Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Arts myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.Audio trends come and go but stories of scammers never die. While podcasts about murder may have lost their lustre when hosts started salivating over the details of violent crime, con artist tales don’t tend to feature corpses. Done well, they can elicit feelings of astonishment (at the audacity of the ruse), suspense (will the scammers be exposed?) and superiority (we listeners would surely never fall for it). Welcome, then, The Con: Kaitlyn’s Baby, which joins the genre with promising credentials, having been made by the creators of 2023’s Love, Janessa, a breathtaking tale of catfishing involving multiple victims across several continents. But Kaitlyn’s Baby is a different beast, partly because the victims were far from random, each having been chosen for their very specific skill set. They were all doulas, who accompany mothers through labour, childbirth and early parenthood. Doulas are not medical professionals; their job is to provide emotional and practical support. But in this case, they were called on to provide a level of support they never imagined. There’s no way of talking about this series without spoilers; in fact, the biggest one is embedded in the title, which reveals that the figure at the heart of the story is a scammer. The tension lies in the what and the why — at least that’s the idea.It opens with two doulas, Amy and Katie, who agree to help Kaitlyn, a Canadian woman giving birth to a stillborn baby conceived through rape. As if that weren’t hard enough, this was during the Covid pandemic, so rather than being in the same room as Kaitlyn, the doulas were providing support over the phone. What we hear in the first episode is some of the most stressful and harrowing audio I’ve encountered as, over 10 days, Kaitlyn endures one catastrophe after another: haemorrhaging, surgery, a terminal diagnosis, another sexual assault. But then comes the twist: she’s making it all up. The woman, who we learn is a qualified social worker, told outrageously tall stories and put unwitting strangers through the emotional wringer. The police were initially unwilling to investigate, having failed to pinpoint a crime, though later changed their minds when the scale of Kaitlyn’s activities — at least 50 doulas were conned — became clear. She was eventually prosecuted, pleaded guilty and placed under house arrest.But while the first episode is a masterclass in suspenseful storytelling, subsequent instalments struggle to maintain the tension as all attempts by host Sarah Treleaven to delve into the psyche of Kaitlyn, who declined to be interviewed, draw a blank. “What does she have to gain from this?” asks one of the doulas. It’s a question that was on my mind for all six episodes. Alas, at the end, I’m none the wiser.bbc.co.uk/programmes
