After a string of dramas about real-life scams, I was beginning to wonder if anywhere was safe. We’ve had Inventing Anna, the story of Anna Sorokin/Delvey, who posed as a wealthy heiress among Manhattan’s elite, largely at their expense. Then there was The Dropout, about Elizabeth Holmes, currently in jail for defrauding those who invested in her bloodtesting company, which could not do the things it claimed. The Tinder Swindler concerned conman Simon Leviev/Shimon Hayut, who posed as the son of a diamond mogul and persuaded marks to “lend” him huge sums of money to save him from supposed enemies. As for Bad Vegan, you’ll have to look that up yourself – it begins with a promise to make a restaurateur’s dog immortal and beyond that I do not have time or space to explain.
The answer, thanks to Vanishing Act, appears to be no – nowhere is safe. This is the first Australian contribution to the true-scam drama genre to make it to our shores. It traces the disappearance of Melissa Caddick, a financier who vanished three days after the Australian Securities and Investment Commission raided her Sydney home. Four months later, her badly decomposed foot (confirmed by DNA testing) washed up on Bournda beach on the New South Wales coast 500km away from where she was last seen. In the meantime, it was discovered that she had been running a Ponzi scheme for over a decade, which, according to the show, took in more than A$40m (£20.5m) not just from strangers, but friends and family – including her parents – and left them all financially ruined.
