The best true-crime podcasts: from Deep Cover to Scam Factory

"True crime has gone from niche sub-genre to everyone's guilty pleasure", said GQ. It's an obsession that began with podcasts: "Serial" was the first show to transform a disturbing case into "a rich narrative that gripped listeners tighter with every episode". Since then, we have "gotten a taste for shocking tales of manipulation", and today's true crime podcasts span everything from "elaborate scams" to white-collar crimes. Here are some of the best.

Scam Factory

"Who are the people who send scam texts/emails?" said Alexi Duggins in The Guardian. This "shocking" podcast delves into the lives of those forcibly made to deceive people against their will. The show meets a young man from the Philippines who believed he was getting a "legitimate job" but was instead trapped inside a compound and "made to send messages 14 hours a day". His sister's "daring" attempt to extricate him from the "scam factory" adds to the gripping narrative.

The Smuggler: Shadow World

Last year, the presenters of the outstanding BBC podcast "To Catch a Scorpion" chased down a notorious Iraqi-Kurd people smuggler and told the stories of individual asylum seekers, said Fiona Sturges in the Financial Times. A new 10-part series, "The Smuggler: Shadow World", written and hosted by investigative journalist Annabel Deas, is in many respects "a companion piece", with a similarly slick feel and evocative sound design. This time, the focus is on "Nick", a British former soldier whose lengthy career as a people smuggler has earned him two criminal convictions and an eight-year prison term. The series is "at once an illuminating character study and an extended confession" from a man who, it becomes clear, is both "a charmer and an adrenaline junkie". It's also, through "meticulous and wide-ranging reporting", the disturbing tale of a ruthless trade that governments have not managed to stop.

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Pipeline: Left to Die

The second episode of this "unmissable electric shock of a show" from the Daily Mail's investigative journalist Isabelle Stanley is "one of the tensest things I've ever heard", said Miranda Sawyer in The Observer. Stanley tells the story of four divers who died in February 2022 off the coast of Trinidad after they were "sucked with enormous force into the pipe they were mending". A fifth man who escaped "describes how he was smashed along the pipe like a ball". There's also a GoPro recording of the disaster. "Every terrifying detail all true, all lived" will burn itself "unforgettably into your brain". Kamla Persad-Bissessar, the new prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago, "has promised to bring about justice and she surely must".

Dancing with Shadows

George Balanchine, the co-founder of the New York City Ballet, was "one of the most revered figures in dance", but not everyone held him in high regard, said Sturges in the Financial Times. "Dancing with Shadows" looks at the legacy of Balanchine, who died in 1983, "because of the culture he fostered that can still be felt decades after his death". The dance company has been "mired in scandal" in recent years, with allegations of mental abuse, body shaming and sexual harassment. Journalist and producer Nicky Anderson, who talks about her own love of dance, offers a "rare and penetrating portrait of a notoriously closed world where dancers often sacrifice a personal life, bodily autonomy and their health in pursuit of their art".

Sea of Lies

This "expertly produced" podcast from CBC's "Uncover" series tells the story of Canadian con-man Albert Walker, brought to justice by the discovery of a dead man's Rolex watch, said The New Yorker. It begins off the coast of Devon in 1996, when a father and son "make a grisly discovery in the net of their trawler". Presenter Sam Mullins "patiently unspools a head-spinning mystery of keen detective work, false identities, embezzlement schemes and murder". It "makes for a vivid parable about the creative treachery of some financial crime" and how important the "guarding against it" is. Mullins promises that the story will "blow your mind". And it will.

Deep Cover

This "meaty investigative podcast" delves into the motivations and mysteries behind people who have lived double lives, said The Guardian. The most recent series tells the "audacious tale" of Sarah Cavanaugh, who was unmasked in 2022 after extracting money from the US government while posing as a decorated military veteran suffering from cancer. Cavanaugh had not only deceived institutions, but also her loved ones, even her wife. Presenters, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jake Halpern and journalist and prolific writer Jess McHugh, "go deep" into the psychological and real-world implications of this notorious deceiver.

Heists, Scams and Lies

Daily Mail crime correspondent George Odling and senior reporter Andy Jehring have spent five years investigating the £25 million jewellery robbery at Formula One heiress Tamara Ecclestone's London home in 2019, and it shows, said The Independent. This is a podcast that "puts listeners in the room" with those directly involved in the case, featuring exclusive interviews with Jay Rutland, Ecclestone's husband, the police chiefs who led the investigation, and "even acquaintances of the thieves themselves". Whether you're a "true crime fanatic" who already has thorough knowledge of the crime that was one of the Met's "most iconic sting operations" or entirely new to the case, "Heists, Scams and Lies" is sure to steal your attention.

Snitch City

The Boston Globe's investigative team is known for its exposés of institutional corruption – such as the cover-up of abuses in the Catholic Church depicted in the Oscar-winning film "Spotlight", said Sturges in the Financial Times. The newspaper's "gripping" podcast, "Snitch City", about police informants in New Bedford, Massachusetts, is very much in that tradition. Reporter Dugan Arnett spent two years penetrating crime networks in New Bedford, a city where police are locked in a fierce battle with drug gangs, and he has a rare talent for getting people to talk. What emerges is a "remarkable piece of reporting" – a multilayered story of police "drunk on power, informants hung out to dry and officials closing ranks to protect their own". The tension lies "not in exposing the bad guys, but in seeing what the so-called good guys do to get results – and the extraordinary damage left in their wake".

The Golden Toilet Heist

"I waive my usual moral objection to true-crime podcasts for 'The Golden Toilet Heist', a splendidly light-hearted caper from the BBC's 'Crime Next Door' series," said James Marriott in The Times. The case is well known: in 2019, thieves broke into Blenheim Palace and stole a solid gold toilet worth £5 million from an art exhibition. While not quite a victimless crime, it is "hard to summon much grief over it". And there is something "irreducibly British" about the tale – "like Agatha Christie or Richard Osman via Salvador Dalí". It is a story "so absurd that it has the pleasing effect of making everyone involved sound rather mad". Presenter Clodagh Stenson brings verve, humour and a welcome dose of "whimsy" to proceedings.

Bed of Lies

The terrific third series of the award-winning investigative podcast "Bed of Lies" is "not for the faint-hearted", said Marriott in The Times. Its subject is the execution-style murders of three Catholic men in Northern Ireland in the 1980s, none of whom had connections to paramilitary activity. The first episode focuses on Michael Power, who was shot dead by three gunmen who forced his car to stop as he was driving to Mass. His wife and children were with him – and one of them was horrifically injured by shattering glass. Written and presented by the Telegraph journalist Cara McGoogan, the podcast examines the devastating impact of these murders. But it also explores the links between the killers – members of the loyalist Ulster Defence Association (UDA) – and the British Army and police. "It's gripping and shocking stuff, sensitively told."

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