Every September, a friend from school would tell me about her summer, claiming she’d partied with Duran Duran and, a little more realistically, spent time with Nik Kershaw.
We loved hearing her stories, but it was even more fun picking them apart on the ride home. We quickly realized she was a bit like the character Jay Cartwright from The Inbetweeners – she tended to exaggerate and boast, but it was all in good fun and ultimately harmless.
While innovation often brings positive change, we’re seeing a rise in disturbing cases highlighted by true crime documentaries. Being deceived is unpleasant for anyone, but it’s especially harmful when someone pretends to be sick to profit from the kindness, fear, and generosity of others – essentially exploiting their empathy for financial gain.
The Mother of All Cons gives a jarring account of young woman Megan Bhari’s life after sharing her diagnosis of a brain tumour. Inspired by watching The X Factor, she launches a charity with her mother Jean O’Brien that, with the sterling help of One Direction, gains thousands of supporters and raises huge amounts of money.
Throughout her journey, she brightens the lives of sick children by helping them achieve their dreams, and even receives an award from Prime Minister David Cameron. But things take a turn when a parent voices their suspicion to another, saying something doesn’t seem right. The other parent admits they hadn’t considered that anything was amiss. This marks the beginning of an investigation.
Equal in its power to shock is the documentary Scamanda, the tale of Amanda Riley, a smiley Californian new mother, special needs teacher, beacon of her local church, who breaks the hearts of her entire community with news of her stage 3 blood cancer.
Over the following eight years, she collected around $100,000 in donations, supposedly to cover her medical expenses. However, a friend became suspicious and, like in a detective novel, hired a private investigator to look into things. Soon after, the IRS also began investigating her finances.
Both of these stories involve tragedy and raise two key questions: What motivates someone to do such a thing? And how are they able to continue undetected for so long? The answer to the second question is relatively straightforward. Today, with the widespread use of online platforms like blogs and social media, it’s much easier to gain public support and sympathy, extending far beyond what was possible in smaller, local communities.
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It’s much simpler to embellish stories or even make things up online, especially without facing the person you’re talking about. Fundraising sites can’t monitor all the individual requests for donations that happen daily. For example, generous people might donate to my sponsored run, even if I’m actually relaxing at home with some snacks and watching TV.
The initial question is more complex. Interestingly, both documentaries focus more on the consequences of these actions than on why they happened. When the documentaries do explore the motives, it becomes apparent that even those who commit terrible acts deserve some understanding – a nuance that clashes with the simple ‘good versus bad’ framework these sensationalized series often present.
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What’s the lesson? Trust no one? Amanda’s stepdaughter makes the point, “You don’t ever want to know that people are living in the world faking cancer.” Exactly that. I’d rather be taken for a mug any day of the week and be called naive, not unkind.
Perhaps the only comfort is that while we can all continue to exaggerate like an Inbetweener, there’s a reason such harmful cases as these still warrant their podcast and TV treatment, that is that they remain as mercifully rare as they are fascinating.
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2026-06-11 12:08