From The Dropout to Fyre, Inventing Anna to The Tinder Swindler, television has been enjoying a years-long relationship with the scammer. The lively Australian documentary Con Girl (Paramount+) isn’t likely to join the greats, but it does offer the astonishingly bizarre story of a woman named Samantha Azzopardi, known to various other women around the world as either Annika, Coco, Layla, Emily or Harper, among other names. These cons are so strange and perplexing that it takes four hours to try to unravel them, and though it zips through at a pace, it never quite gets to the heart of it.
It begins with the story that became known in the Irish press as “GPO Girl”. A young woman was found in a distressed state near the GPO Museum in Dublin in 2013. Refusing to speak, she indicated that she was 14, spent several weeks in a children’s hospital and through drawings implied that she was the victim of a trafficking ring. The Garda could not identify her, despite involving Interpol and the Missing Persons Bureau, and took the unusual step of releasing a photograph, with the aim of finding out who this child was. Then, says one officer, the southern hemisphere woke up.
This child turned out to be a 25-year-old Australian woman, known to the authorities as a serial con artist. From here, we dive into a long history of tall tales that are all the more baffling because they do not seem to have a purpose beyond the lies themselves. This makes it all the more confusing, and all the more disturbing.
In one case, Azzopardi pretends to be a 15-year-old gymnast with a Russian background. She is enrolled at a school in Perth and befriends teenager Hope, moving in with her family after setting up a detailed story that her parents and twin sister died in a horrible family tragedy. Hope’s parents even offer to adopt her, until an issue with suspicious documentation starts to raise the alarm. She was actually 23 at the time.
In another, she pretends to be a model agent, scouting a very young teenager on Instagram and bringing her to Sydney for a fake audition; in the end, it becomes clear that this teenager and her family are being used as part of another scam, which requires the authentic-sounding voice of a young teenager. Elsewhere, she fakes qualifications and agrees to be an au pair, or pretends to have tuberculosis, or enrols in and attends a school for children with learning disabilities, or claims that she is on the run, as her parents are spies.
You really can take your pick, but perhaps the most outlandish story told here is one involving an American student travelling in Australia, who starts to believe that she, too, is in danger from unknown enemies of Interpol, and must join the woman that she knows as Annika (who claims to be Swedish, until two Swedish travellers attempt to speak to her) in a safe house in the middle of nowhere.
Whenever you start to wonder how these victims could believe such fabrications, an expert is on hand to explain it. Vera Tobin, an associate professor of cognitive science, is particularly revealing. Her expertise is in how people construct and interpret narratives, and she explains that films, for example, have a certain way of working on the mind. She suggests that Azzopardi works like “a human page-turner”, reeling people in with small confidences, checking their susceptibility with bigger ones, before keeping the twists and turns coming. In this case, it is absolutely true that if this were a novel or a film, it would be too far-fetched to be believable. You could not make it up.
Except Azzopardi did, frequently, running simultaneous scams, with the kind of tech knowhow that impresses an expert in the field. The obvious question, of course, is why she is doing it, and keeps doing it, but here, Con Girl reaches its limits. While the effects of these scams on the victims vary, some have been terribly scarred by trusting this woman, and Con Girl gives them their due sympathy. But it tries to pin down Azzopardi by allowing a professor of psychiatry, who admits that he has never met or examined her, to offer speculative diagnoses. I am not sure how useful that is. Obviously, given the nature of the lies, we are dealing with a very troubled woman, and maybe this isn’t the point of the documentary, but perhaps some of that sympathy could have been handed out with more generosity than it is. Still, this is an odd, grimly fascinating story that has to be seen to be believed.
