Child-stealing scam artist awaits sentencing
A woman who has been running bizarre scams - including dressing as a schoolgirl and stealing children - can’t find anywhere to stay after she gets out of jail.
Samantha Azzopardi was set to be sentenced at Melbourne Magistrates’ Court on Wednesday, May 27, after pleading guilty earlier this week to three counts of child stealing, and obtaining property by deception and theft.
But, her lawyer Jessica Willard told the court they had been unable to reach the aunt Azzopardi wants to live with following her release.
“She’s very reluctant to give the name of the person she wants to live with,” Ms Willard told the court.
She said Azzopardi wanted to leave Victoria and stay with an aunty in northern NSW.
Mrs Willard also said other family members had reached out on Tuesday and that a cousin had written a letter about Azzopardi’s childhood.
But, prosecutor Kristie Churchill questioned the authenticity of the letter and there was no proof confirming the woman’s relationship with Azzopardi.
Ms Churchill was also concerned Azzopardi would be “set up to fail” if she was released without some kind of mental health treatment, and a report found she was not a suitable candidate for a community corrections order.
“There’s a pattern of offending where she moves from location to location, assumes new identities and creates sophisticated backstories,” Ms Churchill said.
The 32-year-old was caught during her latest scam when she was found dressed as a schoolgirl with a ten-month-old and four-year old girl in a Myer at Bendigo in 2019.
She had convinced the children’s French parents she was a professional au pair and told them she was taking them for a picnic.
Instead, she took the children to a mental health clinic, telling staff she was a pregnant 14-year-old who had been abused by her uncle.
After a staff member recognised her and called the police, Azzopardi was later found and arrested in the cosmetic section of Myer.
She refused to give her details to police officers, answered cryptically, and locked her phone to prevent access.
Other bizarre scams saw her steal an iPad, pretend to be a talent agent, and use an alias to work as a live-in nanny for basketball star Tom Jervis.
Listing herself as a 17-year-old coming from a “rich American family” on Facebook, Tom Jervis and his wife Jazze hired Azzobardi as an au pair in 2018.
After working for them in Brisbane and moving six months later when they moved to Melbourne, Ms Jervis became suspicious of Azzopardi in June 2019 and fired her.
She was paid $6500 while working for them in Victoria and was later charged with obtaining property by deception.
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Her former employer also discovered that her driver’s licence and iPad had disappeared after Azzopardi left.
While working for the couple, she also posed as a talent scout and met up with a girl who responded to an agency ad looking for people to be in a cartoon movie.
Though she told the girl she wasn’t right for the role, Azzopardi flew her to Sydney for an audition for a show called Punk’d.
But, after they arrived in Sydney, Azzopardi took the girl to Centrelink and told her to “write on a piece of paper that she was stealing ghosts”, and was later charged with child stealing.
In 2013, she was found in Dublin, where investigators believed she was a teenage victim of the sex slave industry until a family member contacted the police to confirm it was Azzopardi.
A year later, she walked into a health clinic in Canada claiming to be a 14-year-old victim of sex trafficking and using the name Aurora Hepburn.
She was then charged with causing public mischief.
Following her most recent scam, Ms Azzopardi will be sentenced on Friday, May 27, after spending upwards of 570 days on remand.