How a Canadian conwoman scammed Adelaide radio station SAFM in 2008 and her outrageous web of lies
In 2008, a Canadian woman conned SAFM and its listeners with an ever-expanding web of outrageous lies about cancer and dead fiances, even catfishing one of the hosts and spending a week with her. Read the whole bizarre story.
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It’s a jaw-dropping tale worthy of the big screen: a Canadian conwoman who tricked thousands of Adelaide radio listeners and a top-rating breakfast show into falling in love with a supposed cancer victim on the other side of the world, while catfishing one of the hosts.
It’s a jaw-dropping tale worthy of the big screen: a Canadian conwoman who tricked thousands of Adelaide radio listeners and a top-rating breakfast show into falling in love with a supposed cancer victim on the other side of the world, while catfishing one of the hosts.
Not only did Ontario native Sarah Robertson swindle $12,000 from Southern Cross Austereo station SAFM in 2008, the following year she had the audacity to visit Australia – under the guise of Sara Kelly, the “late” Robertson’s best friend – and spend a week at the Adelaide home of radio presenter Amber Petty.
On her trip, Robertson personally met the other members of the breakfast team she single-handedly deceived, Dave ‘Rabbit’ Rabbetts and Andrew ‘Cosi’ Costello, and at one point asked Petty to take her to Glenelg beach so she could “spread the ashes” of her bestie.
Her web of lies included an outlandish claim that she was a member of the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics committee, in the process getting an introduction to Petty’s circle of celebrity friends such as Ryan ‘Fitzy’ Fitzgerald, Wil Anderson and Tim Ross.
Robertson also catfished Petty into a short-lived online romance with a Canadian radio DJ friend of hers who, of course, turned out to be a figment of her imagination.
It all sounds so far-fetched … except it actually happened. Here’s how it unfolded.
The beginning – take a deep breath
In June 2008, the SAFM breakfast show received an email from a listener in Adelaide named Blaine Armstrong who asked one of the hosts, Rabbit, to do a ‘gotcha’ call on his fiancee who lived in Canada and was soon moving to Australia.
Rabbit posed as an immigration officer and told the woman, Sarah Robertson, that there had been an issue with her visa application to move to Australia.
The gotcha call on the 26-year-old yoga instructor went off without a hitch, and the bubbly Canadian kept in touch with Rabbit afterwards.
“They became very close, very buddy-buddy off-air,” Petty said.
By December 2008, Robertson told Rabbit that her plan to move to Adelaide had been dealt a huge blow – she had suddenly been diagnosed with terminal stage 4 breast cancer and was given just a few months to live.
Robertson agreed to tell her story on air, and over the following weeks, SAFM listeners fell in love with the Canadian as she gave regular updates about her declining health, always somehow managing to remain upbeat.
When Robertson said on-air that her dying wish was to fly to Adelaide to marry Armstrong in his hometown, heartbroken listeners who had followed the tragic love story rallied together.
Kids rang up and donated their pocket money – mums rang in and said they had to pull over their cars because they couldn’t drive through tears – the calls kept coming with people chipping in what they could and by the end of that morning’s show, about $12,000 had been pledged to make Robertson’s dream come true.
But before she could make the trip Down Under, she passed away in February 2009.
The SAFM hosts were devastated, as were the listeners, and there wasn’t a dry eye in South Australia when the radio station aired a farewell message from Robertson which she had recorded before her death.
The story gets complicated
After she passed, her Canadian best friend, named Sara Kelly, made contact with one of the hosts, Petty.
The two women quickly bonded over email and formed a friendship. Kelly, who said she was a writer on a popular late-night TV talk show, The Hour, in Canada, even introduced Petty to a handsome male friend of hers – again, over email – named Cory Malcolmson, who had also worked in radio.
“Sara said she had lost a bet with him and as part of the bet she had to introduce me to him,” said Petty, who hit it off with Malcolmson and began an online flirtation with the good-looking radio host.
“We started emailing each other for a few months … that year for my birthday in August I got some flowers from Cory. But we never spoke on the phone, Sara told me that Cory wanted the first time he spoke to me to be in face-to-face.
“She said he was old-fashioned like that and to be honest, it didn’t worry me that much. I didn’t care enough to be suspicious.”
The lies begin to unravel
In September 2009, Kelly told Petty she was finally ready to fly from Canada to Adelaide to honour Robertson in the city that had offered her friend so much emotional and financial support before her death.
Kelly made the journey and stayed at Petty’s house, but immediately, Petty sensed something was amiss.
“The first thing that alarmed me was she seemed very distracted and very angry and she was also very preoccupied with meeting Rabbit,” Petty said.
“She had brought over gifts that Sarah had left Rabbit and I. She had left Rabbit her old guitar because as part of their friendship, they used to play the guitar to each other down the line.”
A major reason for Kelly’s trip to Adelaide was to spread Robertson’s ashes at Glenelg beach, which was a special place for her and her SA beau Armstrong.
“This ashes ceremony was something we talked about countless times, it was so important because it was the beach where Blaine apparently proposed to her and where they had hoped to get married,” Petty said.
“So I thought it was very strange once we got to the beach, she just charged off without me, and opened the bag with the ashes and out of nowhere, a gust of wind blows, and the ashes were all over her skirt.
“I’m just going, ‘Oh my god … sh*t!’ I was too scared to laugh.”
Kelly then visited SAFM and thanked the radio employees who had done so much for her friend, also spending a weekend away with Petty in the Barossa Valley, before the pair headed to Perth together for a few days during a radio survey break.
“She had started to warm up … up until then it had been very, very difficult, I found her very hostile towards me, I found that very uncomfortable,” Petty said.
The awkwardness eventually became too much for Petty, who cut ties with Kelly in Perth, but not before she shared the contact details of some of her celebrity radio friends. Kelly had claimed she was on the committee for the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics, and was looking for Australian comedians to entertain their athletes in the village.
She told Petty she had been in touch with Nova’s Ryan ‘Fitzy’ Fitzgerald (then still on-air in Adelaide), comedian Wil Anderson and Tim Ross, of Merrick and Rosso radio show fame. She also received front-row tickets to a live taping of Rove McManus’s late night TV show in Melbourne.
“She loved Fitzy, she told me she thought Fitzy was really, really funny,” Petty said.
But after Kelly finally left Australia, some of the SAFM radio station staff, including the breakfast hosts, started to suspect something wasn’t quite right.
The money that had been donated by the listeners was gone. No one could track down Armstrong, Robertson’s fiance, in Adelaide.
The complex truth comes out
And then Petty did some of her own online detective work and by Christmas 2009, she discovered the Cory she had been chatting to wasn’t who he said he was.
Cory Malcolmson was in fact Cory Kimm, another Canadian radio DJ whose photo matched the ones sent by Kelly.
Kimm told Petty his radio station had also been scammed by a “young yoga instructor” matching Robertson’s description.
Robertson’s web of lies quickly unravelled and the truth was revealed.
Yoga instructor Robertson never existed. She was made up by Robertson, as was Malcolmson, the man Petty was flirting with online.
The whole thing was fake. Robertson had catfished not only the radio hosts but also an entire state and made off with the money donated by listeners – and there was nothing they could do about it.
“I told the (radio) bosses that we’d been completely conned. They were definitely very concerned … they said we need to contact the Canadian and Australian police to find out what can be done, we need to check births, deaths and marriages in Canada to find out if anyone died on that day over there, and we need to record a message saying something has come to light and we’ll give listeners their money back,” Petty said.
“My gripe is I read the message out on air at 6.20am – audiences listen at regular hours. It’s not the same audience at 6.20am.”
No one ended up calling and SAFM never had a record of who donated as they simply broadcast the details of the bank account that had been set up for the cause. The station later donated $12,000 to the breast cancer foundation.
But wait, a twist! And a sort of closure
Petty, who left the station in June 2010, eventually tracked Robertson down on Facebook but was immediately blocked after trying to make contact.
Incredibly, in late 2019 and several years after she uncovered the truth, Petty received an email from Robertson who finally admitted to the scam and said she wanted to “come clean”.
Now aged 46 and still living in Canada, Robertson claimed she was dealing with mental health issues and drug addition when she orchestrated the hoax for “s**ts and giggles”.
“I remember thinking this is ridiculous, how can he (Rabbetts) not know this is fake. When I want to be I can be pretty charming, I can talk myself into pretty much anything,” she told Petty in a conversation that aired on a new US podcast, Snap Judgment.
“It’s disgusting. It was horrible and I can’t do anything to take that back.
“It sounds like a cop out but I was mentally sick, I was so f … ing sick.
“Regardless of mental health or this or that or alcoholism … that doesn’t mean, well ‘Hey, I f … ed a bunch of people over, it’s okay because I’m alcoholic, or I’m an addict or I’m bipolar’.
“I’m not running away from any of the responsibilities, I did it 100 per cent. Fear has stopped me (contacting SAFM) and I don’t have $9000 (Canadian dollars) out of my own pocket to pay someone.”
Petty, who turned 50 this week, openly accepts blame for letting Robertson into her life so easily, saying: “The person I was back then, I didn’t have strong enough boundaries, I was really struggling with mental health issues and self-esteem and that’s just not me anymore.
“I’ve certainly grown a lot,” she added.
The catfishing story is a major part of Petty’s upcoming book, This is Not a Love Song, a memoir that covers her experiences on breakfast radio and her time in SA.
Now based in Melbourne, Petty said the larger-than-life tale has also attracted attention from top Hollywood management company United Talent Agency, which has expressed interest in turning the story into a TV miniseries or film.
“I look at it now like it’s a black comedy. It’s so crazy. I’m not emotionally scarred by this story … every time I talk about some of the details … it’s hysterical. The reaction I get any time I tell this story, whether I do a small version, a medium-sized version or a long version, everyone’s like, ‘oh my god, this is unbelievable, this is a movie’,” Petty said.
“It just blows everyone’s head off.”