From The Mother of All Cons to Scamanda, what is the real lesson of these true crime documentaries on deception?

This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.

Every September, one of my friends from school used to appear, detailing how she’d spent the summer holiday partying with Duran Duran and, slightly more believably, “hanging out with Nik Kershaw”.

It was great fun listening to her tales and, even better, debunking them all on the bus home afterwards. Even then, we saw it for what it was; she was our very own Jay Cartwright from The Inbetweeners, guilty only of a bit of far-fetched storytelling, self-aggrandising but harmless.

At the other end of such invention is a growing number of cases finding a new and wide audience, courtesy of real-life crime documentaries. None of us likes being swindled, but it does seem a particular kind of cruelty to exploit other people’s grief, sympathy, fear and goodwill, by pretending to be ill – for money.

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.

Along the way she helps sick children realise their own dreams and receives a special award from then-PM David Cameron. Until, one day, one concerned parent tells another, “I smell a rat,” and he replies, “It never crossed my mind there was a rat to be smelled.” The game is afoot.

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 next eight years, she raises $100,000 in donations, seemingly in support of her treatment, until one friend smells a similar rat and, it being America, finds her own Jim Rockford-type private investigator to rake through the weeds. And, it being America, the IRS isn’t far behind.

While one of these stories brings its own tragic twist, they both ask two questions: Why do such a thing? And how do they get away with it for so long? The second is easy to answer. In an era of online blogging and sharing, it’s possible to generate widespread sympathy far beyond the local communities of the past.

And it’s also easier to exaggerate, invent and disseminate without having to look your witness in the eye. Fundraising platforms can’t possibly legislate the thousands of personal appeals made every week. Kind people could easily donate to my charity run while I’m at home eating Skips, watching Columbo.

The first question is much harder; it’s revealing that neither of these documentaries spends as much time on the motives for such actions as on their impact; when they do, it becomes clear these agents of shocking acts deserve sympathy too – but that doesn’t sit easily in the binary world of perpetrator and victim that these increasingly dramatic series seek to create.

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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