A 38-year-old Brazilian woman who claimed to be a 12-year-old girl has been jailed for deceiving a couple who took her in.
Amanda Maria Souza de Oliveira tricked the couple into caring for her while hiding her real age.
According to Mail Online, she pretended to be handicapped and to have the mental age of a child – even drinking milk from bottles and sucking on dummies.
The extraordinary sequence of events began with Oliveira attending services at an evangelical church in Joinville, southern Brazil. She presented herself as an 18-year-old called Gabriele, and said she was seeking work.
The pastor introduced her to the couple who, taking pity on her, invited Oliveira to stay with them for a while.
As time passed, her story became more and more exaggerated, and she eventually told her hosts she was actually a 12-year-old girl.
The couple believed it all.
She was later exposed when a relative of the couple raised an alarm that she was convinced that Oliveira was older than she claimed.
Through research online, she found reports from 2023 of someone called Amanda who had run a similar deception in Rio de Janeiro. It was Oliveira.
When police arrived and entered her bedroom, Oliveira dropped the act immediately and spoke to them in her normal, adult voice.
‘It is clear that I deceived people; I lied. But I did not intend to scam anyone,’ she told police.
Court records show she had pretended to be a child in nine different places: Parana, Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais, Goias, Ceara, Rio Grande do Sul, Sao Paulo, Rio Grande do Norte and Mato Grosso do Sul.
A judge in Santa Catarina rejected Oliveira’s defence that she was mentally ill and therefore not criminally responsible, concluding that she had acted deliberately and consciously.
Oliveira’s lawyers said they would appeal. They argued in court she had done nothing more than adopt the ‘survival strategy’ of a deeply troubled woman. They also claimed she had just been seeking the love and affection she was starved of as a child.
The prosecution said a jail sentence was warranted, given the financial and psychological damage Oliveira had inflicted on the family.