Australian con-woman Samantha Azzopardi will be back to her old tricks in no time.
She's currently eligible for parole after her latest stint in prison, and if her history shows us anything it's that she's seemingly incapable of stopping.
Time behind bars doesn't seem to deter Azzopardi, now 36, from her elaborate scams.
Nothing does.
Listen to The Many Faces Of Samantha Azzopardi. Post continues after video.
She returned to her old ways when she was released from Canadian detention in 2014 after being charged with 'public mischief' for telling police she was a victim of sexual assault.
She returned to her old ways when she spent a year in prison in 2017 after she posed as 13-year-old Harper Hart and tricked a school for special needs in Sydney into caring for her.
She returned to her old ways after serving two years for kidnapping two children from Melbourne in 2019 while pretending to be a teenage au pair, taking them to a mental health unit in Bendigo where she claimed to be a 14-year-old abuse victim.
She's just served her time after pleading guilty to claiming to be 17-year-old Hattie Leigh, a Belgian victim of domestic violence who obtained $20,000 worth of aid from family support services in Victoria.
With more than 100 criminal charges, 55 international convictions, hundreds of victims and at least 75 aliases - Azzopardi can't be stopped.
Authorities have been trying for 15 years, but she refuses psychological treatment, and jail time doesn't seem to phase her.
But why do people keep falling for her tricks? Because she's very, very good at lying.
Watch: The trailer for Con Girl. Post continues after video.
She convinced 15-year-old Hope and her family that she was a teenage Russian gymnast, faked her entire family dying in a murder-suicide in France, and then convinced Hope's family to adopt her, before a forged birth certificate was her undoing.
She convinced 18-year-old Emmy that she was a Swedish backpacker, on the run from 'bad guys' because her parents were international spies. She convinced Emmy to stay in a shipping container in remote NSW for 10 days because it was a 'safe house' before convincing her to follow her to Canada. She very nearly kept Emmy in her web for longer, until two Swedish travellers tried to speak to her in their native tongue while they were staying in a hostel, and she baulked.
Azzopardi is also very good at avoiding photos, which means her face isn't as well known as it should be. The three images you see in the top of this article are among the best we've got.
One was taken, sneakily, by police in Dublin in 2013 as they tried to work out who the 14-year-old abuse victim sitting in the children's hospital bed was. They'd found her wandering distressed in the city-centre, and spent nearly a month investigating until they snapped this photo and authorities in Australia recognised her.
At the time she was 25, and Ireland swiftly deported her home to Sydney.
The two other photos were taken by the Bevege family, who Azzopardi tricked in 2018 while posing as a New York model scout called Coco.
She lured 13-year-old Georgia by promising her a model job, forcing her to practice her 'acting skills' by walking into office buildings pretending she was an abuse victim.
As Executive Producer of Con Girl Paula Bycroft told Mamamia's True Crime Conversations, "our expert psychiatrist said that maybe she gets to a point where she can't be a teenager anymore, and so she's involving younger children [to live that fantasy through].
"The problem is that once you involve kids, it can be very dangerous, and that's where her cons weren't just hurting young women, they were hurting children."
Psychologically it's hard to understand what's happening, because Azzopardi is very good at duping people. Even experts.
But Psychiatrist Jacqueline Rakov, who assessed her for a year, told a court she found her to have pseudologia fantastica, a "rare but dramatic" psychiatric disorder involving an "extreme type of lying," as per The Guardian.
Professor of psychiatry Richard Frierson MD, studied Azzopardi's life and crimes for Con Girl, and he suspects something traumatic might have happened to Azzopardi when she was a teenager, which would explain her desire to continue to embody someone between the ages of 14-17.
Azzopardi doesn't financially gain from her cons. She wastes money in terms of police time and things like food and accommodation from refuge and mental health services, but she's not trying to steal money. That's not her goal.
Sometimes she takes her victim's ID or an iPad here or there, but Frierson says her main 'why' seems to be her "addiction to deception" further proven by her honing her skills over the years to juggle several cons at once, making them overlap and interact with each-other.
In recent years, she's posed a fair bit as an au pair. Only time will tell what her new con will be but Bycroft thinks she "uses her time in prison to research new scams".
We can only hope that by continuing to tell her story, show her face, and expose her lies, more and more people will recognise her before being duped.
Because the people she's conned before, are still dealing with the consequences years later.
"The problem with being the victim of a con is that you lose trust in everyone, and that was the hardest part for all of the victims to agree to trust us to tell their story," Bycroft told True Crime Conversations.
"The hardest thing is the shame, because you're embarrassed that you fell for the con, and you also think you're the only one. Often, a lot of these victims thought they were the only one who was stupid enough to be conned by Samantha.
"But unfortunately, it happened all around the world, and as we discovered in the documentary talking to experts, anyone can be conned if you get the story right."
Feature image: Dublin police/Facebook.
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