As a broadcast journalist, every so often a story comes along that stops you in your tracks. That triggers such a strong emotional response that you feel compelled to find out more, to open your own investigation into what really happened and why.
For me, Amanda Riley’s cancer scam was one such story. Here is a woman who for seven years pretended she had terminal cancer and in 2022 was convicted of conning tens of thousands of pounds out of her friends and well-wishers to supposedly help pay for groundbreaking new treatment. How could Amanda lie to so many people, including her own family, her own children no less, about something so heartbreaking – and why did so many people believe her? What gripped me was never the financial side, it was the psychological manipulation.
Having grown up with a stepfather who abused and coercively controlled my mother and me, I’m acutely aware of how insidious manipulation can be, so I’m fascinated by extreme examples like this.
And as a woman embroiled in an ongoing – so far unsuccessful – IVF battle to have children of my own, I was particularly struck by Amanda’s betrayal of her young sons and stepdaughter. Not only did they live in the shadow of her ‘cancer struggle’ and the fear that they could lose her at any point, they were even told they might have to go through the invasive process of donating bone marrow to save her life.
I would love to be a mum one day so it was very hard knowing that Amanda, a former teacher living in California’s Silicon Valley, had put her own children through all this. Her story gripped me so intensely that in 2023 I released a podcast series about Amanda, which went viral and became Apple Podcasts’ most downloaded and shared show that year, before going on to create a four-part television documentary. Both are entitled Scamanda.
The TV documentary airs in the UK from tomorrow on Disney+. In it you will see me interviewing friends and acquaintances of Amanda, still coming to terms with having been duped by a woman they had considered ‘lovely’, ‘kind’ and ‘inspirational’.
In the last episode, I can be seen handing Amanda, who’s now 39, my business card outside court, following her conviction for wire fraud – receiving money into her bank account, under false pretences. She was sentenced to five years in prison.
Incredibly, although she declined to be interviewed for the TV series, Amanda and I have kept in close contact ever since. Far from shunning me for bringing her criminal behaviour to the attention of the world, she uses me as a confidante.
Broadcast journalist Charlie Webster is the presenter of Scamanda
Amanda Riley with Cory on their wedding day, a scene from the documentary Scamanda
Of course, my sympathies lie mainly with her victims; their stories are at the forefront of my mind whenever I speak to Amanda.
We’re an unlikely pairing – her a convicted fraudster from California who duped thousands of people, and me a straight-talking broadcast journalist from Sheffield, who, I’m often told, can sometimes be a bit too honest.
Still, we’ve had numerous video calls over the past three years, during which Amanda has shed many tears, telling me how she regrets her actions, that she’s ‘not a monster’ and is ‘very sorry for the hurt she caused’.
She says she should have stopped and admitted she had been lying but was scared to because it would mean ‘losing everything’. She has lost everything anyway – her home, family, liberty – and claims to regret what she did ‘every single day’.
I can also reveal an update on her husband, Cory. Since making the documentary, I have been told on good authority that he is in a new relationship, and again with a younger woman – Amanda was 12 years his junior – having filed for divorce last year.
As for her victims, some told me they will never trust their own judgment again. Given my own experiences with deception and betrayal, I was conscious that she could be trying to manipulate me as well.
With that in mind, I always questioned her words and intentions, while also trusting my own instincts. There were moments early on in our conversations where I wasn’t sure she fully grasped the severity of what she had done.
At times, it felt like she was still trying to rationalise or justify aspects of her story, and maybe didn’t see the wider picture, or how disrespectful she was to all the people who actually do have cancer, who are suffering every day, and to families grieving after the awful loss cancer causes.
But after spending so much time going back and forth with her, I do feel she sees it now – partly because of my investigation and the scale of the public response. I think when someone’s deception is exposed so widely, it forces them to confront it in a way they might not have before. With 20 years’ experience in broadcasting, including presenting for Sky Sports and releasing a BBC documentary about sexual abuse in sport that changed policy nationally and worldwide, I understand how reporting can change perspectives. I now fly between London and Los Angeles, filming and recording factual shows as well as continuing my broadcasting work.
I’ve come a long way from my early years, growing up with nothing – my parents were only 16 and 17
when I was born – and being physically and emotionally abused by my stepfather and sexually abused by my sports coach.
This adverse start has, I believe, given me the grit to achieve success in a cut-throat industry and helps make me more relatable to some of the interviewees on my shows who have also experienced adversity.
When I first heard about Amanda, I was living in Los Angeles, where I’d moved to build a podcast division for Lionsgate, writing and presenting my own shows.
American TV producer Nancy Moscatiello had been keeping tabs on Amanda for three years, and brought the story to my attention shortly before sentencing. Nancy explained that it was ten years before, in 2012, that Amanda – then 26 and married to Cory – began telling friends, and fellow members of the congregation at her church, that she had Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a cancer affecting the white blood cells.
Her lie became increasingly elaborate as word spread and people in her community would ask for updates on her treatment, while offering support.
Riley claimed to have having cancer treatment in hospital
The docuseries explores how Riley played on supporters’ empathy to con them out of thousands of dollars
Amanda began writing a blog about her ‘cancer journey’. It turned out that she had even gone to the length of collapsing, and wetting herself, in church on one occasion, so she would be rushed to hospital.
There, she took photographs of herself, wired to IV drips and holding bottles allegedly containing chemo drugs, which she would later share online, pretending they had been shot during cancer treatment. She shaved her head and spoke, movingly, about having stage four cancer.
At times she claimed to be ‘in remission’ – including two separate occasions when she announced she was ‘miraculously’ pregnant with each of her two sons. Her supporters cheered her on – only for the cancer to ‘come back’, and the fundraising for lifesaving treatment to begin again.
Amanda was very much loved, an important part of the community both in her home town of San Jose and online, where she shared the ups and downs of her ‘journey’ with her tens of thousands of followers.
Most of her supporters never suspected for a moment that she was lying. In fact, most, even those who were themselves battling cancer, found her strength inspirational. Ironically, many praised her honesty in the face of such terrible adversity.
As for when she first started receiving money from these people, her brothers started a fundraising page for her in 2012, though Amanda has made it clear to me that they weren’t part of her deception.
Amanda’s scheme continued until 2019, when it was uncovered by an investigation by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the San Jose Police Department.
In total, 349 individuals and entities were identified as having made contributions towards Amanda’s fabricated medical expenses, totalling as much as £84,000.
Much more was donated in cash and gifts by people at her church, and in her community, including airmiles for fictitious trips to New York for ‘cancer treatment’, food, subscriptions to health supplement companies and free babysitting.
Even when Amanda was charged with wire fraud in June 2020, some of her supporters found it impossible to believe she could have done something so terrible. She pleaded guilty in October 2021.
In May 2022 she was sentenced to five years in prison, with the judge ordering her to repay the full amount. That was when her victims knew she was lying.
When I learned about the case in 2021, I examined the dossier of documents Nancy had compiled on the story. I then sat for days reading Amanda’s blog posts. I couldn’t believe that it wasn’t true – the way she wrote with so many supporting pictures of her in hospital was very compelling. I even said to Nancy, ‘Are you sure this woman is lying?’ I spoke to the anonymous source who had alerted Nancy to the story and then started making contact with Amanda’s childhood friends.
According to them, Amanda was always prone to lying. They spoke of her need to impress adults and recalled her childhood bedroom containing a huge number of trophies and tiaras, marking her achievements in sport and dance.
An ex-boyfriend and friends from her college days told me she had pretended to have lupus, an autoimmune disease, as an excuse to get out of things she didn’t want to do. As far as I could tell, she had a normal, middle-class upbringing, one of four children raised by two attentive parents.
The fact there was no clear reason or motive for her bizarre behaviour made the story all the more captivating to me and it began to take over my life. I’d dream about it, wake myself up in the night, working out how to investigate the story, thinking about new leads to potential interviewees. I made the podcast first and, as a result of its huge success, ABC News commissioned the TV series, for which more victims came forward.
I believe that the fact Amanda had young children tugged on people’s heartstrings. Most who heard her devastating story wanted to do their bit, offering financial and practical support, to help her realise her ‘ambition’ to live long enough to see her ‘boys go to college’.
It’s a gut-punch that someone could conjure up such a terrible false reality, when there are mothers out there whose real illnesses have robbed them of this chance.
While making the docuseries, I was navigating an intensely difficult time personally. I was attending hospital appointments, undergoing several unsuccessful rounds of IVF and the devastating loss of a twin pregnancy, early last year. In fact, it was on a filming day for the TV documentary that I was given the heartbreaking news, 12 weeks into my pregnancy, that the heartbeats of both the twin babies I was carrying had stopped.
I wasn’t just the presenter, but also the producer, so I had to be there because I was filming that day and we had a strict schedule. I drove to the set and, without telling anyone what had happened, somehow got through the day. I then spent the whole night alone, crying in my LA rental apartment, thousands of miles from my family and friends.
As devastating as this was for me, I was determined to see this story through. I first spoke to Amanda at her sentencing, when I gave her my contact details.
Shaken and subdued, she left without saying much in response. But during one of my many communications with her in prison, I made, and kept, a promise that her sons’ faces would be pixelated on TV. I also included a statement from her, making it clear that her mother and brothers played no part in the scam.
So what, after three years of intense research, have I discovered about this woman who deceived so many? What was her motivation? The only explanation that makes any sense to me, as I’ve got to know her, is that she has a deep-seated insecurity and the attention made her feel special. It became her narrative, her reality, and she built her whole world around it.
Some have asked whether Amanda has Munchausen syndrome. Also known as factitious disorder, this is a psychiatric condition in which sufferers pretend to be sick to receive attention or sympathy.
However, despite having undergone psychological assessments, this did not form part of Amanda’s defence in court. Instead, she admitted she did not have cancer and, although I’m not a clinical psychologist, I don’t believe she has Munchausen’s.
Read More
Middle-class animal lovers like me are mired in 'pet debt'
I don’t believe it was the money that motivated her, either. Although there’s no denying that she and Cory benefited greatly from this generosity, it was never enough to mean they could stop work, or pay off their mortgage.
I’ve been contacted by many people since the podcast aired who say they also know of women – and yes, it always seems to be women – claiming to be terminally ill when they are not, either for emotional or financial gain. This is not to diminish her crimes, but Amanda was unlucky she came on to the radar of Nancy Moscatiello, who pursued the story like a dog with a bone when so many others had been taken in by the lies.
It was Nancy who reported Amanda to San Jose detective Jose Martinez. But it might surprise you to learn that it is not a crime in America to fake cancer, to lie or to traumatise the people around you.
This is when the IRS came on board, raiding Amanda’s house, carrying guns, in the early hours of one morning in 2021, to prosecute Amanda for wire fraud.
Amanda is now almost two and half years into her sentence. She is in what is known as residential re-entry management or a halfway house, preparing for her release, expected to be in December this year. Having earned time off for good behaviour, she will have served just over three years.
She is studying, having counselling, which was mandated as part of her sentence, and going through a fight to gain some custody of her boys who are in the care of her ex, Cory. Given that my podcast went viral and the docuseries will be released worldwide, I can imagine it will be hard for her to build a new life.
Everything she now says suggests that she would never attempt to con people in that way again. I do believe in rehabilitation, but I’ve no idea how easy it is for a habitual liar to reform.
I hope Amanda does decide to speak publicly once she’s served her sentence. Not to justify her behaviour but to help us understand what motivates a person to do something so exploitative.
Is there a chance that someone who craved so much attention is enjoying the notoriety it has brought her? Millions of people are now familiar with Amanda Riley’s story. But as a woman who desperately craves sympathy, being famous for being a liar seems to me like the very last thing Amanda would want.
As told to HELEN CARROLL
- Watch Scamanda on Disney+ from tonight