Face of Nation : The Australian serial con woman known for impersonating young girls around the world has struck again according to a family in Melbourne.
Samantha Azzopardi, 31, posed as an au pair for Jazze and Tom Jervis for a year, the family has alleged. They claim she lived with them in the couple’s Brighton East home and looked after their daughter.
They claim a woman they now allege to be Azzopardi told them her name was Harper Hernandez.
Victoria Police told news.com.au that police received multiple reports of alleged deceptions involving the 31-year-old from Sydney’s southwest and were investigating whether any crimes had been committed.
But the Jervis family says Azzopardi remains on the run with Ms Jervis’ identity and, possibly, her daughter’s birth certificate.
In a post on Facebook, Ms Jervis sent a warning to others who might come across her.
“Hi all, I’m hoping you can help us (or police) locate this girl,” she wrote.
“To us, she was Harper Hernandez, but she has many aliases as you will see here. Her real name is Samantha Azzopardi, a serial con artist.
“Please share the photo where you can so that nobody else is affected.”
A court previously heard that in 2017 that Azzopardi posed as a 13-year-old girl. She called herself Harper Hart and successfully received admission to a high school.
But after suspicions were raised, the school contacted police and Azzopardi was arrested. She pleaded guilty to four charges of dishonestly obtaining financial advantage by deception where she gained education, food and accommodation.
She was jailed for a year but was eligible for parole after six months.
Azzopardi did not turn up on police radars until Friday when Ms Jervis reported the matter to police.
“She was our au pair for a year,” Ms Jervis told news.com.au.
News.com.au previously spoke with Azzopardi’s friends and family members, as well as people who encountered her while travelling.
One woman, Emily Bamberger, crossed paths with Azzopardi in 2014 when she was holidaying in Australia.
Ms Bamberger says Azzopardi told her a backstory made for Hollywood.
She said she was royalty and had been kidnapped when she was a young girl. She said her “keepers” were Interpol agents and that, for the majority of her childhood, she’d been moved around the world to stay off the radar.
Azzopardi convinced Ms Bamberger to accompany her to what she described as a “Sydney safe house”.
The house was in Campbelltown, where Azzopardi grew up. For eight days, Ms Bamberger stayed in a cabin and not allowed to use the main house.
There was no Wi-Fi, meaning she couldn’t let her family know where she was or if she was OK.
“I can’t believe how creepy that was looking back on it,” Ms Bamberger says. “Nobody knew where I was.”
Azzopardi’s first real foray into impersonating young women started in Brisbane in 2010. She went by the name of Dakota Johnson then and told police she was 14 years old despite graduating from high school years earlier.
After claiming she needed help and housing, her true identity was revealed. She fronted a magistrate in Brisbane where she was convicted of charges including forging documents and false representation.
She turned up in Perth in 2011 playing the role of a troubled gymnast with roots in Russia and a new first name: Emily.
Azzopardi told a friend she was the top under 16 gymnast in the country and that her entire family had died tragically in a murder-suicide in France. Of course, none of that was true.
From there she convinced her friend’s family to take her in. To complete the ruse she stole the identity of an adoption specialist and a judge and emailed the family the requisite paperwork to complete the process.
She enrolled in school (again) but, like always, the lies disconnected and her story fell apart. Her next lie made international news.
It was in 2013 at a post office in Dublin where a young girl unable to speak and barely able to stand stood out from the crowd.
She looked frail so a passer-by alerted police who picked her up. But she wasn’t talking. Instead she drew a stick figure scene of a young woman on a bed surrounded by men.
The story was picked up by newspapers around the world after authorities discovered they’d been lied to. She was kicked out of Ireland only to try again in Calgary, Canada a year later.
Calgary Police guarded her on a flight out of the country.
A police spokeswoman said Azzopardi used the name Hepburn when she first turned up and health care workers “spent countless hours working on the alleged victim to establish the extend of her abuse and provide services for her recovery”.
“We don’t know exactly how she got here,” the officer said. “We are concerned about this happening somewhere else in Canada or anywhere.”
A high school friend told news.com.au Azzopardi had always been inclined to lie. Juanita Levi said Azzopardi was “a really smart student” who “had a small circle of friends” and “was a bit of an attention seeker”.
She has now gained the attention of Victoria Police.
