Samantha Azzopardi: Woman who pretended to be a nanny waits to find out fate
A woman, who was aged in 30s when she pretended to be a high school student, went on to spin an unbelievable web of lies with new fake identities.
A fake nanny who dressed as a schoolgirl and stole children in a bizarre long-running scam can’t find somewhere to stay after she gets out of jail.
Samantha Azzopardi was due to be sentenced Melbourne Magistrates’ Court on Wednesday after pleading guilty earlier this week to three counts of child stealing, obtaining property by deception and theft.
But in a last minute twist to the saga, her lawyer Jessica Willard told the court they had been unable to get in contact with an aunt Azzopardi wants to live with on her release.
“She’s very reluctant to give the name of the person she wants to live with,” Ms Willard told the court.
Azzopardi wanted to leave Victoria and go to an aunty’s place in northern NSW but no one had been able to reach the relative, she said.
Other family members had reached out on Tuesday and a cousin had written a letter about Azzopardi’s childhood, Ms Willard said.
But prosecutor Kristie Churchill said the “authenticity of the letter was questionable” and there was no proof to confirm the woman’s relationship with Azzopardi.
She was also concerned if she was released without some form of mental health treatment she would be “set up to fail”. A report found she was an unsuitable candidate for a community corrections order.
“There’s a pattern of offending where she moves from location to location, assumes new identities and creates sophisticated backstories,” Ms Churchill said.
The 32-year-old was caught in her latest scam when she was found dressed as a schoolgirl with a 10-month-old and a four-year-old girl in a Myer at Bendigo in November 2019.
She conned the children’s French parents into thinking she was a professional au pair and told them she was taking them for a picnic.
Instead, Azzopardi took the children to a mental health clinic and told staff she was a pregnant 14-year-old who was abused by her uncle.
A staff member recognised the fraudster and called the police, who later arrested her in the cosmetic section of the department store.
She refused to give her details to officers, gave cryptic responses and locked her phone to prevent access.
It was the latest in a bizarre series of crimes that saw her steal an iPad, pretend to be a talent agent and use an alias to work as a live-in nanny for a star basketball player.
Basketball star Tom Jervis and his wife Jazze hired Azzopardi as an au pair in mid-2018 after seeing a listing in a Facebook group. She used an alias and claimed to be a 17-year-old and was “somebody who came from a rich American family”, a summary reveals.
She worked for the couple in Brisbane and moved with them six months later when they relocated to Melbourne.
But by June 2019 Ms Jervis had become suspicious of Azzopardi and fired her.
She was paid $6500 during the time in Victoria and was later charged with obtaining property by deception in relation to the fraud.
When Azzopardi left the property, her former employer discovered her driver’s licence was gone and an iPad had been stolen.
While working for the basketball power couple, the serial scammer also posed as a talent scout from February to April 2019.
She met up with a girl in February after they responded to an agency ad looking for people to be in a cartoon movie.
The conwoman told the girl she was not right for the cartoon role but instead offered to “mentor” the victim for a show called Punk’d, which was similar to the American version of the show.
In April she said there was an audition for the program in Sydney and the pair flew to the city together from Melbourne.
The day after they arrived, Azzopardi took the child to Centrelink and told her to “write on a piece of paper that she was seeing ghosts”, court documents show.
She was later charged with child stealing in relation to this bizarre trip.
This is not the first time the scammer has had run-ins with the law.
In 2013, a woman was found wandering dazed and confused along a busy shopping strip in Dublin.
Investigators initially believed she was a teenage victim of the sex slave industry but after a High Court fight the Irish police released her image.
A family member contacted police and confirmed it was Azzopardi. She was repatriated back to Australia.
One year later, Azzopardi walked into a health clinic in the Canadian city of Calgary and claimed to be a 14-year-old victim of sex trafficking.
She used the name Aurora Hepburn and told police she’d endured years of violent sexual abuse and torture.
It was another lie. She was charged with causing public mischief.
Ms Azzopardi will be sentenced for her latest round of offending on Friday after spending more than 570 days on remand.