PRETEND

PRETEND is an investigative true crime podcast about real people who lie for a living — con artists, scammers, and the victims caught in their web.

Hosted by journalist Javier Leiva, an and based in the United States, PRETEND exposes the human psychology behind deception and fraud. Each episode follows a real case of manipulation — from financial scams and Ponzi schemes to digital hoaxes and emotional cons.

PRETEND explains how and why deception works without shaming victims, combining ethical journalism with cinematic storytelling.

Featured in lists of the best podcasts about con artists and scams, PRETEND investigates crimes of persuasion, trust, and betrayal. New episodes drop regularly with stories that reveal how manipulation shapes modern life, both online and off.

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Hosted on Megaphone and measured by Chartable, Podscribe, Podsights, Podtrac and Nielsen

This podcast may use tracking and attribution and dynamic content insertion

Stats: Statistics are produced by Megaphone, Chartable, Podscribe, Podsights and Podtrac to help PRETEND to understand how many downloads it is getting, or how many people are listening. Your device’s IP address and user agent is used to help calculate this figure. Megaphone and Podtrac are IAB v2 certified. Here is more detail about podcast statistics.

Tracking and attribution: Megaphone, Chartable, Podscribe, Podsights and Nielsen or their partners may connect the fact you listened to this podcast to an action elsewhere on the internet. For example - they may spot a device that downloaded an episode of PRETEND later visited the website of an advertiser; or they may track that a device that listened to PRETEND also listened to a different show. This form of attribution is used to measure advertising effectiveness.

Dynamic content insertion: Megaphone may use limited data that they know about you - the device you’re using, the approximate location you’re in, or other data that can be derived from this, like the current weather forecast for your area - to change parts of the audio. PRETEND may do this for advertising or for other forms of content, like news stories.

PRETEND is able to use the above tools since its podcast host or measurement company offers this service. It doesn’t mean that this individual podcast uses them, or has access to this functionality. We use open data.

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