DEVIL IN DISGUISE
I thought I was on trip of a lifetime with my best pal but it was all a web of lies – the truth left me scarred for life
LANGUISHING in a jail cell thousands of miles from home, Emmy Bamberger couldn't help but think: "How the f*** did I get here?"
But that still wasn't enough to wake her up to the sinister reality of her situation - that she had fallen into an elaborate web of lies spun by a serial con artist.
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Emmy had become best pals with Annika Dekker, a 'Swedish' woman she met while travelling the world after high school.
The pair were inseparable, but unbeknown to the American, Annika was actually Aussie , a pathological liar who went by 40 aliases and had duped dozens of people.
Her four-month ordeal has now been told in a new documentary, Con Girl, which explores how the scammer, 34, schemed her way into the lives of unsuspecting victims - for no apparent reason or monetary gain.
Traumatised Emmy tells the documentary: "Knowing what I know now about her and the multiple victims that she has flipped their lives upside down and has caused years of trauma and pain... yes, she's the devil."
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Web of lies
Graduating from her California high school in 2014, Emmy - then aged 18 - decided to travel the world in search of inspiration for her writing career.
Shortly after landing in Sydney, Australia, she met a Swedish woman who claimed to be of the same age called Annika while staying at a hostel.
"I do remember people not liking her in our little group and thinking she was a little weird and strange - I didn't quite catch the weirdness," Emmy says.
The pair eventually grew close and Annika - who was actually Samantha - wasted no time feeding her a series of untruths.
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Emmy thought nothing of it when Samantha told her she was an airline heiress, but began to get suspicious when her new friend wouldn't divulge too much information about her life.
After pressing her, she eventually admitted she was not an airline heiress - only to cook up an elaborate story worthy of a Hollywood blockbuster.
Emmy explains: "She [said] 'I'm not exactly an airline heiress. I am the daughter of Interpol agents.' She basically grew up running her whole life and so she had been in different private schools and different countries."
To ensure her story was believable, Samantha even produced numerous snaps of herself in destinations such as Denmark, Sweden, and other European countries.
She also claimed to have "keepers" who took care of her, because she was rarely able to see her parents.
'Everything shifted'
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Not content with her fictitious life, Samantha soon took things even further - claiming that she had just received medical test results that proved she was actually a 14-year-old girl.
"This is the moment where I can specifically remember everything shifting," says Emmy.
"All of a sudden this cool 18-year-old girl was not this person anymore. She's a 14-year little girl who doesn’t have a birthday, has parents she does not see, and has only seen the world through the eyes of her keepers.
“It just turned into such a sad story, which kept me in her web. I loved her and I was protecting her from imminent danger.
"Like who would believe that story?"
Determined to drag Emmy further into her orbit, Samantha then told her that she was in danger from a mysterious group of people who had all of her personal details and were out to get her.
Emmy recalls: "She never explicitly said they were anyone in particular. It was just like Boogeyman bad people. There were pages of stuff about me.
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"My family's names, their addresses, their phone numbers, things about my friends. It had legit passwords of mine. Just a lot of information that didn't seem like you could Google at the time.
Samantha hatched a plan for them to go on the run, claiming that in order to keep both of them safe, they would have to stick together.
Emmy says: "She was always making sure I was extremely aware of people and their body language. That's when she said I needed a new identity.
"I was under the impression that me and everybody I loved was in danger. I am scared out of my f***ing mind."
Kidnap suspect
As the pair travelled across Australia, Emmy was able to pick up a fake ID under the name Amy Fisher.
One night, Samantha complained of a headache, which looked so serious that Emmy thought she was "exhibiting signs of a stroke."
Panicked, she rushed her to a nearby hospital, where the scammer continued to insist she was a 14-year-old child.
Growing suspicious of Emmy as a result, doctors called the police and she was arrested for the kidnap of an unknown minor and suspected drug trafficking.
Emmy says: "They think I kidnapped this girl and they think that I pumped her full of drugs and that I'm human trafficking her."
After interrogating her at a police station, they discovered the fake ID and bundled her into jail for what Emmy says was "a very long time".
"I was thinking like how the f*** did I get here?", she says. "Like this is so off base from hopping around backpacking and I was just a nervous f***ing wreck."
Emmy was eventually hauled in front of a judge who ordered her to be freed after paying a fine, because police could not prove that she had kidnapped a minor.
Meanwhile, Samantha escaped her hospital bed with a needle still in her arm.
Reuniting, the pair went on the run yet again and this time went into a "safe house" in Sydney to avoid further detection.
Emmy was so distraught over being kept in a cabin unable to use her phone, or make contact with her loved ones that she made up a story about her tourist visa expiring just to escape.
Lies unravel
When Emmy boarded a plane to leave back to the States, Samantha sent her a message warning her that she was in danger and asked her to meet up in Canada.
Believing she was under threat, Emmy flew to Vancouver to meet her - but this time it was the smallest of details that finally lifted the veil from over her eyes.
Emmy explains: "We get to this backpacker's house and when you show up you're supposed to write down your name and what country you're from and she writes down Sweden.
"One night these two girls come up and this girl was Swedish. When she's signing her name, she sees that there's another Swedish girl. She says 'hello, how are you' in Swedish.
"And [Samantha] looks like she's a little scared and she's like 'It's been a long time since I've spoken Swedish'."
Now four months into their friendship, Emmy found herself unable to trust Samantha and left her in Calgary, Canada - never to see her again.
Serial offender
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Emmy later learned that Annika was in fact Samantha, a serial con girl who has committed 100 offences - including defrauding families and authorities in Australia, Canada, and Ireland.
Astonishingly, she had already achieved infamy on the other side of the world after falsely claiming to be a victim of sex trafficking in Ireland in October 2013.
Found outside Dublin General Post Office, she was dubbed the 'GPO Girl' and controversially released without charge after it emerged she was in fact 24 years old.
After leaving Emmy, she told Canadian police that she had been a victim of abuse and had escaped from a cult, but after an expensive investigation, a fingerprint analysis brought up her case in Ireland the previous year.
Serving two months in prison, she was then deported back to Australia - only to embark on other bizarre schemes.
In 2016, she enrolled in a school in New South Wales claiming to be 13. She was later found out and sentenced to a year in prison.
Another scam came in 2019 when she moved into a French couple's home to work as a nanny for their two children using a falsified identity.
She eventually took the boys to a mental health facility where she claimed to be a 14-year-old who had been abused by her uncle.
She pleaded guilty to child stealing, theft, and property deception and was ordered to spend in 2021.
During her trial, it was revealed that she had been diagnosed with pseudologia fantastica, which causes her to lie incessantly often for no gain at all.
Samantha's elaborate tales not only ripped her victims' lives apart, but caused cops to waste hundreds of thousands on long-winded investigations.
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Last November, she was after claiming to be an abused 14-year-old French girl.
Con Girl is available to stream on Paramount +
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