When I worked at the newspaper in Wagoner, Okla., a suburb of Tulsa, an elderly woman would wonder around the town usually on cold and/or rainy days offering to sell crocheted items so she could “get home.” Then, she’d cry crocodile tears.
She came in at least two or three times when I was at the office and at least another time when I was out but I heard about it later. We were a block away from the police department and in the other direction a block away from the store the mayor at the time owned and operated. She was a bold woman to pull this scam but I think because she was older, maybe she thought the authorities would go easy on her if she was caught. Even the police said they’d often give people gas money if they need it.
It’s hard to trust a lot of people. Those people who hang around the side of the road near on/off ramps of highways or in shopping centers near the main road holding up signs are panhandling. But are they really stranded? I’ve heard a lot of stories. Maybe you have too. People have gotten smarter with it mainly using the fact they’re elderly or even stolen valor claiming to be military veterans.
The sad part is they hurt other people who really need help. So a lot of those people don’t even bother to ask. It’s even worse when someone fakes a huge illness to get money out of people. Amanda C. Riley spent many years pretending she had blood cancer Hodgkin’s lymphoma and then lung cancer. She was able to scam over $100,000 from people by soliciting funds over social media and through her blog titled “Lymphoma Can Suck It.”
Amanda forged medical letters and even staged photos inside hospitals and physicians’ offices. Having spent many times in hospitals when my ex was in poor health, my guess is she did this very quickly by walking through a medical facility and finding a room to snap a quick selfie. Unlike the Gypsy-Rose Blanchard case, Amanda didn’t go to many extreme lengths.
But the four-part documentary series Scamanda which aired on ABC doesn’t answer these questions. How did so many people get so easily fooled? The filmmakers argue that Amanda and her husband, Cory, used the gullibility of church people to give her the benefit of the doubt when they didn’t see her health getting worse. We always want to put on our best behavior but I remember when the Masonic Lodge made a donation to a young man who had cancer, he looked like he could barely hold out his hand to accept the check. He also looked like he had used up all his energy to put on blue jeans and a shirt. Sadly, he passed away some time after.
I think part of the reason we don’t get those hard answers is that many of the people who were fooled want to remain anonymous. It’s one thing to give someone a few bucks just once because you think they’re dying of cancer. It’s another to keep doing it over and over and you wonder why they keep putting on a happy face. But it’s obvious Amanda wanted to have her cake and eat it too as the old saying goes. She wanted to appear to be sick, but she wanted to continue to live an average lifestyle.
As one former friend recounts her coming over to go swimming mere hours after she claimed she had fluid drained from inside her skull. You don’t go swimming after something like that. Chemotherapy and radiation treatment drains your body. It also disrupts your gastrointestinal system.
Steven Jay Russell, a real-life convicted con artist played by Jim Carrey in the movie I Love You Philip Morris, pretended to have AIDS to be released from a Texas prison. He periodically cut back on the amount of food he ate so he could lose weight and even took laxatives to keep giving himself diarrhea as it’s a symptom of the disease.
It doesn’t appear that Amanda was willing to go to the full extremes. If she was, she might have been able to get away with it farther. The documentary even argues Cory helped Amanda with her website and illness so he could lower child support payments to a daughter from a previous marriage. But I think so many were fooled because Amanda put on a good image of herself as a Christian woman who worked in education. She also used her good Christian woman looks to sucker people in.
The documentary is based on the 2023 podcast of the same name that Charlie Webster did. But that one was more detailed. This feels rushed when it should be more informative and repetitive at other times. I feel the people behind this documentary either realized the people being interviewed were saying the same thing and they didn’t have enough material or the legal department kept some of the juicy stuff out.
This could’ve very easily been a single 20/20 episode and covered the same topics and subject covered. Nothing here really stands it that you probably couldn’t find in a quick Google search.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 