Samantha Azzopardi will spend at least eight months in prison for lying to police that she was a 14-year-old French victim of abuse.
On Friday, the Waverley Local Court ordered the 33-year-old habitual liar to serve jail time for his 100th charge.
Azzopardi will spend a maximum of seventeen months in prison for deceiving police by impersonating a French teenager in August.
She was also on a community corrections order for a similar offense at the time. This order has been revoked in light of the verdict handed down on Friday.
She contacted the religious charity Jewish House and identified herself as Enslie Cohen, a victim of abuse. This resulted in a five-hour search of Sydney’s eastern suburbs by multiple agencies to locate the fictitious foster family’s home.
She claimed she spoke only French, but she refused to communicate with a French-speaking police officer.
A shrewd caseworker recognized similarities between this con and previous tales by Azzopardi.
Even after her arrest, she continued to lie, signing documents under the name Emily Ramberger that had been given to her by a custody manager.
Due to the retroactive nature of her sentence, she will be eligible for parole on January 15, 2020.
Her previous frauds include convincing Irish and Canadian police that she was a victim of human trafficking, acting as a qualified nanny for a Victorian couple, and claiming in a Bendigo mental health clinic that she was a 14-year-old girl who was pregnant and abused.
She was released by Victorian authorities in May 2021 on charges of fraud and child stealing, only to spark another false investigation in late 2021 in New South Wales while posing as a fourteen-year-old.
She has been charged 100 times in Australia, primarily for fraud and deception-related offenses, according to the Waverley police.
A statement of facts states, “It is evident that the defendant is a compulsive liar and suffers from several mental health issues, which were no doubt a catalyst for her criminal behavior.”