In early 2023, investigative journalist Sharon Davis received a call from an unknown number. The caller didn’t identify herself, but asked Sharon to meet with her. She said she had “important documents” about “international corruption” to share.
Sharon arranged to meet the mystery woman at a fish market on the NSW Central Coast, hoping she’d be safe among the bustling Sunday crowds.
Sharon didn’t have to wait long.
The woman approached quickly, dressed in a white top, as promised. Her hands were shaking as she pulled a scrunched-up piece of paper from her pocket and handed it to Sharon.
“Who sent you?” Sharon asked.
“I can’t say anything else about it,” the woman stammered, “but if you read that…”
Speaking to Mamamia’s No Filter podcast, Sharon said she was struck by the woman’s demeanour.
“She was scared. She wasn't in this for a laugh,” Sharon said. “And I actually said to her, ‘You seem like a nice young woman. Can I give you a bit of advice? Don't get involved in things that you don't really understand.’”
“I understand your concern,” the woman replied. And with that, she hurried away.
Listen to Mia speak to investigative journalist Sharon Davis, who has spent the past few years working on the successful podcast Finding Samantha. Story continues after audio.
Sharon unfurled the paper to find a micro SD card inside. When she later opened the memory card with the help of an IT specialist, it was blank.
By then, Sharon’s suspicions seemed all but confirmed. There was no tip-off, no story about corruption. She was likely being teased from afar by a person whom she had been pursuing for months: the notorious Australian con artist, Samantha Azzopardi.
Finding Samantha.
Sharon Davis is one of the reporters behind the extraordinary investigative podcast Finding Samantha.
The seven-part series from Irish network RTÉ, co-hosted by journalist Nicoline Greer, traces Samantha Azzopardi’s tangled trail of fraud and deception – a peculiar case that is also the subject of a new documentary, Con Girl, airing on Channel 7 and 7plus in September.
The Sydney-born woman has been on the radar of law enforcement since 2007 when, at the age of 19, she was caught using false Medicare cards.
In the years since, she’s crisscrossed the globe from Dublin to Melbourne, Brisbane to Calgary and beyond, using more than 100 aliases, falsifying documents, duping authorities, and scamming dozens of victims along the way.
In 2010, she enrolled in a Brisbane high school, where she posed as a teen named Dakota Johnson and claimed she had been abused by her family. She took classes, received special attention from teachers, even forged friendships with other students.
In 2013, she was found wandering, distressed, outside a Dublin GPO (post office). She didn’t appear to speak English, but indicated she was 14 years old. She drew pictures for police that led them to believe she was a sex-trafficking victim. Her story was reported widely in the media, as authorities embarked on a desperate, global search for information about “the GPO girl”.
In 2014, aged 26, she walked into a health centre in Calgary, Canada, and claimed she had escaped a cult in which she had been subjected to sexual abuse. She said she was 14 years old and her name was Aurora Hepburn.
In 2016, she was found on the streets by a couple in Sydney’s west. She told them she was a teenager named Harper Hart and that she was in a US witness protection program after surviving sexual abuse. They helped her enrol in a local school for disadvantaged youth.
In 2018, she took a job with a Melbourne family as a live-in au pair for their two children. She told them she was 18 and that her name was Sakah. A month later, she walked into a mental health unit in Bendigo with the children in tow and claimed she was a 14-year-old who had been sexually abused by her uncle.
Watch: Samantha Azzopardi posing as a casting agent. Post continues below.
These are just a handful of dozens of deceptions committed by Samantha Azzopardi. In fact, in 2022, she fronted court on her 100th charge.
The fallout from her frenzied, 15-year spree has been significant.
In many cases, substantial public resources were spent on medical care and police investigations into Samantha’s false claims. The total cost for the Dublin saga, for example, including the investigation and her hospital stay, was €350,000 — roughly $573,000. (Samantha was ultimately deported to Australia after multiple people identified her via a photograph published in the media.)
Yet, unlike many con artists, Samantha’s motivations aren’t financial. She doesn’t profit from most of her scams.
So what’s in it for her? That’s one of the many questions Sharon and her colleagues explore in the Finding Samantha podcast.
By examining the con artist’s crimes and speaking to victims, expert psychologists and officials involved in her cases, Sharon said it’s clear that Samantha is charismatic and smart: “She does her research. She works out people's vulnerabilities, she works out areas of connection.” But it’s also clear that she’s vulnerable herself.
The courts have heard that Samantha suffers from multiple complex mental health conditions, including a severe personality disorder, and that she endured abuse in her formative years. (This is part of the reason Samantha has only ever received a smattering of custodial sentences.)
“Maybe [her cons] started as something to draw attention to herself. But as time has gone on, I think she does get some sort of pleasure or sense of power out of tricking people,” Sharon said.
Sharon believes she is among those to have been duped.
Since she started her investigation for the podcast, she had several engagements with people on social media who claimed to have information about Samantha. One asked her to meet, but never showed. Plus there was the mystery woman who handed her the SD card — Sharon believes she was likely another victim, conned into acting on Samantha’s behalf.
“The person who turned up, I didn’t know what their motivation was or what they'd been told about me. I still don't know that,” she said.
More recently, she has spoken to the real Samantha Azzopardi via Facebook Messenger. Their conversations have been “friendly, but guarded”. Samantha apparently refuses to speak to Sharon in person or participate in any media (though Sharon notes that Samantha appears to consume content about herself with great interest).
Despite it all, despite all the lies and all the harm she’s caused, Sharon has room for sympathy for this deeply complicated woman.
“My feeling is, it's not easy being Samantha,” she said. “I don't think that that would be a life that you would choose, if you could make choices.”
She said at one point in their Facebook exchanges, she did ask Samantha if she was getting psychological help.
“She said that she had to wait some months, because she wasn't a priority in the queue,” Sharon said. “And that alarmed me a bit, to be honest. Because if that is true, Samantha should be at the top of the priority list, because she's damaged and she causes damage. She needs help.”
Sharon and the Finding Samantha team haven’t heard from Samantha since. It’s unclear where she is now. Or should that be… who?
Con Girl – Part 2 airs Sunday, September 24, at 8.45pm, on Channel 7 and 7plus.
Feature Image: Supplied
This article was published in August 2023, and has since been updated with new information.
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