AS police officers led the little girl away, the woman who had taken her in and cared for her pleaded with them to let her fetch a sweater because ‘She might be cold.’
It was the last heartbreaking moment in a con that had stretched for more than a year.
Amanda Maria Souza de Oliveira acted like a young girl to deceive her victims Credit: Newsflash
Oliveira conned a couple by posing as a traumatised child – using a childlike voice, dummies and baby bottles to maintain her deception Credit: Newsflash
The shivering little girl was no vulnerable child but a 38-year-old career conwoman with a long history of deception.
To fool her latest victims she had sucked a dummy, drunk from a baby bottle, carried a comfort blanket, and talked to her adopted family in a baby voice.
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But just moments before she was taken away, as police swooped, the mask had fallen.
“The charade is over,” said police chief Rodrigo Gusso, as he confronted 38-year-old Amanda Maria Souza de Oliveira, on a bed strewn with dolls and kids toys.
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To fool her latest victims, she had sucked a dummy and drunk from a baby bottle Credit: Newsflash
The couple treated her like a daughter, giving her accommodation, money, food, medication, and other care Credit: Newsflash
She looked up from her lunch, smoothed down her heart-print shorts, stared the chief in the eye and said, in her normal deep voice: “Should I come with you?”
The con had been running for 14 months, when Amanda, calling herself Gabriele, spotted her latest victims – a middle-aged couple in the southern city of Joinville.
She had first got to know them at the evangelical church they attended.
Later, Amanda walked into the little bakery they own, claiming she was 18 and an experienced baker.
She pleaded for work and a place to stay, saying she was in trouble with money and her health, and the kind-hearted couple took her in.
She had chosen her latest targets well. The mother, investigators said, was heartbroken and vulnerable after her son had left home.
When she had won their trust her story changed – and her age.
And her elaborate backstory unfolded. Amanda claimed to be an 11-year-old runaway, fleeing a monstrous, abusive father.
The couple showered her with love. She was given her own bedroom, filled with toys and dolls.
When some raised concerns about her grown-up appearance, she claimed to have been force fed hormones during a period of abuse when she was younger.
Everywhere she went she worked to the same script. She kept a hood up, rarely met an adult’s eye and shrank from being seen in person.
Cops were contacted at the end of May and Oliveira was arrested at their home on June 2 Credit: Polícia Militar
Oliveira was convicted of fraud and using a false identity to deceive a couple into taking her in for 14 months Credit: Campo Grande Civil Police
She panicked whenever anyone mentioned the authorities, always pleading that her father would track her down. She talked the couple out of enrolling her in school and out of formalising any adoption, warning that any paper trail might alert the father she had fled.
Sources close to the case said that for more than a year, she took cash from them to carry out simple tasks – £28 to brush her teeth, £140 to stop wearing nappies.
She spent the money on shopping trips, although her lawyers said her con was more about being cared for than cash.
She even invented a fellow character to back up her story. ‘Pastor Barbara’ vouched she had sheltered Amanda before and had tried to win custody of her.
Barbara only ever messaged by text, never a call or a voice note, and made exactly the same spelling mistakes Amanda did.
The account fell silent the instant Amanda was arrested.
Other messages, later pulled from her mobile, show her throwing a crisis whenever the family paid attention to their own nephews and nieces.
She sulked over photographs of them and complained that they were prettier children than her.
The fewer people around, police concluded, the fewer there were to grow suspicious.
For her 12th birthday, the doting couple printed invitations and threw her a party.
But earlier this year a desperate relative began digging online, found reports of Amanda’s near-identical scams in other parts of Brazil and alerted the family.
On June 2, officers arrived at the house. She insisted she had never been after money. Asked what she had actually taken from the family, she replied: “Only food, clothes, a place to sleep, those things.”
Asked by the defence’s own psychiatrists whether she had set out to con anyone, she said: “Of course I deceived them, I lied, but not with that intention.”
What she wanted, she said, was simpler and stranger than greed. “I just want to be cared for in a way that doesn’t match my age.”
Oliveira says she lied but did not intend to scam anyone Credit: Newsflash
The couple gave her a bedroom full of toys and treated her like a daughter Credit: Newsflash
Her case has gripped Brazil, splashed across national newspapers, prime-time news and call-in shows.
On Instagram alone her story has generated almost 200 million views.
“This is a huge number, on par with the biggest political news stories in Brazil,” said Pablo Ortellado, a professor of public policy and management at the University of São Paulo. He said the story drew so much attention “because it’s so unusual.”
“She is a woman who did not look 25, let alone 12, yet managed to deceive a family,” he said.
“That unusual and implausible nature sparks immense interest and curiosity.”
Amanda, from Ceará, Brazil, had spent well over a decade posing as a vulnerable girl and living off the kindness of anyone soft-hearted enough to take her in.
The country now knows the serial scammer as Pequena Amanda, Little Amanda.
Back in the late 2000s, in her twenties, she is said to have walked into a police station claiming to be 12, accusing her own parents of abusing her and forcing her into sex work.
Her defence argued that her identities were a survival tactic, not a deliberate fraud Credit: Campo Grande Civil Police
Police have linked her to the same con across at least seven states, always closing in on families through churches and shelters.
She has a conviction behind her in Goiás, faces further cases in two more states, and once spent six months in prison in Porto Alegre.
Down the years she has been Julia, Emily, Duda and more.
As “Emily,” a 13-year-old supposedly dying of leukaemia during the pandemic, she moved one woman so deeply that she had the fake child’s name tattooed on her wrist.
Posing as an autistic abuse victim called Duda in Rio de Janeiro, she was later found to have used her phone to search “how does an autistic person behave” and “how to draw as if you were a victim of abuse.”
One woman she fooled said Amanda “puts on a character like a coat.”
In 2020, she walked into a children’s shelter as Julia, a 12-year-old who said she was running from a father who dabbled in the occult and had forced her into prostitution.
Staff swallowed every word until a medical exam a week later found she was a grown woman.
She simply walked out, and disappeared, ready to begin again somewhere new.
An older file, drawn up when she was in her twenties, recorded psychiatric admissions, self-harm and the same lifelong habit of shrinking herself into a child under a borrowed name.
During her latest trial, the official psychiatric report found she had antisocial personality disorder but understood exactly what she was doing, with one examiner noting her manipulation and total absence of remorse.
Her own experts said she was a broken woman who needed treatment, not a cell.
Judge Rogerio Manke was unmoved, ruling she knew right from wrong and chose wrong regardless.
Her lawyers insist to this day that she is a survivor, not a swindler. Her lawyer Lúcio Sousa said “all the evidence” showed she had cost her latest victims nothing.
“She admits that she invented an identity,” he said. “It was the way she found to survive. But she has been a vulnerable person for more than 20 years.”
But Judge Manke pushed the sentence well above the minimum, describing what he called “a genuine way of life built on taking on false identities to live at other people’s expense.”
She was found guilty of fraud and false identity and sentenced to one year, 10 months and 28 days. In an adult prison.
