Fraudster swindled huge sums from victims while working in the mortgage industry
An American woman who stole a six-figure sum from clients while working as a mortgage adviser in Northern Ireland has been handed a 40-month prison sentence.
Marianne Smyth, a 56-year-old employed as an adviser during the 2000s, was described by a judge at Downpatrick Crown Court as an “incorrigible fraudster” who obtained substantial sums of money for investments she didn’t make.
She was convicted of stealing £115,000 from four people she provided mortgage advice to between 2008 and 2010. One victim said during a four-day trial in September that he gave Smyth over £72,000 for a buy-to-let house to help fund his children’s college education, but the money was never invested.
She was ordered to serve half her term in custody and half under licence, and faces deportation back to the US.
Smyth initially paid money to customers directly from her own accounts to maintain the pretence that their investments were profitable, according to the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI).
She was extradited from the US to Northern Ireland last year to face charges of theft and fraud, and reportedly claimed she had fled Northern Ireland because she was on the run from the IRA.
Smyth, originally from Bangor, Maine, was arrested by US law enforcement and had been held in custody since February 2024. In 2019, she was sentenced to a five-year prison sentence for conning Johnathan Walton, a TV producer, out of nearly $100,000.
Walton later reported his interactions with Smyth on a viral podcast Queen of the Con: The Irish Heiress in 2021, and passed her details to authorities in Northern Ireland after being contacted by listeners who gave him her US address.
But he expressed disappointment on Saturday at the decision to hand her a jail term of only 40 months. “She scams or tries to scam everyone she meets, and she will never change,” he said in a statement.
Walton alleges that Smyth also started a Satanic church to financially exploit other victims and said she impersonated actress Jennifer Aniston in an attempt to convince a producer to give her millions of dollars for a fake business deal.
Judge Sandra Crawford, handing down the sentence in Downpatrick on Friday, said Smyth was “practised in inveigling [herself] in the lives and financial affairs of others, expert in deception and indifferent to whether the victims are friends or strangers.”
