Unraveling the Deceptions: The Chilling Story of Serial Scammer Samantha Cookes

Despite her eager smile and open face, Samantha Cookes is a compulsive liar. She is also a deeply evil woman. As the true-crime documentary Bad Nanny unfolded, chilling parallels with another highly plausible but evil criminal emerged. For anyone who finds it impossible to believe in killer nurse Lucy Letby’s guilt, this two-part report, which concludes tonight, should be required viewing.

None of the charges against Cookes, a 37-year-old serial scammer, is as appalling as Letby’s murder of at least seven babies on a neonatal ward — though there are disturbing circumstances around the death of Cookes’s own infant daughter in 2008. Letby operated by befriending the people whose babies she murdered. Gloucester-born Cookes has a record of defrauding friends with scams of exceptional callousness.

The Deceptive Path of Samantha Cookes

In 2012, Cookes posed as a willing surrogate for a Yorkshire couple desperate to have a baby. She took thousands of pounds from them and then disappeared. Turning up in Ireland under another name, she sought out mothers with disabled children and weaselled her way into their lives, before taking their money. Her schemes were as varied as they were cruel, targeting the vulnerable with a cold precision.

In 2022, at the height of the TikTok craze, she launched her most brazen fraud — masquerading as a terminally ill patient facing death with inspirational courage. The social media landscape, overpopulated with people seeking attention for their diseases, real or imaginary, had a term for such figures: ‘sickfluencers’. But Cookes, now calling herself Carrie Jade Williams, took her pretence to extreme levels.

The Sickfluencer Phenomenon

Claiming that she was being sued by an American couple who had rented her home on Airbnb, Cookes stated that these paying guests had been traumatised by her illness and were demanding £450,000 in compensation. Stated so baldly, it’s all an obvious lie, but Cookes is a highly convincing liar. Money poured in to help her.

“She has been diagnosed with a psychological condition called ‘pseudologica fantastica’, or pathological lying.”

But that doesn’t explain her obsession with targeting mothers of young, often fragile children. Cookes was eventually arrested for benefits fraud and is serving a four-year sentence. The whole complex saga was recounted by a dozen or more of her victims, but the fraudster herself refused to comment, so we never fully understood what drove her to invent such vicious lies — just as no one really knows what goes on in Letby’s head.

Parallels with Infamous Cases

On at least two occasions, when she fled a neighbourhood overnight, she left sheafs of incriminating notes — similar to the confessions scrawled on Post-its that helped to convict Letby. ‘I stand shoulder to shoulder with the coroner that I did not murder my daughter,’ read one. Her baby, Martha, was found suffocated in her cot, hours before she was due to be handed over to social workers from an adoption agency. A verdict of accidental death was recorded.

Whether that or anything else in Cookes’s life can be taken as true, we’ll never know. The documentary Bad Nanny leaves viewers with a haunting question: can we ever truly understand the depths of deception in such individuals?

Implications and Future Considerations

The case of Samantha Cookes raises broader questions about the nature of deceit and the ease with which modern platforms can be manipulated by those with malicious intent. As society grapples with the implications of such scams, there is a pressing need for greater awareness and more robust safeguards.

Meanwhile, the parallels between Cookes and other notorious figures like Lucy Letby serve as a stark reminder of the potential for evil lurking behind seemingly benign facades. As investigations continue and more victims come forward, the story of Samantha Cookes is likely to unfold further, offering insights into the psychology of deceit and the human capacity for manipulation.