From The Dropout to Fyre, Inventing Anna to The Tinder Swindler, television has been enjoying a years-long relationship with the scammer. The lively Australian documentary Con Girl (Paramount+) isn’t likely to join the greats, but it does offer the astonishingly bizarre story of a woman named Samantha Azzopardi, known to various other women around the world as either Annika, Coco, Layla, Emily or Harper, among other names. These cons are so strange and perplexing that it takes four hours to try to unravel them, and though it zips through at a pace, it never quite gets to the heart of it.
It begins with the story that became known in the Irish press as “GPO Girl”. A young woman was found in a distressed state near the GPO Museum in Dublin in 2013. Refusing to speak, she indicated that she was 14, spent several weeks in a children’s hospital and through drawings implied that she was the victim of a trafficking ring. The Garda could not identify her, despite involving Interpol and the Missing Persons Bureau, and took the unusual step of releasing a photograph, with the aim of finding out who this child was. Then, says one officer, the southern hemisphere woke up.
