Fraud and Scams 36 Law & Order episodes
Swindles, embezzlement, insurance fraud, identity theft and the con artists behind them.
- Season 1 · Episode 5
Happily Ever After
A well-off couple is ambushed in a garage near their home, and the surviving wife’s account starts to look too tidy.
- Season 2 · Episode 9
Renunciation
A hit-and-run that a witness says was deliberate points to a teacher’s affair with a 16-year-old student.
- Season 3 · Episode 20
Securitate
A Romanian immigrant’s murder exposes his brother, a former secret police officer, and the brother’s own killing brings a novel insanity defense.
- Season 4 · Episode 16
Big Bang
A mail bomb kills a physicist’s estranged wife, and the trail leads through a particle accelerator to a jobless scientist with a grudge against her husband.
- Season 5 · Episode 1
Second Opinion
A teacher with breast cancer dies after skipping surgery for an unapproved treatment, and the DA’s office tries to hold the woman who sold it responsible for her death.
- Season 5 · Episode 9
Scoundrels
A lawyer’s murder exposes a scheme to fleece victims of a savings and loan swindler, and McCoy goes after the swindler himself.
- Season 6 · Episode 11
Corpus Delicti
A dead show horse leads detectives to a horse dealer who preys on wealthy widows, and McCoy tries to convict him of killing a woman whose body has never been found.
- Season 7 · Episode 2
I.D.
An unidentified woman is found shot in an office building elevator, and the prosecution is upended by a judge who turns on the DA’s office and by the question of who the victim really was.
- Season 7 · Episode 4
Survivor
A rare-coin dealer is killed in his gallery, and the hunt for a missing collection leads from a flamboyant tycoon to the daughter of a Holocaust survivor.
- Season 7 · Episode 11
Menace
A young woman goes over the side of a Brooklyn Bridge ramp while fleeing a man after a fender-bender, and her death turns out to be tied to a suspicious factory fire.
- Season 7 · Episode 12
Barter
A co-op treasurer is shot in her building’s garage, apparently mistaken for a neighbor, and the killings lead back to a lender who holds life insurance on his borrowers.
- Season 7 · Episode 13
Matrimony
A wealthy philanthropist is strangled in his townhouse, and suspicion falls on his 22-year-old wife, a former stripper whose marriage was arranged by his lawyer.
- Season 7 · Episode 23
Terminal
A gunman fires on guests leaving a charity cruise, and the governor takes the case away from DA Adam Schiff when he will not pursue a capital charge.
- Season 9 · Episode 4
Flight
A child’s death from an exotic bacterium first looks like bioterrorism, then points to his father, and McCoy charges the company that mailed the germ to get the proof he needs.
- Season 9 · Episode 7
Venom
A paid society escort is shot outside a charity concert, and the detectives learn the bullet was meant for the wealthy widow beside him, whose secret young lover turns out to be her son.
- Season 10 · Episode 8
Blood Money
An elderly man dies in a taxi from a stab wound and a hidden gunshot, and his death exposes an insurance company’s effort to bury policies sold to Jewish families during World War II.
- Season 10 · Episode 16
Trade This
The shooting of a junior broker uncovers a rigged internet stock, a staged harassment settlement and a mob family’s missing millions, and McCoy builds a death-penalty case with gangsters as his victims.
- Season 11 · Episode 19
Whiplash
An undocumented day laborer collapses and dies a day after a staged car accident, and the insurance scam that put him in the car leads from a moving-company boss to a chiropractor and a personal-injury law firm.
- Season 12 · Episode 21
Foul Play
A retired detective turned private eye is shot with his own gun in an empty Washington Heights apartment, and the case leads into a youth baseball league fielding an overage star.
- Season 13 · Episode 5
The Ring
Remains dumped in a Hell’s Kitchen lot belong to a young woman everyone believed died in the September 11 attacks, and a $40,000 ring ties her to a married man from a powerful political family.
- Season 13 · Episode 6
Hitman
A Manhattan contractor is shot in what looks like a professional hit, and a trail of money and phone calls leads from his unfaithful wife and her lover to a hit man already in federal custody.
- Season 14 · Episode 6
Identity
The murder of a man who hid his layoff from his family exposes an identity-theft scheme that cost an elderly Harlem veteran his home, and the case turns on whether the old man is fit to stand trial.
- Season 14 · Episode 9
Compassion
A psychic grief counselor dies of cyanide at lunch, and the trail leads to a celebrated pediatric oncologist he once robbed under another name, leaving McCoy to decide whether she wanted revenge or has lost touch with reality.
- Season 14 · Episode 19
Nowhere Man
The murder of a veteran appeals prosecutor reveals that he spent two decades in the DA’s office under a stolen identity, and a mob case he quietly dropped ten years earlier leads McCoy to his killers.
- Season 14 · Episode 22
Gaijin
A Japanese tourist is fatally shot on an empty Manhattan street, and her husband’s story of a Black robber collapses only after he has gone home to Tokyo to denounce New York.
- Season 15 · Episode 14
Fluency
During a flu vaccine shortage, patients who believed they had been immunized start dying, and detectives follow a chain of black-market middlemen to a counterfeiter who filled the vials with salt water.
- Season 15 · Episode 22
Sport of Kings
A Panamanian jockey who can’t get rides is shot dead outside a downtown bar, and his curiosity about a gifted colt leads to the horse’s owner, a company chief who bought it with his employees’ retirement money.
- Season 16 · Episode 2
Flaw
A con man shot in an empty office tower dies with Detective Olivia Benson’s number on his phone, pulling SVU into a case against a mother and daughter who have slipped away from Benson before.
- Season 18 · Episode 6
Political Animal
Three men are shot dead in a Manhattan apartment, and a trail that first leads to a closeted state assemblyman ends with a celebrated political fundraiser who is living under a borrowed name.
- Season 18 · Episode 12
Submission
A dog-fighting bust turns into a murder case when one of the dogs turns out to have swallowed a woman’s finger, and a reporter romancing the suspect complicates Cutter’s prosecution of the missing woman’s husband.
- Season 18 · Episode 14
Burn Card
Ed Green shoots the suspect in a referee’s murder outside an illegal gambling club, and an Internal Affairs probe exposes his old gambling habit and lands him on trial for murder.
- Season 18 · Episode 17
Personae Non Gratae
A car-stereo worker beaten to death had tried to expose his boss’s online romance with a girl whose messages were really written by her mother.
- Season 19 · Episode 11
Lucky Stiff
When the owner of a struggling trucking firm is shot in the street, the trail leads to a green-energy broker who sold the same trucks again and again, and the broker’s own murder after his conviction leaves a fortune for his heirs to fight over.
- Season 19 · Episode 14
Rapture
The murder of the man behind a website that emails unbelievers after the rapture leads to stolen gold, a Christian charity that sends Jews to Israel, and a suspect who takes shelter in Iran’s diplomatic mission.
- Season 20 · Episode 2
Just a Girl in the World
The murder of a crime scene investigator seems linked to a livery driver’s attack on a young music writer, until Lupo’s affair with that witness and a faked lab result turn the case around.
- Season 20 · Episode 11
Fed
A community organizer found dead with “FED” inked on his chest turns out to have been a conservative secretly filming his liberal employer, and the case widens into embezzlement and an affair at the top.