How serial fantasist Samantha Azzopardi became one of Australia’s greatest con artists
The fair-haired fantasist has conned police in three countries and has more than 40 aliases. But who is serial con woman Samantha Azzopardi really?
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She’s conned police in three countries, has more than 40 aliases and has been charged with more than 100 offences.
Serial fantasist Samantha Azzopardi may well be among Australia’s greatest con artists.
But will anyone ever know who this international con artist really is?
Since first coming to police attention in 2007 in Queensland, Azzopardi, 33, has left a trail of deception and destruction in her wake.
“Her whole life is one of dishonesty and fantasy,” a lawyer once said on her behalf.
The fair-haired fraudster was most recently in court for her 99th domestic offence.
Sentenced to a three-year community corrections order after pretending to be a victim of a cult member who held her captive in a Sydney home and raped her.
Her appearance in court in Sydney came after she’d completed two years behind bars in Melbourne on three counts of child stealing while posing as a faux au pair.
In May 2021 she formally pleaded guilty to a raft of offences, including child stealing, obtain property by deception and theft, following a bizarre ruse which saw her employ fake aliases to dupe multiple families, including a basketball star and his wife.
Azzopardi was arrested at a Myer store in Bendigo in November 2019 where she was found with a four-year-old girl and a 10-month-old baby strapped to her chest.
The children were reported missing after being taken for a “picnic” with their nanny – Azzopardi – who had earlier visited a youth mental health service claiming to be a pregnant 14-year-old.
Azzopardi had earlier been hired as a live-in nanny named “Harper Hernandez” by basketball star Tom Jervis and his wife Jazze in June 2018.
The serial liar earned $6500 as a fake nanny before she was eventually fired by the family in mid-June 2019 after Ms Jervis grew suspicious of the woman living in their home.
Azzopardi also admitted to a third count of child stealing in which she posed as a “talent scout” and promised to help a Melbourne couple’s daughter land a role on the Australian version of the hit US TV show ‘Punk’d’.
The Melbourne Magistrates’ Court heard how Azzopardi convinced the parents to allow their child to travel with her to Sydney for an audition in April 2019.
During the bizarre con, Azzopardi instructed the girl to go into a Centrelink office and “was instructed to write on a piece of paper that she was seeing ghosts”.
A Melbourne magistrate said at the time the woman’s motives remained unknown, and were plainly bizarre, and sentenced Azzopardi to at least 12 months’ jail.
Prosecutor Kristie Churchill pointed out the problem facing authorities in dealing with the serial fraudster.
“There is a pattern of offending in Ms Azzopardi’s case where she moves from location to location and assumes identities and creates sophisticated backstories,” Ms Churchill said.
“We don’t know where she intends to go and what she intends to do.”
Having already spent more than 570 days behind bars since her arrest in the Bendigo mall in November 2019, the grifter was immediately eligible for release.
But it wouldn’t be long before she came to the attention of authorities north of the border.
According to NSW police, the woman contacted a youth worker months later to claim she was a teenage member of a cult.
Azzopardi told the youth worker her parents had sent her from Brisbane to live with a man who had regular non-consensual sex with her, took photos of her, and held her captive.
She used the alias of 16-year-old Eleanor Harris when she told the youth worker she sometimes slept in the park to escape her alleged abuser, according to documents tendered to the court.
The youth worker subsequently called the Child Protection Helpline, which triggered a police investigation.
Azzopardi’s scams have also made her infamous to authorities overseas with the con woman known by more than 40 aliases.
She claimed to be a sex-trafficking victim from eastern Europe, while wandering the streets of Dublin, Ireland, in 2013, accepting charity and benefits.
Azzopardi posed as a sex-trade victim in Calgary, Canada, in 2014, prompting authorities to spend $150,000 investigating who she really was, before deporting her back to Australia.
The woman also pretended to be a 13-year-old schoolgirl named Harper Hart in Sydney in 2017, again claiming to be a child sex-trafficking victim, leading to a six-month prison term for fraud.
The truth of Samantha Azzopardi’s identity is difficult to determine.
The woman had a long list of aliases, including the name under which she was charged for her most recent offences – Emily Bamberger.
Emily Bamberger is the name of a former friend of Azzopardi’s, who became another victim of her lies when Azzopardi convinced her they were being chased by a shadowy force intent on kidnapping them.
Azzopardi employed her aliases when committing crimes, which made it difficult for people to verify information she was telling them.
According to the court documents, Azzopardi was diagnosed with a condition called pseudologia fantastica, which manifests itself as compulsive and pathological lying.
At her most recent court appearance her lawyer Carolyn Shiels said there were only two options with her client: treat her mental health disorder or “lock her up and throw away the key”.
Ms Shiels said for the first time Azzopardi was owning the fact she was “desperately unwell” and had gone to her father for support while acknowledging she needed help.
Only time will tell if that is to be believed.
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Originally published as How serial fantasist Samantha Azzopardi became one of Australia’s greatest con artists
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