Amanda Riley tricked friends, coworkers, and total strangers into thinking she had Hodgkin's lymphoma — and defrauded her unsuspecting victims out of over $100,000.
LionsgateAmanda Riley holding a #TeamAmanda sign, which she often used to garner online support for her fake cancer journey.
When Amanda Riley started blogging about her battle with Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 2012, many people were touched by her story. A young Christian mother of two based in California, Riley was only in her late 20s when she was diagnosed. Hodgkin’s lymphoma is an aggressive form of cancer, too, so many were sympathetic about her predicament.
Amidst sharing optimistic health updates, discouraging setbacks, and her steadfast faith in God, Riley quickly attracted attention with her blog, which was titled “Lymphoma Can Suck It.” It wasn’t long before donations came pouring in from friends, coworkers, strangers, and even celebrities who wanted to help Riley pay for her expensive medical treatment. There was one glaring issue, however: Amanda Riley never had cancer.
The story first started to fall apart in 2019, when an anonymous tipster asked an investigative journalist to look into Amanda Riley. Just one year later, the IRS filed a criminal complaint against the blogger, stating that she had faked her illness to scam her followers out of more than $100,000.
This revelation was a huge shock to those who had supported Riley, as everything about her “cancer journey” was a complete fabrication. She shaved her head to make it seem like she was undergoing chemotherapy. She created fake medical records and forged doctors’ documents. She took countless photographs of herself as she supposedly underwent treatment and posted them on her blog and social media, creating a compelling narrative that was sure to wrench the heart of anyone who read it.
This fraud later became the subject of a 2023 investigative podcast called Scamanda, which showed just how far Amanda Riley was willing to go.
“Lymphoma Can Suck It”: Amanda C. Riley’s Blog Documenting Her Cancer Journey
In 2012, Amanda Christine Riley, a former teacher and principal from Northern California, started a personal blog called “Lymphoma Can Suck It.” While that blog is no longer live, there are several archived versions of it that show the full extent of Riley’s con. The blog ran from 2012 to 2019, during which Riley pretended to have Hodgkin’s lymphoma. She also claimed at various points that the cancer had gone away and then returned.
For example, she hosted a page on her blog asking for donations, which read: “Amanda beat Hodgkin’s Lymphoma in Spring 2013, but unfortunately it returned by Summer, and she learned at the same time she was pregnant which obviously complicated her treatment.”
Amanda RileyA selfie posted by Amanda Riley with the caption: “Psshhhh I got this!”
This page then claimed that after a difficult pregnancy, Amanda Riley’s family was happy to announce that her son Connor Lee was born healthy. However, it quickly goes on to say Riley’s cancer “is now back with a vengeance, and Amanda has already jumped back into her fight for life currently receiving 3 rounds of ICE chemotherapy combined with radiation treatment.”
In an archived post from December 2015, titled “Blessed Beyond Belief,” Riley uses language that, if she were telling the truth, would be heartbreaking, but given the knowledge of her lies, reads as incredibly manipulative.
“As far as whether this immunotherapy worked enough to get my spike to stay on treatment, I wont [sic] know until at least Tuesday,” she wrote. “Hoping and praying for answers before Christmas. It’s definitely stressful knowing that it’s either not working and I’m about to spend my last Christmas with my husband, kids and family, or I’ll be partying like a rockstar (a really well behaved goody goody rockstar) celebrating victory.”
Amanda RileyA selfie Amanda Riley posted along with the “Blessed Beyond Belief” update.
Comments on her blog posts all express sympathy and encouragement, with commenters calling Riley a “fighter,” saying her posts “are a testimony to the amazing God we serve,” and writing that Riley inspires them “like no other.” In that same post, Riley shares a photograph of a check that was written to her for $1,300 to help pay for a medical treatment.
Several blog posts show Riley in various hospitals, Riley with her head shaved, and Riley with an IV in her arm. On the surface, the posts and photographs tell a truly tragic tale of a woman battling cancer, trying her best each day to survive and be there for her family.
But none of it was true. And eventually, the walls came crashing down.
How Amanda Riley’s Scam Was Revealed
Curiously enough, none of Amanda Riley’s photographs were fake — at least, not in the sense that they had been significantly altered or edited by her after they were taken. Once again, it was all a part of her elaborate scheme.
“So my understanding is she did actually go to the hospital,” Charlie Webster, the journalist and host behind the Scamanda podcast, told Glamour in a 2023 interview. “They’re not fake photos. She did things like said she fainted or that she wasn’t feeling very well and then took herself to the emergency room. And then she would say things like she got dehydrated or she had cancer and she was dehydrated. So then they immediately put her on a drip, and then, snap, snap, snap, snap, snap, snap.” Riley went to different ER rooms, presumably to evade suspicion, and even bought some of her own medical equipment to make her story more believable.
Riley kept this charade going for seven years before it all started to fall apart. It was all thanks to an anonymous tip to investigative journalist Nancy Moscatiello in 2019 that the IRS began to investigate Riley further. This investigation proved to be the nail in the coffin for Riley’s scam.
Lionsgate SoundThe cover art for Scamanda, a podcast about Amanda Riley from Lionsgate Sound. There will also be a docuseries based on the podcast, also titled Scamanda, premiering on ABC in October 2024.
According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Northern District of California: “Riley had no medical expenses. The donations she received were deposited into her personal bank accounts and used to pay her living expenses.”
The investigation found that 349 different people and entities made contributions to Riley’s supposed medical fund campaign. In total, this amounted to $105,513 paid to Riley for medical expenses that did not exist. Further details of the investigation showed that Riley “went to great lengths to maintain her deception,” including shaving her head, falsifying medical records, forging physicians’ letters and medical certifications, and attacking or even suing those who suggested that her illness might not be genuine.
LionsgateAmanda Riley was sentenced to 60 months in prison after pleading guilty to wire fraud.
Riley was charged in July 2020, and she pleaded guilty to wire fraud in October 2021. In May 2022, she was sentenced to 60 months — five years — in prison and ordered to pay restitution in the full amount of $105,513.
Of course, there were still several unanswered questions. Why would Amanda Riley do this? What was her motivation? And who else was in on her scheme, if anyone? It may be easy to fool people online, but she even managed to fool some of her loved ones. Did that include her husband?
Did Her Husband Know About Her Scam?
Amanda RileyAmanda Riley with her family.
The question of whether Amanda Riley’s husband Cory knew about his wife’s fake cancer or if he believed her story has been ongoing ever since the trial — and more so since Scamanda was released. Some believe that Cory Riley will face even further public scrutiny once a docuseries based on the podcast, also titled Scamanda, premieres on ABC on October 9, 2024. (The docuseries will then be available to stream on Hulu the next day.)
As of now, Cory Riley hasn’t been charged with any crime related to the case, and he’s far less active online than his wife was, so it’s difficult to know for sure how involved he was in her scheme, if at all.
When Scamanda host Charlie Webster was asked her opinion, she chose her words carefully: “So the way I would answer this is, if you listen carefully to the podcast… if you listen very carefully to the nuances of what was said, it will give you the answer. People are smart. I was really careful to make sure that I stuck to the facts but also showed you the facts so you can decide.”
According to Webster, Cory was, at the time of the interview, looking after his children in Texas, near where Amanda is serving her sentence. As for why Amanda Riley concocted this whole scheme in the first place, the Scamanda host believes the answer is quite simple: attention.
She said, “In my opinion, from the conversations I’ve had with her and just conversations with everybody, I do really feel that it was attention. In her church, she was seen as a miracle because she survived cancer and had a baby, who was seen as a miracle. She was idolized, she was like a local celebrity. I think that just carried on and carried on. People gave her things and were surrounding her all the time, and she felt that kind of adored love.”
After reading about how Amanda Riley convinced countless people she had cancer, learn about other infamous con artists from history. Then, read about infamous pastors who were caught doing unholy things.
