My wife and I have watched Catfish for years. Most episodes follow a familiar arc where someone has been talking to the love of their life for months without ever seeing them on a live video call, and you can usually guess where it’s headed long before the big reveal. Super Scam Me, the new National Geographic film from Mariana van Zeller, plays a little like Catfish if the host decided to become the person getting catfished, on purpose, with a prosthetic nose.
Becoming Mary Zell
Mariana has spent more than 20 years reporting on black markets, and she’s probably best known for Trafficked, which I wrote about when it premiered back in 2020. She has interviewed plenty of scam victims along the way, and the film opens with her talking about the reaction she hears most often when she tells people about them, which is some version of asking how anyone could be that gullible. Her answer was to find out for herself what it feels like to be the target.
So she gets a makeover, complete with a new nose and new hair, and becomes “Mary Zell,” a 50-something divorcee in Phoenix whose kids have just left for college. Watching her fill out dating profiles is one of the lighter stretches of the film. She agonizes over photo choices and questionnaire answers like anyone who has ever set up a dating profile, and she calls the project “the wildest journalistic experiment of my life.”
It doesn’t take long for the bait to work. A man claiming to be a four-star general deployed in Syria finds her on Instagram, and after she follows a few George Clooney fan accounts (she admits she’s a big Clooney fan herself), she starts getting video messages from someone who would very much like her to believe he’s George Clooney. There’s also a sarcastic talking cat that pops up every so often with statistics about scams, which sounds like a strange choice on paper but works better than you’d expect.
The People Behind the Numbers
National Geographic says romance scammers stole more than $1 billion from Americans in 2025. That number is hard to picture, so the film spends its time with some of the people behind it.
The one who stuck with me most is Leslie, a woman in Louisiana who has been a Jon Bon Jovi fan since she put his poster on her closet door in 1985. She has spent 30 years as a mortgage lender, so she knows money, and she knows math, and she still ended up sending a large amount of it to someone she believed was Bon Jovi. When Mariana asks what made her believe it was really him, Leslie admits she was “lonely, bored” and wanted it to be true. It’s a hard scene to watch, and Mariana handles it with a lot of care.
The production also had a rule that complicated things. Mariana wasn’t allowed to send the scammers any real money, and money is the only thing they want, so she had to figure out how to keep the conversations going without paying.
The Hacker in the Keyboard Vest
Help shows up in the form of Arman the Cyber, who Mariana meets on her way out of DEF CON, the annual hacker conference in Las Vegas. He’s a reformed hacker with a colorful backstory, and he’s a lot of fun on screen.
I talked with Arman for a separate piece on TechSpective that gets into the technical details. The short version is that he built a fake cryptocurrency exchange that looks real enough to fool the people who run these scams for a living. When a scammer tries to cash in, Arman gets a lot more than a name. I won’t say where the trail leads, but watching the location show up on his screen is one of the most satisfying moments in the film. Arman told me they tracked about 20 more scammers who never made the final cut.
Why It’s Worth Watching
Plenty of documentaries about scams turn into a parade of warning signs, and Super Scam Me has some of that. But Mariana keeps coming back to the loneliness that makes these scams work. A daily good morning text and someone who seems interested in your day go a long way when you don’t have much of either, and the film never treats the victims as punchlines.
The film swings between funny and uncomfortable, and there are a couple of turns near the end that I didn’t see coming, so I’ll leave those for you to find.
Super Scam Me premieres Saturday, October 17, at 9 p.m. ET on National Geographic, and it streams on Disney+ and Hulu starting tomorrow. If you have a parent or grandparent who spends a lot of time on Facebook, it might be worth watching with them.
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