Ferrell and Hilary Duff, and a true crime story about a con artist targeting women.
A podcast about Michelle Mack who runs a theft ring stealing from high-end stores and selling on Amazon.
A professional shoplifter recounts her experience and the exploitation by a fence running a large-scale retail theft ring.
Reverse shopping starts with paid driving.
A podcast about Michelle Mack who runs a theft ring stealing from high-end stores and selling on Amazon.
The trick is the fifth question.
An undercover investigation into a California mom who allegedly ran an $8 million retail theft ring using a team of young women.
A podcast about Michelle Mack who runs a sophisticated retail theft ring using young women to steal and sell merchandise on Amazon.
Jonathan Walton opens with a line about Peggy Fulford being a woman you should "hide your money and your old rich men" from, then talks with showrunner Andrina Hale about the BET+ documentary "American Gangster, Trap Queens: Peggy Fulford." Hale explains that the prison video call with Ricky Williams was easier to arrange with the Bureau of Prisons than to get Williams himself to agree, because he had not spoken to Peggy for about a year or two before prison.
This transcript consists of promotional content for various iHeart podcasts, including ads for 'Thanks Dad', 'Trust Me, Babe', and 'Love Trapped', ending with the host Jamal Jordan introducing his podcast 'Rorschach'.
This episode features multiple podcast promotions from iHeartRadio, including shows about a con artist, a Bachelor star scandal, and a murder mystery.
A Shakespeare comparison lands first.
The host shares personal advice from his father about knowing when to quit if something stops being fun, contrasting it with typical inspirational messages.
This episode features a brief mention of Will Ferrell as a guest and includes multiple promotional segments for other iHeart podcasts like Love Trapped and The Girlfriends, with themes of advice, deception, and relationships.
A podcast about Michelle Mack, who ran a multi-million dollar organized retail theft ring using young women to steal from high-end stores and sell on Amazon.
A woman runs a decade-long theft ring using young women to steal from high-end stores and sell on Amazon.
A podcast about Michelle Mack, who runs a sophisticated retail theft ring using young women to steal and sell merchandise on Amazon.
A podcast about Michelle Mack who leads a crew of women stealing millions from stores and selling on Amazon.
A podcast about Michelle Mack who runs a theft ring stealing from high-end stores and selling on Amazon.
A deep dive into Michelle Mack's organized retail theft ring that stole millions from high-end stores and sold the loot on Amazon.
A true crime podcast about Michelle Mack, who ran a retail theft ring using young women to steal and sell merchandise on Amazon.
A podcast about Michelle Mack who runs a theft ring stealing from high-end stores and selling on Amazon.
A podcast about Michelle Mack who runs a retail theft ring using young women to steal and sell merchandise on Amazon.
A podcast about Michelle Mack, who ran a theft ring stealing from high-end stores and selling on Amazon.
A podcast about Michelle Mack who runs a theft ring stealing from high-end stores and selling on Amazon.
A deep dive into Michelle Mack's organized retail theft ring, where she directed a team of women to steal millions for resale on Amazon.
A podcast about Michelle Mack who leads a crew of women stealing millions from stores and selling on Amazon.
A podcast about Michelle Mack who runs a theft ring stealing from high-end stores and selling on Amazon.
A deep dive into Michelle Mack's organized retail theft ring, where she directed a team of women to steal millions for resale on Amazon.