37-year-old Amanda Maria de oliveira was arrested in Joinville, Brazil, after deceiving a couple into “adopting her” by posing as a 12-year-old girl for 14 months, using baby bottles, pacifiers, and a comfort blanket to sleep, in addition to faking panic attacks and speaking in a higher-pitched tone of voice to keep up the charade, while the family threw her a 12th birthday party and paid for obesity medication.
The impostor, who used the name “Gabriele”, approached a church where she said she had escaped abuse, and a local couple took her into their home, even coming to consider her a daughter, but a relative alerted the authorities, who discovered that the woman had a history of similar scams in several states of the country.
In 2023, the same woman had already tried to pass herself off as a 12-year-old girl named “María Eduarda” in Nova Iguaçu, where she had pricked herself with more than 100 needles to support her false story of abuse and satanic rituals, and although she was arrested, a court granted her provisional release the next day under precautionary measures.
