Internet’s sickest scammer faked cancer, baby deaths & Ebola for 20 years to defraud charities… this is how I caught her

FOR more than 20 years, Sarah Delashmit faked everything from cancer and Ebola to baby loss. Fabulous investigates her shocking web of lies – and speaks to the woman who spent two decades hunting her down. Sarah Delashmit was confronted on TV about her lies Credit: Screengrab Delashmit (right) lied to Erin Johnson (left), who has cerebral palsy Credit: supplied by Erin Johnson. Sitting at her computer in May 2006, Andrea Smith felt her blood run cold. As a volunteer with an online support group for parents of children with spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) – a rare disease which, at that time, had a life expectancy of just two years in babies – she had been doing some digging on a member named Connie. “The chat group was a lifeline,” says Andrea, 55, originally from the US but now living in Costa Rica. “There were hundreds of messages every day. SMA has a very specific progression, and a couple of things Connie said about her supposed son didn’t add up. Some of the other mothers thought she was a fake.” So Andrea compared the IP addresses – a unique number assigned to every device – attached to Connie and another newcomer called Megan, who had also been raising suspicions. They were identical, suggesting they were the same person. It got worse. Andrea dug further and discovered this impostor had also infiltrated other support groups and a separate charity, Cole’s Quilts, where she claimed to have SMA herself to obtain a handmade quilt intended for children with the condition. The hoaxer’s name was embroidered in the quilt: Sarah Delashmit. “The idea that somebody who doesn’t have the disease masqueraded as a sufferer and violated those who donated their time, energy and money to making this happen was appalling,” says Andrea, a retired healthcare advisor. “To take a mother’s time away from her kid to answer questions about your imaginary child’s imaginary symptoms is a violation.” She didn’t know it at the time, but Andrea had just hunted down a woman who was to become one of the internet’s most prolific medical hoaxers, spinning countless intricate lies throughout the US charity community – not to gain money, but to create drama and get sympathy. Posing as everything from a leukaemia patient to an Ebola sufferer, Delashmit even attended a camp for disabled people, turning up in a wheelchair and allowing volunteers to bathe her, cut up her food and change her sanitary products. For the next two decades, the two women would play a game of cat and mouse across cyberspace as Delashmit built increasingly devious hoaxes – until she was finally brought to justice. “She has occupied more space in my life than she has any reason to occupy,” says Andrea with grim understatement. Now the subject of six-part podcast Sympathy Pains, Delashmit was born in Illinois, USA, in 1984, and began creating false online identities while at school. In 2003 she attended Southern Illinois University, where she told roommates she had leukaemia. They supported her through her fake cancer treatment – one even shaved off her own hair in solidarity. The following academic year, the cancer had disappeared and was replaced by a crippling back injury from a car crash. Delashmit arrived for the new term in a wheelchair and wearing a back brace. However, that lie unravelled when a roommate spotted her walking unaided. The university authorities did not follow up on Delashmit’s behaviour, and she made new friends. In 2005, she volunteered as a counsellor at Camp Courageous, a California summer camp for young people with disabilities, where she befriended Erin Johnson, who has cerebral palsy. Erin, now 44, tells Fabulous: “She was very sweet, very welcoming, and very understanding of my disability. She was open, funny and kind. She worked hard at pleasing people, and she wanted to be there for me as a friend.” Delashmit fed Erin an endless stream of tragedies. She claimed to have contracted Ebola while dissecting infected monkeys at university, leaving her with rare auto-immune disorder Guillain-Barré syndrome. She also introduced Erin to her fictitious younger sister, Gabby, online, who supposedly had SMA, before later dying of pneumonia. Over the years, she invented multiple pregnancies, infant deaths and a brain tumour, even staging a seizure during a Skype call. So convincing was Delashmit, Erin came to view the babies her close friend claimed to have given birth to as her nieces and nephews. One was even named after her. In early 2006, around the time she was duping Erin about Gabby, Delashmit created the two fake profiles on the SMA support group – and Andrea tracked her down. Enraged, Andrea contacted the FBI, who initially dismissed the case. She eventually persuaded agents to alert police in Delashmit’s hometown, where an officer brought Delashmit into the station, recovered the quilt and returned it to the charity. With officers regarding Delashmit as a lonely 22-year-old college student, no charges were brought. Emboldened, Delashmit continued creating online identities across charity chatrooms and forums, posing as an SMA patient, the sister of an SMA patient, a cancer patient, a pregnant woman, a fertility patient, a mother of multiples and a terminally ill patient. All the while, Andrea continued to track her movements online, building a spreadsheet of aliases and spelling mistakes that identified Delashmit, and alerting charities she was targeting. Andrea Smith, who first uncovered Delashmit’s lies, continues to monitor her Credit: supplied by Andrea Smith. Delashmit is now the subject of six-part podcast Sympathy Pains Credit: Screengrab At the same time, Delashmit – who’d qualified as a registered nurse – was also faking pregnancies at work. According to licence suspension documents, she admitted to wearing a pillow within her clothing, showing ultrasound pictures of twins to staff and reporting that she had prematurely delivered the babies and that both had died. Delashmit confessed it was at least the second time she had falsely claimed to be pregnant, and she lost her nursing license in 2014. The following year, her deceptions stepped up a gear. She attended Camp Summit in Texas, a residential camp for adults with disabilities, claiming to have muscular dystrophy. She arrived in a wheelchair and volunteer Bethany Turner spent the week providing intimate personal care, bathing, dressing and feeding her, while helping her take part in camp activities. Delashmit signed up to return to the camp again in 2016, but a few weeks before she was due to arrive, the pastor of some of her relatives called. He explained that she was a fantasist and asked if, along with the unnamed relatives, he could confront her at camp. The organisers agreed. Delashmit’s family have remained tight-lipped about her behaviour, but her father, Dave, later spoke to Sympathy Pains presenter Laura Beil, telling her he loved his daughter and believed she needed psychiatric help. Delashmit turned up to the camp in a wheelchair. When she saw the pastor and her relatives, she stood up, got into the van they had arrived in and shut the door. The group left and nobody contacted the camp afterwards to explain what had happened. Knowing Erin was friends with Delashmit, camp officials called Erin’s father to explain what had happened. When he broke the news, a shell-shocked Erin phoned Delashmit herself – who cried and said she’d never meant to hurt her. “I was in shock,” says Erin. “I was devastated. I believed I had family who were like my nieces and nephews, but they were made up and killed off. It was very real to me, because she worked hard at creating them. I always wanted to be a mum. “I don’t have kids, and I don’t know if I ever will, so I was invested in the children Delashmit created. “She knew that and she played on it. When I realised it was all a lie, it was like having several people in my family die at once. The memories aren’t real, but they were real for a very long time in my mind.” After this, with Andrea still on her tail, Delashmit focused on targeting cancer charities, claiming at different times to have liver, brain and breast cancer. In September 2018, she took part in a bike ride for young breast cancer survivors, where she met volunteer Liz Hickox and told her she had terminal breast and brain cancer. The two struck up a friendship, and by early 2019, Delashmit was staying with Liz’s mother in Florida, spending weekends with Liz and her husband Brian, sharing stories about her impending death. But when Delashmit claimed a stalker had shot her and several bystanders outside a supermarket, Brian searched for online reports and found nothing. Suspicious, he Googled Delashmit’s name and found posts about her lies, plus details of her nursing licence suspension. Following comments on her various social media accounts, he traced Delashmit’s aunt, who confirmed her history of lies. Police were again alerted, but said no crime had been committed, so Liz contacted the US talk show Dr Phil, hoping the TV star could persuade Delashmit to accept psychiatric help. Delashmit, Camp Summit volunteer Bethany, as well as Liz and Brian, appeared over two episodes in April that year, titled Terminal Cancer, A Disability And A Non-Existent Family: Will Sarah Ever Stop Lying? and Liar, Liar: Sarah Faces Her Accusers. During the shows, Delashmit admitted to her hoaxes, but framed it as a compulsive behaviour that she felt unable to control. She agreed to go to a residential psychiatric treatment unit. After watching the TV show, Andrea and Erin reached out to Brian, Liz and Bethany, sharing their stories and intel on Delashmit. Erin explains: “I started to realise the magnitude of it, and that I wasn’t the only one.” As a group, Delashmit’s victims continued pressing for a criminal investigation after she left the residential treatment arranged by the TV show within days. Their concerns intensified when she quickly returned to charity events and investigators uncovered evidence that she had fraudulently obtained two expensive racing bicycles and financial assistance from Camp Summit. Those offences transformed years of emotional deception into a prosecutable federal fraud case. In March 2020, Delashmit was charged with fraud and aggravated identity theft, and later admitted to five counts of fraud as part of a plea bargain. The following January, she was sentenced to 18 months in prison. The original plea bargain set the sentence at eight months, but the judge thought that was insufficient and more than doubled it. “Miss Delashmit deceived and manipulated individuals and families facing terminal illness and debilitating disorders, and non-profit organisations and volunteers who serve those individuals,” said the judge. “She accepted donations and allowed volunteers to care for her when she did not need or deserve that care. She took resources from those who did.” Since her release in March 2022, Delashmit has moved back to her hometown, where she has had two children. It’s not known who the father is. For Andrea, it was not the end of the story, and she continues to monitor Delashmit from afar. “I could walk away from it, but I won’t,” she says, adding that Delashmit and the charity community she targeted have ultimately been let down by the system. “In the United States, the authorities will not commit a person to mental health care until someone has been harmed. It’s hard to be angry at somebody who’s mentally ill, but I’m angry at the lack of provisions for psychiatric care for somebody who is clearly ill and can harm herself or others.” She believes that Delashmit will not be able to resist the urge to fall into old habits. “This isn’t about a quilt that she got from a community or about how she p**sed me off. This is about what could happen to other people. We’re just playing a waiting game.” Twenty years after she first uncovered Delashmit’s lies, Andrea still checks online every month, hoping she won’t discover another family mourning tragedies that never happened.