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Con artists are terrible people who inflict pain on others, but sometimes it’s tough not to marvel at the ingenuity employed to pull off their cons.

Take notorious Australian con artist Samantha Azzopardi, who has now been sentenced to two years in prison for child theft.

The Melbourne Magistrate, Johanna Metcalf, said the motive behind the “bizarre crime” remains unclear, but it’s very much in keeping with 32-year-old Azzopardi’s relentless desire to con people.

Over the past decade, she has also gone by the names Emily Peet, Lindsay Coughlin, Dakota Johnson, Georgia McAuliffe, Harper Hernandez, Harper Hart, and many others, whilst scamming her way through Ireland, Canada, and her home country.

The BBC reports that she’s taken on a wide range of identities:

Throughout her 20s and early 30s, she repeatedly pretended to be a young teenager. And with her slight figure, soft voice and a tendency to nervously chew her fingers, she often got away with it.

Image: Facebook

For years she has been running into trouble with authorities. She has been deported from foreign countries, she has been jailed for short periods. Yet, the saga seemed never-ending.

Whilst presenting her defence, it was argued that she has been diagnosed with a severe personality disorder, as well as a condition called pseudologia fantastica, which leads one to lie compulsively.

She is certainly guilty of that, most recently during her time as an au pair for a French couple living in the state of Victoria.

Azzopardi said she was an 18-year-old au pair called Sakah, gained the couple’s trust, and then took their children more than 200 kilometres away.

Before being arrested, she had gone to a counselling centre dressed as a schoolgirl, saying she was pregnant, and had arranged for an unknown person to call the centre posing as her father.

As mentioned earlier, Magistrate Johanna Metcalf couldn’t make sense of it either.

In Ireland, in 2013, she had been found wandering around aimlessly by police, and after weeks of not talking, they assumed she was mute.

She indicated via hand signals that she 14 (she would have been around 24), and authorities believed she had been a victim of sex trafficking.

Only once her picture was released (below), in an effort to identify her, did a family contact recognise her, and she was flown back to Australia.

Image: Irish Police

She popped up in Canada the following year, claiming to be a 14-year-old who had escaped from a kidnapper, before being once again flown back to Australia.

That same year, she also convinced an American backpacker travelling through Australia that she was a Swedish royal named Annika Dekker, who had been kidnapped as a young child.

One more for the road? She duped a family from Perth into believing she was a Russian gymnast, who had lost her family to a murder-suicide incident in France.

Now she’s finally behind bars in Melbourne, but it seems unlikely she’ll stop spinning tall tales.

[source:bbc]