Sunday, October 12, 2025

He lost nearly $100k to a con artist. He turned it into a business

Johnathan Walton wants to make sure you never get scammed.

BY KATHERINE LAIDLAW

The first time Johnathan Walton met Mair Smyth is burned into his memory.

She was regal, magnetic, with short black hair and expensive designer shoes.

It was 2013, and he was rallying support for repairs on the swimming pool in their shared Los Angeles apartment building. She introduced herself as a recent transplant from Ireland.

Fourteen months later, they were best friends.

The relationship would change the course of Walton’s life — in ways he never could have imagined.

He and Smyth slid into an easy friendship, bonding over family drama. Walton, who’d come out at 30 years old, was estranged from some of his. Smyth too had struggled, spinning a story of a violent childhood and a family back in Ireland at odds over millions of Euros in a long-promised inheritance.

Occasionally, she’d show him emails from lawyers helping her battle her greedy cousins. On her apartment wall hung a copy of what she said was the Irish constitution, signed by her ancestors.

The first time Smyth needed money, Walton obliged and loaned her $4k. Her boyfriend paid him back right away.

Johnathan Walton spends his days hunting down con artists, and telling stories about them. (Provided by Johnathan Walton)

One day in 2015, he arrived to pick her up for brunch to find her in tears. Her bank accounts had been frozen, she told him. Her family in Ireland had paid a dirty DA to try to cut her out of her share and keep the ~$6.5m for themselves.

For years, Walton made ~$100k a year as a reality television producer on shows like “Shark Tank,” “UFO Hunters” and “Beverly Hills Pawn.” His Emmys keep a watchful eye from beside his TV.

Walton, watching his friend suffering, agreed to spot her for a while. First, it was rent ($6k), then another rent payment to move into a cheaper building ($3.2k). Then it was living expenses ($16k). Whenever he grew doubtful, he always went back to that first loan, and how she’d paid him back.

Finally, Smyth told him she was at last going to get the windfall she’d been promised. She just needed to pay $54k in legal fees to release it.

Walton only had $4k in cash left to loan her, so he did the unthinkable: he let her put the other $50k on his credit cards.

“I was rescuing a damsel in distress,” he says.

Walton and Smyth in happier times. (Provided by Johnathan Walton)

A few weeks later, he got a call from Smyth. She told him she was headed to jail to serve a 30-day sentence, set to be imprisoned for inadvertent money laundering, in her family’s latest attempt to thwart her receiving the money. When Walton said he’d come to visit, she demurred.

He persisted, punching her name into the prison system website looking for the address. When the charge against her came up as felony grand theft, he was shocked. He went to the courthouse to look at the case files. There, he learned she’d pled guilty to stealing $200k from the travel agency where she worked. The $54k he loaned her? According to the documents, most of it went toward a restitution order. It was gone.

On the day Smyth was released, she called to ask him for a ride. He drove down, laid out her lies, demanded she pay him back. She said she would, and then disappeared.

For months, Walton paid thousands of dollars in interest on the credit-card loans. Eventually, he filed for bankruptcy. It left his credit so decimated he couldn’t even buy a sofa. He and his husband put their plans to adopt a child on hold — indefinitely.

Tracking the cons

Victims of scams tend to be hesitant to come forward because of the shame that comes with being taken for a ride.

Walton went the other way. He wanted to tell everyone he knew. It was all he could think about. He started a blog.

“I immediately started telling everyone, mostly to warn people. Don’t give this woman money,” he says.

The Hustle

He became obsessed with tracking Smyth. He snuck into a law school library to use its Nexis account to find old addresses for her. He hired private investigators in every state she'd lived in.

His husband and friends were desperate for him to stop.

“Early on, my husband said, let it go. We’re healthy, we have each other, we can make the money back. Let it go. It’s destroying you,” he says.

But Walton couldn’t — he started to hide it, slinking off to the coffee shop down the street or staying up late to email investigators back or contact another detective.

Then something interesting happened: his blog started to take off. And he wasn’t just hearing from Smyth’s victims. He was hearing from hundreds of people worldwide who needed help because, like him, they’d been scammed.

Walton turned his blog into a podcast and a book. He’s made way more off them than the $92k he lost — multiple times over, he says.

Today, he spends his free time as a kind of informal consultant, helping dozens of victims track down their scammers, write affidavits, or report their crime to local police. So far, his work has helped lead to a handful of arrests. He likens pitching police on a fraud case to pitching television execs on a new show idea.

“When you go to the police for the first time, you have to think of it as putting on a show,” he says. “They need to care about you as a victim. You need to show them who the bad guy is, and show all the evidence you have.”

Alerts warn shoppers of increasingly common gift-card scams in a New York Walgreens. (Photo by Lindsey Nicholson/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

But he can’t bring himself to charge the victims who he helps. That, he says, he does for free.

“So many people offer me money and I’m like, no, that feels like another con,” he says.

Fourteen red flags

Con artistry is on the rise: the FBI’s most recent Internet Complaints Center report estimated Americans lost $16.6B to scammers last year.

But a proliferation of scams means there are patterns to draw, which Walton does in his book, Anatomy of a Con Artist.

Among the red flags he says are endemic to cons:

• A stranger offering help, often too kindly and too quickly.
• Beak-wetting, or financial generosity, in the form of fancy meals out or gifts that lower your guard.
• A story from a far-away place, making it difficult to verify.
• A seemingly endless appetite for and attraction to drama.
• Technology that helps sell their story.

And as scams get more complex, using AI cloning to copy voices of loved ones, or impersonating banks, or offering jobs that don’t exist, our ability to see through them is faltering. A New York Times reporter who’s written on crime for decades found himself nearly drawn in last month by a call whose ID read “Chase Bank.” Last year, New York magazine’s financial advice columnist admitted to giving away $50k in a purported Amazon scam. 

The Hustle

Today, Walton lives his life on high alert.

When he meets a new person he considers letting into his social circle, he runs a background check. Do they have a criminal record? Do they have liens against them? Have they been sued?

At a recent cocktail party in L.A., he noticed a glamorous couple working the room. They were beautiful, he thought. They could be on OnlyFans. He wandered closer. Before long, he noticed they were telling different stories to different people about who they were, where they came from, what they did for work.

“I told the host of the party when I left, I don’t know what the con is, and I don’t have the bandwidth to take this on, but these people are scammers,” he says. 

“They’re working the room. They’re trying to find someone to get their hooks into. It’s instinctual to me to notice these things now.”

International justice

After Mair Smyth (real name: Marianne Smyth) was convicted of defrauding Walton, she served nearly two of her five-year prison sentence before being granted early release due to COVID overcrowding. From there, she moved to Maine, evading outstanding fraud charges from her years working as a mortgage advisor in Ireland from 2008 to 2010.

It wasn’t until Walton got a tip from a practicing Satanist (yes, really) alerting him to Smyth’s whereabouts that the Irish authorities could have her extradited to stand trial. 

The Hustle

Last month, Walton watched as a courtroom erupted in tears.

After a jury deliberated for ~20 minutes, they returned a guilty verdict for the four people Smyth had tricked out of $155k. Walton had flown to Ireland to see it, bringing a near-decade-long saga to a close.

“It’s very validating. Very healing,” he says.

He stared at his former friend, motionless in the courtroom, showing no sign of recognition as she was led away. What was there left to say? He was just another face in the crowd.

“Con artists don’t target anyone specifically. They target everyone,” he says.

“They’re like sharks moving through the water.”

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