Original subtitles

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[ Telephone rings ]

-Nancy Moscatiello called me and said, "Hey,

I got this story that you might be interested in."

And she had a lot of energy behind it.

When she was telling me what was going on and all the dynamics,

I thought, "Okay, this is interesting, no doubt."

-I sent links to the blog, links to the research I had done.

-You look at a case from two ends,

where if it is true, how do I prove it?

I just thought this is going to be quite a feat

to get above the barriers,

like the HIPAA laws that we have here in California

that protect patient confidentiality.

But what can we lay down in front of us

that says this is true?

Amanda's blog had a lot of information

and it was showing a lot of her personality.

-"To lighten the tension and mood,

I brought Nerf guns to the Oncology wing last week,

and we made the doctors and nurses our targets."

-She had all the right components for the whole

victim-of-cancer persona,

and she was sharing different stages

of her sickness and recovery

and back to sickness and back to recovery.

♪♪

-When you look at Amanda's blog,

it really is hard to believe that she doesn't have cancer.

-There's all these pictures of her in the hospital,

with a port, with IVs. You name it, she's got it.

And at the same time,

if you take the time and look really closely,

that's when it becomes apparent how she was fooling people.

You know, holding up the medicine,

but just turning it enough

that you couldn't see whose name was on it

or you couldn't make out

distinguishing marks on them to know, like,

was it that medication or not?

Everything was just slightly off with what she would post.

But Amanda would go to the hospital.

She would check herself in, so to speak.

When you go to an E.R., you're telling them what's wrong,

and then it's their job to figure out

or treat those symptoms.

And I believe that's -- that's how easy it was.

And once she was in there, you know, she could do things,

you know, the average person wouldn't.

But if you're looking to fake cancer, you know,

the world's your oyster in a hospital.

[ Camera shutter clicking ]

-Amanda was getting these pictures by going into

the hospitals for different things,

by going to the emergency rooms and hospital appointments,

and she took advantage of that clinical setting.

-It's not that hard to keep a gown,

take tubing, take, you know, gauze pads.

It's not that hard to have medical supplies.

You can order them online.

There's a lot of ways that you can make it look legitimate.

-Sometimes the people who want to really push something as true

will make it big.

And by putting all this information out there,

nobody's going to second-guess it.

In this case, she had a following in that church

and the church was really big.

I thought, "Wow, this is -- this is on another scale now."

-I mean, how -- how could you not believe in God

just looking at this room? I mean, oh, my goodness.

-Yeah, it's incredible.

-She knows the power of her appearance and her personality.

[ Applause ]

-I just love you. I really do.

-She knows the power of social media.

And it made me want to call the different organizations

that she had named, like the Lymphoma Leukemia Society.

♪♪

So I called them, and they said the thing

that I thought everybody else is saying to themselves.

Why would somebody fake cancer?

And I say, "Okay, but that aside,

what's your criteria to support somebody

or to have that person be your front person

to get people to donate to your organization?"

And they wouldn't answer that question.

And I thought, "That's perfect. It's a perfect crime."

♪♪

[ Horns honk ]

-In the fall of 2015,

Amanda was still saying she was in a clinical trial at Columbia,

in New York City.

-"After getting poked, prodded, and scanned all morning,

I had a 2-hour break to allow enough time

to get from the main hospital to the clinic from the shuttle."

-She said it was for the drug Keytruda,

and it was coming up on Thanksgiving and Amanda

had posted about how her doctor was so fantastic

because he said, "You don't need to come to New York

for the holidays.

I'm going to ship you the drug Keytruda,

and you can do the clinical trial at home in California."

-"I thought giving myself injections

would be a lot scarier than it was.

It was actually really easy and relatively pain free

using my picc line."

I'm like, "This is ridiculous."

So I contacted Columbia, and they said that's absolutely,

no way that would happen.

Keytruda has to be reconstituted,

it has to be administered by a nurse oncologist.

Especially in a clinical trial,

everything is monitored, everything is recorded.

Not to mention, they said

like, "We are not doing a trial on Keytruda now."

When I saw the picture of her in

her bathroom claiming to self-inject chemotherapy,

I remember sending that over to Detective Martinez right away,

and he said, "Well, I don't know what else to say.

I mean, now she's...

she's self-injecting chemotherapy at home."

♪♪

-Detective Martinez was doing everything he could

to try and look into Amanda.

All he needed to know was, does this woman have cancer or not?

But because of HIPAA laws,

Detective Martinez could not access her medical information.

-The doctor has a right to know.

An investigator doesn't have a right to know.

So it became her shield because it's so hard to get beyond.

So at that point, I wanted to show my cards a little bit.

Amanda didn't know that I was looking at her.

So I decided to go to the church

and lay out this possibility

that their darling is possibly scamming them.

-Don't ignore Jesus because he is always there.

And it would be unfortunate if he brought you your miracle

and you weren't watching.

[ Cheers and applause ]

-Can we give her a hand, y'all? Come on. That's...

♪♪

♪♪

-So I went to visit the pastor.

But he deferred to his daughter, who was an attorney.

My hope was to just prod them a little bit.

"I'm thinking maybe you guys are being scammed,

I don't know, but how would you know?"

Right? I wanted them to answer me like, "This is how we know."

But I left with nothing.

♪♪

♪♪

-I watched Amanda on a stage talk about her illness,

and I wanted to be loved just like that.

To be perfectly honest, I was struggling in my own way.

We prayed for a lot of things -- the difficulties in our lives,

the struggles we were facing,

but consistently we prayed for Amanda.

♪♪

-My two goals is to see what the church is going to do

in reaction and to see if they're going to contact her

and start her ball rolling and then see what she's going to do.

She obtained an attorney and the attorney contacted me.

He says, you know, "Hey, this is my client.

We heard that you were looking at her investigatively."

And to just kind of leave her alone.

I said, "Okay, well, I just have one question.

It's pretty simple. Does she have cancer?

I can close this case if you can show me something

that can be validated.

But if you can't, this is going forward."

And some time passed.

And then he e-mailed me and say, "Hey, I got the proof.

It says my client is sick.

And here's the doctor's note."

He e-mailed it to me.

[ Mouse clicks ]

It was super, super brief.

And then the doctor's signature on the bottom.

I researched the doctor's name.

And I contacted Kaiser Investigations

to question the legitimacy of the letter.

They were super protective.

But he said, "There was a letter sent to her.

But it wasn't for that."

Now I have a fraudulent doctor's letter.

And I thought "Wow!"

"We got ourselves a case."

[ Camera shutter clicks ]

♪♪

♪

♪♪

-Detective Martinez has tangible information

where he knows Amanda is lying.

And then he has another breakthrough with City of Hope,

which is a hospital that Amanda said she was at on her blog.

-It was a cancer-specific hospital.

I made a phone call and said, "I'm just trying to verify

whether or not this information in this blog is correct.

Can you just tell me whether or not this person is a patient?

If she's not a patient,

we're not breaching a confidentiality."

And they said, "She has never been a patient here.

She's not scheduled to be a patient here

and never was."

So it was another break.

So it was starting now to stack up.

I just don't know how far she's taken this now.

I need a bigger reach.

[ Dog barking ]

-I had been talking to my father-in-law,

who was a retired IRS agent.

And I was telling him the story

I was working on about Amanda Riley,

and all the money she was raising.

She has this website, the supportamanda.com.

And he said, "Well, that's wire fraud."

-The federal reach is going to be better

because if I am limited to San Jose,

what's happened here might limit the scope of what I can prove.

But the federal is going to cover the whole blanket.

I thought if the IRS can run with this

and possibly get a conviction on a federal level,

that's going to be the best-case outcome.

-Arlette interview, take one. Mark.

[ Clapperboard clacks ]

-My name is Arlette Lee. As a IRS Special Agent,

my job is to work financial investigations.

We're like the FBI, with a badge and a gun,

car with the lights and sirens, the bulletproof vests.

But our focus is on financial crimes.

And what I do is I get the facts.

I called Nancy.

She did her homework on this case,

and she was passionate, extremely,

extremely passionate about this case.

-Neither of us could believe that someone would

fake cancer for -- for gain, for benefit like this.

And she said, you know, "Let me do some digging on my end

and see if this is a case that we would take."

-It wasn't the large dollar amounts

that we would normally be working.

And so Detective Martinez

and I went down to the U.S. Attorney's Office

and kind of discussed a little bit about the evidence

we had so far, and after, you know, 30,

45 minutes of giving him the information we had,

he said, "Okay, I think we'll open this case."

And he told me, "This is a righteous case."

-Arlette and I agree that the IRS will take

over the investigation.

And they run with it.

♪♪

-I subpoenaed every medical facility

that she listed in her blogs, trying to tie down,

was there anywhere that she may have received treatment

that showed that she had cancer?

-I remember her calling me

when the medical records finally came in,

and I thought "Wow."

-There were years of medical records,

going back to the first point in time

in which she claimed to have cancer.

We needed to prove the fraud, the lies.

Was gonna be in those medical records.

And it was thousands and thousands

and thousands of pages of records that I went through.

[ Monitor beeping ]

The allegation was that she was faking cancer

and getting donations based on that information.

And there was nothing in her medical files

that showed that she had cancer,

was diagnosed with cancer or was treated for cancer.

-When you look at all the things that Amanda did

to convince people that she had cancer,

you do wonder what kind of person could do this.

Who was Amanda before all this began?

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-Okay.

-What was the worst day of your life?

-The day that I got diagnosed with cancer

and the day that I found out that I had terminal cancer,

because they were separate days,

but kind of revolve around the same thing.

-Cut. -I did it. Yes.

-What surprised me is that it went on for so long

and the lengths that she went to fake the cancer.

Shaving her head to all of the photos

that was on her blog of her in emergency rooms.

Why would somebody want to fake such a horrible disease?

♪♪

-I've talked to people that knew her in high school.

A friend of hers had sent her senior picture.

And I saw the quote and just sat there laughing.

It was just like that's Amanda.

♪♪

-Amanda, so, there's a lot of people in here

who know you, clearly. I mean,

you're the queen of the house and we love you dearly.

[ Crowd cheers ] But more so than that,

why don't you kind of give us a little bit of background

on your childhood before we dive into the deep stuff,

kind of how you were raised? -Sure.

I grew up a really good childhood.

I had a gr-- I have a great life.

Um, I grew up in Southern California.

[ Scattered cheers ] Whoo!

Um, normal thing, went through high school,

went through college,

taught special ed, got married, had babies,

all the normal stuff.

-It was really important for me to dig into Amanda's childhood.

-One thing you guys might not know about me

is I didn't grow up knowing God.

-So, I wanted to speak to people that knew her when she was

younger and start to piece together

where these patterns of behavior began.

♪♪

[ Indistinct conversations ]

-My name is Trisha.

And I met Amanda when we were in sixth grade.

She had just moved to Riverside.

[ School bell rings ]

And we became friends.

We were friends through sixth grade, middle school,

high school and through adulthood.

I remember in elementary school Amanda would make things up.

♪♪

She once told us she was ambidextrous.

She said her family had annual passes

to Disneyland, little white lies.

They always made her seem distinctive in some way,

but they were really inconsequential.

So that's why it didn't bother us.

And we never let Amanda know that we knew she was lying.

Even at that young age,

I think we intuitively understood

that Amanda had a certain need,

she felt, to distinguish herself.

-I remember a childhood friend of Amanda's

painting this picture for me

of what Amanda's bedroom looked like

with all these trophies and tiaras

from pageants and dance competitions.

It made me wonder if this was the only way

that Amanda could get attention.

It really made me question who her parents,

Tom and Peggy, were. What were they like?

I also found it really curious that Peggy, Amanda's mom,

wanted to be called goddess

because she felt like she was too young to be a grandma.

♪♪

-I met Peggy at the end of 2009.

I remember thinking like, "Peggy is a role model as a mother."

She has raised four children who were all happy,

respectful, successful.

It seemed like the ideal family.

She just was someone that was very nurturing,

especially with what I went through over the next year

after I met a wonderful young man,

who, about two months into the relationship,

was diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer.

Peggy was there every step of the way, hearing

every single development throughout chemo and tubes

and the sickness and the medication

and the trials and the scans and the updates, all of it.

[ Monitor beeping ]

My boyfriend passed away in 2011.

And I remember when Amanda got diagnosed with cancer.

I was willing to do anything I could to help

because I knew how important the support was

when you're going through that.

And once Amanda was diagnosed,

I began to grow more of a relationship with Amanda.

-I met Amanda through her mom, Peggy.

We belong to similar friend group.

Amanda just seemed like she had this heart of gold.

Peggy and Tom, they, kind of, seemed like this...

I don't want to say snobby, but kind of more untouchable.

But they seemed like they had a strong family.

♪♪

-Every now and then Peggy would blog for Amanda

or give information, and she was really active

in the fundraising part of it from afar.

But it seemed that Amanda was looking for

almost like a mother figure or someone to fill that void.

-San Jose mom. I was called that.

It was one time, Amanda was really sick.

I was over there.

I said, "Amanda, where is your mom?

How come they can't come and help you?"

She said, "Well, they went to Europe."

I said, "You're this sick and they went to Europe?

What do you mean by that?"

She says, "Well, you know, some parents are like that."

-Peggy's relationship with Amanda, in the beginning,

it all seemed like it was ideal.

So when Peggy told me she was buying some investment property

at the same time Amanda was fundraising,

I remember asking Amanda, "How are you feeling about this?"

And she just said,

"My mom and I have a complicated relationship."

And I can understand that,

But I couldn't reconcile it in my head.

Because for me, as a parent,

if my child was going through life-saving treatments

and was having to file bankruptcy,

I would be putting every cent

I had into whatever I could do for my child.

I didn't say much about it, but it kind of just like gave me

a red flag about Peggy.

I was like, "There's just something off here."

♪♪

♪♪

-When this case came to me,

my twin sister, she had Stage 4 colon cancer.

She had so many surgeries and so many rounds of chemotherapy.

She suffered.

But she kept fighting.

She fought it for nine years.

She passed away November 29, 2023.

Working this case gave me a little bit of the ability

to fight in my own way.

And it was fighting for the truth.

Amanda was lying about having cancer for financial gain.

And one of the jobs of IRS special agents

is we follow the money.

[ Keyboard clacking ]

wire fraud is using the wires to perpetrate your fraud.

In this particular case,

she got people to donate to her through a website.

The money went into her bank account.

And so I was able to get the records

for that particular site.

I was able to trace a little over $100,000

but it was just a portion of it

because I wasn't able to trace cash.

-Amanda was comped a lot of stuff.

I mean, it was endless.

-I got approached by somebody in Encounter

who said, "Hey, you know, I want to start a meal train for you,"

and they brought meals for an entire year.

Our daycare out of nowhere was like, "Merry Christmas.

Like, you're not paying for daycare for two weeks."

-We did a thing called the 12 days of Christmas,

which is kind of a tradition my family, we've always had.

We pick a family

and we give them a gift for the 12 days leading up to Christmas.

We really thought we were bringing some joy to them

because they were having such a hard time.

-There's tens of thousands of dollars that I calculated

over the years that were in kind gifts, that were cash gifts.

There were separate fundraisers that had nothing

to do with the wire fraud.

♪♪

-The dollar amount wasn't as important,

but we knew that the betrayal

that she was doing to these people,

especially the ones who were part of her church,

that was what was important.

-This is bigger than me.

He taught me this is bigger than me.

And look where we are right now.

[ Cheers and applause ]

-There were candlelight vigils, auctions,

fundraisers, donations of bucket-list experiences.

I would see so many posts with pictures.

There were all these different ways

that people were trying to help make her life better.

Or just anything that maybe will make her day.

♪♪

-Thousands of people threw money at her.

But it was the time that people gave,

the prayers that they prayed

that's impacted everybody the most.

-I was hospitalized for weeks at a time.

I couldn't get out of bed.

We had to have both of our kids in daycare

because I couldn't take care of our kids.

-This case has another level to it,

another moral level to it, if you will.

-I think I started to lose faith a little bit

the second Nancy called me.

That pit in my stomach,

it's almost like I knew at that point.

One thought I initially had is that "Is there, like, a team

that's, like, making all this happen?

Like, how do people do this and keep it from the world?"

-The thing I get asked most --

Didn't Cory know?

You know, I'm basing everything off the blog,

and I'm looking and Cory seems very supportive.

He seems by her side.

He's supposedly at appointments.

He's there.

He's everywhere she is, and they are putting it out there

that they're a very strong unit, and I believe they were.

-She blogged about him being her rock

and talked about him going to doctor's appointments with her.

And even as Amanda started to come under suspicion,

Cory appeared to be Team Amanda through and through.

But a lot of people were.

♪♪

-To me, it was inconceivable that it wasn't true.

This is a friend of mine and a new mother,

who is going through, like, the unimaginable.

-God gives beauty in every day.

Like, whether or not we see the sunrise or the sunset,

it's going to happen every day, and if you don't look for it,

you're going to miss it.

-I think we as, like, human beings,

like, we not only want to root for the underdogs,

but we want to believe in miracles.

And she fed it up on a silver platter.

-The word that comes to my head

is the most extreme version of being narcissistic.

♪

[ Keyboard clacking ]

-Even though Amanda had several different investigators

looking at her, she continued to blog.

[ Mouse clicks ]

She could have just stopped and made it all go away,

but in fact Amanda doubled down.

Why would somebody do that?

♪♪

[ Man speaking indistinctly ]

-Dr. Ho, ABC, come mark.

[ Clapperboard clacks ]

-I'm Dr. Judy Ho, clinical and forensic neuropsychologist.

I've never met, treated, or evaluated Amanda Riley.

So I'm talking generally from my clinical experience

and my research knowledge.

People want to understand the psychology

behind the intricate web of lies

that Amanda had built over the years.

There is a category of diagnoses called factitious disorder

in the DSM, which is essentially the manual

that all psychologists and psychiatrists

use to diagnose and identify mental-health conditions.

And in it there are two conditions that are related.

One is Munchausen and one is Munchausen by proxy.

Munchausen means that you are faking an illness in yourself.

And Munchausen by proxy means

that you're faking an illness in another person.

Oftentimes with individuals

who have these patterns of deceiving large amounts

of people for long periods of time,

they really don't even know themselves outside

of this type of behavior.

They describe it with more glee

and with more joy than you might imagine

when somebody's suffering from a true medical illness.

-I think there's just a very negative connotation about cancer.

But there's so much good that comes with it too.

I'm thankful that I have cancer

because I'm now surrounded by the right people in my life

and my relationship with God got so much stronger

because I had cancer.

-Everyone's lives has been touched by cancer in some way.

And I think that was something that Amanda tapped into.

[ Keyboard clacking ]

There was so much specificity in the things that she was writing,

her blog posts, what she was talking to people about.

[ Mouse clicks ]

She had photos as evidence.

And it's just harder to doubt when there's so much information

that would suggest she truly had this illness.

Another aspect that's important in a Munchausen diagnosis

is that the person, at least seemingly,

is doing this with full knowledge of their deception.

Their way of feeling special and important

is through this pretend illness.

♪♪

-Even when we were kids, her lies,

they sort of distinguished her in some way,

even though they were very trivial.

This was a very significant lie, but it did make her distinctive.

It also, I think,

allowed her to believe that people really cared about her.

♪♪

-As a journalist and somebody that actually has worked

quite closely with psychology and trauma,

I really feel that for Amanda,

it was all about a need to feel wanted and important.

-She's committed. She's 100 in.

But social media is a platform for people to fool people.

you only see what they show you,

-She was preying on people's emotions.

She was deceiving them.

And I could do something.

-Once Special Agent Lee got involved,

it was only a matter of time

until -- pshew -- Amanda's whole world came tumbling down.

-Police! Search warrant!

-And it was all caught on camera.

[ Indistinct shouting ]

[ Indistinct shouting ]

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-Loo

-Look

-Look at

-Look at t

-Look at the

-Look at the b

-Look at the bab

-Look at the baby!

-Look at the baby! [

-Look at the baby! [ L

-Look at the baby! [ Lau

-Look at the baby! [ Laugh

-Look at the baby! [ Laughin

-Look at the baby! [ Laughing

-Look at the baby! [ Laughing ]

Hi!

Look at her. She's so cute.

Hi, baby.

-I really felt for Cory's ex-wife, Aletta,

because when I first started speaking to her,

she had just recently lost custody of Jessa.

-Cory and I had a daughter, Jessa.

I lost custody.

I had to pay thousands of dollars in child support.

I had to take her to the courthouse and leave her there.

[ Sobs ]

All these years later, and it's still, um --

It's just as painful as it was back then.

♪♪

♪♪

-When you have a criminal investigation,

I'm not able to share the information that I have.

I couldn't share with them the progress of the case.

And so the only thing I could come up with

was just let them know the case is still alive

but the wheels of justice move slowly.

-I had reached out a couple of times to know what was going on.

All she could say is "the wheels of justice turn slowly."

[ Laughs ]

Which was a good thing for me

because I knew something was going on.

♪♪

-We're in the process of gaining the evidence to prove

that the person committed a crime.

And because Nancy was the keeper of all of this information,

I had to go back to her and get additional bits of information.

And she figured out that I was working on a search warrant.

-It was just one of those things that I went "Oh!

Okay, this has got to be what's coming up."

-Nancy and I would talk often.

I found out that there was going to be a raid at their home.

So I called my sister and I said, "Hey, we gotta go."

-We went up to San Jose to wait this out

and see if this was going to be happening.

-Okay, so I'm rolling. Anytime.

-We had a couple of camera people, a reporter, myself.

-We are in San Jose, California.

It is 6:00 in the morning, and we got a tip

that there's going to be some kind of a search warrant

served on Amanda's house, which is literally right there.

-All of a sudden, all these SUVs start pulling up

in front of the property.

It was all caught on camera.

And agents just start hopping out of it

with body armor and guns drawn and helmets.

-Police! Search warrant!

-Describe what you're seeing. [ Indistinct shouting ]

-Our reporter's running out.

We're getting the play-by-play while all this is unfolding.

-You can hear them. They're knocking on the door

and they're saying, "We've got a warrant."

[ Shouting continues ]

-Nancy was there, filming it all.

-It was like, "Ha! You're lying, and you're getting caught."

♪♪

-All of a sudden, like, this house that you're safe in

is now filled with armed people.

We pull everybody out to the living room,

and I'm sitting in a chair across from Amanda,

and next to us is the kitchen

where there's computers and stuff,

and they're going through everything.

But Amanda's not nervous-looking.

She's not biting her fingernails.

And she just looked at me

and she says,

"You're Martinez."

It was just almost unnerving.

-I saw the agents carrying out boxes of equipment.

I saw an oxygen tank.

I saw tubing, one of those IV poles.

-Amanda and Cory eventually came out

when the whole thing had finished.

-Our reporter and camera crew was still there.

-Could you talk to us about what's going on

inside your house? -Nope.

-What about your wife and allegations

that she's been raising money but doesn't have cancer?

I'm thinking "Wow. This is gonna really stop her now."

Boy, was I wrong.

♪♪

♪♪

♪♪