Streaming tips

Cons and kidnappings

The Program

As a teenager, Kathleen Kubler was handcuffed by strangers and sent to Academy at Ivy Ridge, a boarding school that promised to “fix” kids with behavioral issues. In this threepart series, Kubler and other former students detail the abuses they endured, shedding light on an industry built on the conning of parents. Netflix

American Nightmare

In 2015, a Vallejo, Calif., woman and her boyfriend were accused of taking a page from the hit novel Gone Girl by staging her abduction. This three-part series recounts how the truth proved more disturbing. Netflix

Chowchilla

In 1976, gunmen hijacked a California school bus, transferred the driver and all 26 children into a moving van, then buried the vehicle with dirt. In this documentary, the now-grown child survivors reveal the incident’s devastating long-term effects. Max

The Puppet Master

The details of any one of Robert Hendy-Freegard’s family-wrecking cons would be unsettling. This series focuses on two cases in which the British swindler coerced victims into leaving their families and handing him control over their lives. Netflix

The Way Down

Thinness was next to godliness for Gwen Shamblin Lara, a 1990s weight-loss guru turned religious cult figure who, through her Tennessee megachurch, preyed on members’ self-esteem to accumulate power and empty their bank accounts. Max

LuLaRich

This four-part documentary series is as colorful as the garish leggings popularized by DeAnne Brady, the platinumhaired con woman at its heart. Brady promised stay-at-home moms extra income as sellers of those leggings. But the LuLaRoe brand turned out to be a pyramid scheme. Prime