Cults, Corruption and Scams: Here’s Some of Our Top Crime Stories

It’s hard to establish a “best of” list of crime reporting, because true crime stories can make pretty horrific reading. But they’re often the most impactful, and they’ve been a part of VICE since our beginnings back in the 90s. Police corruption, scammers, corporate swindles, frontline stories of cartel violence – you name it, we’ve covered it.

Take our Andrew Tate stories – our coverage of everyone’s least favourite male influencer is a classic example of our signature blend of culture and crime, like this VICE World News exclusive of his WhatsApp messages, for instance or our intimate profile from the culture desk of a young man who escaped Tate’s get-rich cult.

Then there’s stories like this Noisey classic about wannabe rapper Chad Focus, who scammed his day job to fund his music and buy fake fans. Or this VICE World News longread about how police failures led to serial killer Stephen Port almost getting away with literal murder. Or this Broadly profile of whistleblower Chelsea Manning, conducted while she was still in maximum-security jail. Whether it was on VICE, VICE News, Noisey or any of our other storied verticals of the past, we covered some of the biggest stories in the world, with access that nobody else could get. Here’s a non-exhaustive list of some of that reporting.