Fraud Alert: The ‘McMillion$’ Team Explores Another Major Scam In ‘The Big Conn’ – Contenders TV Docs + Unscripted

deadline.com:

Writer-directors James Lee Hernandez and Brian Lazarte recognize a good old-fashioned scam story when they see one.Their 2020 Emmy-nominated documentary series McMillion$ revealed how a former police officer managed to rig McDonald’s big-bucks Monopoly game in the 1990s.

Their new docuseries for Apple TV+, The Big Conn, delves into an even bigger fraud. They first learned of the story from Peter King, a fellow executive producer on the project.Contenders TV Docs + Unscripted  — Deadline’s Complete Coverage“We had dinner with him, and he said, ‘Hey, I heard about this interesting lawyer from this really small town in Kentucky, and it looks like he stole about $550 million,’” Hernandez recalled during an appearance at Deadline’s Contenders Documentary and Unscripted event. “We started looking into it, and the rabbit hole just went deeper and deeper and more insane and more outlandish.”The convicted fraudster, aptly named Eric C.

Conn, cooked up a plot to wring money out of the Social Security Disability Insurance program.“In that region of the country, Appalachia, where you have from coal mining to a lot of manual labor, there has been a lot of people who are a lot younger applying for these [disability] benefits.

And so he found a way to capitalize,” Lazarte explained. “There was a scheme that was concocted between him and a judge to essentially help push people through the system… [Conn] would financially benefit from each person who would get through.”The law eventually caught up with Conn.