Amanda Christine Riley, a California Christian blogger, falsely claimed that she was suffering from Hodgkin's lymphoma. Due to the good-hearted nature of the people who heard her story and deemed it to be true, she ended up receiving more than $100,000 in donations. In 2020, she was found guilty of wire fraud and was sentenced to five years in prison.
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Riley extensively talked about her faux disease on her blog titled "Lymphoma Can Suck It." According to the New York Post, her conjured story began tricking people into donations back in 2012. Riley, back then, was a member of a church. The church's members were devasted when learning about her "disease."
"This came on suddenly, it came on hard," Lindsey Wilder, one of the church's members, told ABC News. "And she didn't deserve to be going through something so hard."
In her blog, Riley detailed her struggle and battle with cancer. Given the nature of the content, many began to follow her writings, making the blog extremely popular. In 2013, Riley revealed that she was pregnant with her second child. Of course, for someone receiving cancer treatment as Riley supposedly did, this was nothing short of a miracle.
"After all this chemo and radiation she had, she's pregnant," Mahasti Ameli, Riley's babysitter, told the outlet. "I said, 'Amanda, what's happening now with you being pregnant?' Oh, my doctor said I could stop the chemo and radiation or anything that is for my cancer till the baby's born. And then we could start again."
Suspicion And Conviction
Riley eventually gave birth to her baby boy in April 2014. However, she then revealed to her followers and readers that, given the amount of expenses and treatments she was receiving, she had to declare bankruptcy.
Of course, for her fellow church members and online followers, this was even more devastating for a woman who suffered from cancer and had just delivered her baby. She received more than $105,000 in donations. However, for one of Riley's friends, there was something off about it all.
Lisa Berry believed Amanda Riley initially, but then something threw her off completely. "She told me that she had just had fluid drained off her brain in the hospital," Berry told ABC News. However, despite her "fluid-drained brain," Riley then went on for a swim. Berry wasn't having any of it.
Therefore, in 2015, Berry contacted Nancy Moscatiello, an investigative producer who was on the lookout for scam stories for her TV show, Crime Watch Daily. Mosciatello, in turn, shared her findings with Jose Martinez, a financial crimes detective in San Jose.
Amanda Christine Riley was eventually charged in July 2024 with wire fraud. Two years later, in May 2022, she pleaded guilty to wire fraud. She was ordered to pay $105,513 in restitution and sentenced to 5 years in prison. Riley was released in December 2024 to carry out the remainder of her sentence at a residential reentry center in Southern California.
