- Con air - 15th April 2026
- Down in the dumps! - 14th April 2026
- Two plus two equals five - 13th April 2026
During 23 years with the BBC, and in a 42 year journalistic career (when he was trained to use clear and simple language, avoiding jargon), for our Editor, Welshman Phil Parry, exposing con artists was always paramount, and this is now put centre stage by a new book about one who claimed he was the son of a dead Russian oligarch.
It has always seemed important to me.
I become very angry at the exploits of con artists, and whenever I hear about them I have always felt the need to expose them if possible, either on the BBC Cymru Wales Current Affairs series I fronted for 10 years, Week In, Week Out, or today on The Eye.
They might seem like harmless fantasists, but regrettably many people have fallen victim to their lies, and lost a great deal of money.
I think they tend to be convincing, because they have an air of believing their own falsehoods.
The spotlight has been shone on this, for me, by a new book called London Falling, by fellow journalist Patrick Radden Keefe about one such dubious character Zac Ismailov.
He claimed that his inheritance was worth about £200 million, and he was battling to get it.
But it was all nonsense – his parents were not Russian, extravagantly wealthy, or dead.
Their ordeal must have been terrible, and they were worried their teenage son, given his fabulations, might have some kind of personality disorder.
I have come across this thought many times.
In fact the parents of one I have uncovered on The Eye, where the son ended up in jail for drug dealing, thought exactly this.
The man here sent threatening social media messages to me before he was put behind bars, as well as to my friends and family.
On a different occasion, when I was in television, I remember that as the camera rolled, I presented a con artist with his own (real) birth certificate, but he stared at me and declared: “That’s not me”.
On another, a con merchant became so angry with my questions that she stormed out of the interview.
You always know you are on to a winner whenever this happened, because to the viewer it was a clear admission of guilt, and you could just fire questions at the disappearing back, such as: “Why won’t you answer the question?”.
This incident was instructive because the woman at the centre of it all, had convinced any number of people she ran a reputable Public Relations (PR) business, by printing all the logos of the big companies she had allegedly worked for on her blurb, along with so-called ‘endorsements’, so the victims handed over wads of cash.
We just rung up all the firms, who said they had never heard of her!
These people are in the same category as the teenager who claimed he was the son of a dead Russian oligarch, when in fact he lived at home with his parents and brother in London.
It’s just that the sums of money involved are different…
The memories of Phil’s astonishing, decades long award-winning career in journalism (when exposing crooks and liars often dominated) as he was gripped by the rare neurological disabling condition Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in another book ‘A Good Story’. Order it now.
London Falling, by Patrick Radden Keefe is published by Doubleday and Picador.
On Monday – as new information emerges about the discredited dossier written by a spying agency linking Donald Trump with Russia, Phil looks at the importance for all journalists of how being given details from reliable sources is crucial.
