February 9, 2025
by Carla Hay
Culture Representation: The four-episode documentary series “Scamanda” (based on the 2023 podcast of the same name) features a predominantly white group of people (with a few Asians and Latin people) talking about the case of Amanda Riley, a former children’s educator from San Jose, California, who was convicted in 2022 of wire fraud for soliciting more than $100,000 in online donations, based on her lie that she had cancer.
Culture Clash: Beginning in 2010, Riley pretended she had cancer and duped hundreds of people into donating money to her, often through Christian charity efforts, and she tried to silence a TV journalist who was investigating her for this fraud.
Culture Audience: “Scamanda” will appeal primarily to people who are fans of the “Scamanda” podcast and anyone interested in high-profile fraud cases.
Based on the 2023 podcast “Scamanda,” the four-episode documentary series “Scamanda” offers more insight into the notorious case of a children’s educator in California who received donations totaling six figures by pretending that she had Hodgkins lymphoma (which affects the lymphatic system) and lung cancer. This docuseries is better than the “Scamanda” podcast because it has interviews with members of convicted scammer Amanda Riley’s blended family, including one of her stepdaughters. More investigation was needed for enablers’ involvement in the cancer fraud.
There is no director credited for the “Scamanda” documentary series, which is produced by Pilgrim Media Group, a division of Lionsgate Alternative Television, for ABC News Studios. Elizabeth Waller and Craig Pilligian serve as executive producers for Pilgrim Media Group. David Sloan is the senior executive producer and Victoria Thompson is the executive producer for ABC News Studios.
The four episodes of this documentary series tell the story in mostly chronological order:
- The first episode, titled “Stage 1: Perfect Wife, Perfect Life,” details how Riley crafted an image of being the ideal wife and mother whose life was tragically changed when she was diagnosed with Stage 3 Hodgkins lymphoma, but a former friend gave valuable information to an investigation that would lead to Riley’s downfall.
- The second episode, titled “Stage 2: All About Amanda,” takes a closer look at the custody battle that Amanda Riley’s then-husband Cory Riley was having with his ex-wife, to explain what else was going on in Amanda’s life during the time that Amanda pretended to have cancer.
- The third episode, titled “The Wheels of Justice,” chronicles the year leading up to police raiding Amanda and Cory’s house in 2016.
- The fourth episode, titled “Catch Me If You Cancer,” shows what happened when Amanda was arrested and indicted in 2020, pleaded guilty to wire fraud in 2021, and was sentenced in 2022 to five years in prison and ordered to pay back the approximately $106,000 she got from online donations.
It’s pointed out in the documentary that Amanda could only be charged with wire fraud because that was the only way to prove an amount of money that she scammed through online donations. Amanda pled guilty to a fraud total of $106,272. She was not charged for the untold amounts that she got from cash donations or non-online gifts, because those monetary amounts were difficult to prove.
Born on June 24, 1985, Amanda Riley’s birth name was Amanda Maneri. She and her three brothers (who are not named in the documentary) were raised by their parents Peggy and Tom in San Jose, California. Amanda continued to live in the San Jose area through the time that she became an adult and committed her cancer fraud.
In 2002, Amanda was 17 years old and a school cheerleader when she was hired as a babysitter for the two daughters being raised by Cory Riley and his wife at the time: Aletta, whose has had multiple last names. Aletta has also been known as Aletta Souza and Aletta Bernal. At the time this documentary premiered, her name was Aletta Bernal.
When Cory and Aletta were married, they were raising Aletta’s daughter Jaymie (born in 1995) from Aletta’s previous marriage, as well as Cory and Aletta’s biological daughter Jessa, who was born in 2001. Jaymie was in recovery from leukemia when Amanda entered their lives. Amanda, who was later a student at San Jose State University, was eventually hired to give dance lessons to Jaymie and later Jessa when Jessa was old enough.
Amanda became a friend of the family. And she definitely got very close to Cory, who is 12 years older than Amanda. It’s unclear when Cory and Amanda started their romance, but Cory and Amanda began publicly dating a few years after his 2007 divorce from Aletta. Cory and Amanda got married in 2011.
During their marriage, Amanda worked as an educator for children in elementary school. Most of her jobs were as a teacher. But her last job before she went to prison was her highest job position: From 2017 to 2020, Amanda was the principal of Pacific Point Christian School in Gilroy, California. She resigned from the job before she was arrested. The “Scamanda” documentary series doesn’t mention what types of jobs that Cory has had.
Amanda and Cory became prominent members of the Family Community Church, a San Jose non-denominational Christian mega-church with about 5,000 congregants. Amanda became semi-famous in her community for being a public speaker about cancer. Most of the donations that Amanda received were directly or indirectly through the church’s fundraisers for her. Most of the supporters whom Amanda met in person were people who met her through Family Community Church or through Amanda’s mother Peggy, who was one of Amanda’s biggest advocates in having people donate money to Amanda.
Cory and Amanda had two children together during their marriage: son Carter was born in 2012, and son Connor was born in 2014. In October 2012, Amanda started a blog called “My Story … Our Journey,” where she claimed that she had been diagnosed with Stage 3 Hodgkins lymphoma while pregnant with Carter. She continued to publicly lie about having cancer until she pled guilty in October 2021, and admitted that everything about her having cancer was a lie.
Cory and his ex-wife Aletta had a custody battle over Jessa that got very nasty in the late 2000s to mid-2010s. Cory and Amanda wanted full custody of Jessa, but so did Aletta. According to Aletta, who is interviewed the documentary, Aletta was the victim of a smear campaign where Cory and Amanda told lies and claimed that Aletta was a neglectful and mentally unstable parent.
Aletta comments on Amanda and Cory: “She ripped apart my family. And then, they took my reputation and squashed it.” Aletta’s sister Amie Bernal and Aletta’s daughter Jaymie Bailey are also interviewed in the documentary, and they confirm what Aletta says. (In the “Scamanda” podcast, Aletta and Jessa are interviewed from Aletta’s side of the family.) Amie was the one who actually recommended that Amanda be Jaymie’s dance teacher. Amie says if she had known then what would happen, she never would’ve made that recommendation.
According to people interviewed in the documentary, Cory and Amanda told conflicting stories about Aletta. Cory and Amanda told some people that Aletta was a bad mother who continued to make their lives miserable after Aletta’s divorce from Cory. Mahasti Ameli, the couple’s babysitter at the time, says that Cory lied by telling Ameli that Jessa was born from a one-night stand with Aletta. Ameli says that she later found out that Aletta was Cory’s ex-wife, not a one-night stand. And to some of his friends, Cory didn’t mention Aletta at all and almost pretended like Aletta didn’t exist.
Aletta says that the judge in the custody case believed the lies told by Cory and Amanda in court, which resulted in Cory and Amanda getting full custody of Jessa sometime in 2009, when Jessa was about 8 years old. The couple’s former babysitter Ameli says that Amanda was the “more pushy” than Cory in the custody battle. Aletta had visitation rights but didn’t give up her fight for full custody of Jessa. The documentary doesn’t make it clear when Aletta regained full custody of Jessa, but by the time Cory and Amanda were being investigated for Amanda’s cancer stories in the mid-to-late-2010s, Jessa was a teenager and in the full custody of Aletta.
Other people interviewed in the documentary include Lisa Berry and Steve Berry, a married couple who befriended and then distanced themselves from Cory and Amanda; Rebecca Cafiero, a former friend of Amanda’s; Mahasti Ameli, a babysitter who used to work for Amanda and Cory; Jack York, who knew Cory as a kid through the Big Brother program; Josh Kierstead, a Family Community Church congregant whose father-in-law was pastor of the church; church member Vanna Ruiz and Lindsey Wilder; and other former supporters of Amanda, such as Angie Smailey, Stephanie Davis and Penny Fraley.
Also interviewed in this documentary are several people who were involved in investgations about Amanda: investigative TV producer Nancy Moscatiello, who is a producer for this “Scamanda” docuseries; “Scamanda” podcast host Charlie Webster, who is also a producer for this “Scamanda” docuseries; Jose Martinez, a detective who used to work for the San Jose Police Department; and Arlette Lee, the former IRS criminal division official who was a leader in the federal investigation of Amanda.
Other interviewees in the “Scamanda” docuseries are people who either don’t know Amanda or haven’t seen her in years: clinical and forensic neuropsychologist Dr. Judy Ho, who says she’s never met Amanda and can only speculate about her mental health; a woman named Trisha (no last name given), who says she knew Amanda since they were in sixth grade together; and Natale Tognetti and Rebecca Spencer-Wright, two parents whose children were students at Pacific Point Christian School when Amanda was the school’s principal.
Amanda faked her cancer treatments by going to hospital emergency rooms for various reasons (not for cancer), and then photographed herself in hospital beds, often showing herself hooked up to tubes or IV ports. Over the years, Amanda claimed that her cancer (which she said advanced to Stage 4) would be in remission and then come back again. She fabricated many “medical updates” for herself.
Because of Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA) privacy laws that forbid disclosing a patient’s medical information, Amanda’s stories that she posted on social media could never be verified by the hospitals where she went. If any medical professionals knew she was lying about having cancer, they couldn’t expose her because of HIPPA privacy laws. It’s one of the reasons why it took so long for her to be arrested and charged with this cancer fraud.
Just like many con artists who fool people over several years, Amanda is described as very charismatic and someone who is skilled at gaining people’s trust. She had never been arrested before she got into trouble for this cancer fraud. And, according to people interviewed in the documentary, any other lies she told in the past weren’t not serious enough to be considered a major crime.
The only personality flaw that people noticed about Amanda before she was exposed for this fraud was that she was extremely competitive and didn’t like to lose. As an example of her competitiveness, the documentary shows archival footage of Amanda leading a group of three pre-teen girls (including Jaymie and Jaymie’s unidentifed cousin, who is Amie Bernal’s daughter) for an uncoordinated dance routine in a talent competition at San Jose State University. The judges gave the group a mediocre score of 6.6 out of 10. Amanda wouldn’t accept the score, so she had Jayme and her cousin go over to the judges to try to convince the judges to give this dance group a higher score. This tactic didn’t work. Amanda and her group of dancers didn’t win in the talent contest.
Many of her victims say that they believed Amanda’s cancer stories because of what Amanda put on social media. They ignored obvious signs that she was lying, such as the fact that Amanda never had scar tissue in places where she supposedly had surgery or chemotherapy treatments. Amanda also never lost a lot of weight or had other known outward physical side effects of having Stage 3 or Stage 4 cancer. She sometimes shaved her head, but that’s an easy and superficial way to fake having chemotherapy.
Some of her closest supporters also thought it was strange that during the worst of Amanda’s so-called cancer treatments, they would never see her parents. Amanda explained this absence by saying that her parents were very busy. Amanda’s mother Peggy changed her stories about how much Peggy was there in person to support Amanda for the cancer treatments. At first, Peggy told people that she was by Amanda’s side for many of these medical appointments at hospitals. But then after Amanda’s lies were exposed, Peggy said that she really wasn’t with Amanda at the hospitals and was deceived by Amanda.
The “Scamanda” docuseries has archival footage of videorecorded interviews that Amanda did during the time she faked having cancer. In these interviews, she appears to be bubbly and healthy, which her supporters attributed to Amanda have a constantly positive attitude. No one likes to be scammed, so it’s understandable that her victims found it easier to believe that she was telling the truth rather than take a closer look at the illogical holes in her stories.
The documentary could have done a better job at getting more information about the family backgrounds of Amanda and Cory. Very little is told about Amanda’s and Cory’s parents. Amanda’s mother Peggy is described as someone who hated being called a grandmother and insisted that people call her “goddess.”
All that’s mentioned about Cory’s parents is that his father committed suicide when Cory was a child. Cory’s former Big Brother mentor York remembers boyhood Cory this way: “Cory was super-fun. He always had a smile on his face.” Many years later, when York knew Cory and Amanda as a couple, York says Cory treated Amanda like a trophy wife: “It was almost like how you would treat a sculpture.”
Because Amanda’s case was widely reported by the media, and because Amanda pled guilty, there’s no mystery over who is the main villain in this fraud. However, what “Scamanda” doesn’t really uncover is how much Cory knew about the scam when this scam was happening. Was he an innocent bystander or was he a willing participant in the fraud? Cory was never charged with any crimes related to this fraud. Some former supporters of Amanda also suspect Amanda’s mother Peggy of being an accomplice, but Peggy has also not been charged with any crimes related to this scam.
A caption at the end of the documentary says that Amanda declined to be interviewed for the documentary. Also not interviewed: Cory, his biological children, and any of Amanda’s biological relatives, who did not respond to requests for comment in this documentary. Amanda has not publicly stated that anyone was her accomplice in the fraud. According to an epilogue in the documentay, Amanda has issued a public denial that her parents and her brothers were involved in the cancer scam. She has taken full responsibility for the fraud, although there have been several reports that she continues to claim to have illnesses (not cancer) while she’s been in prison.
Amanda has hinted at the possible motive for this financial fraud: She told “Scamanda” podcast host Webster that most of the money that was scammed went to pay for legal fees for Cory’s divorce and the custody battle over Jessa. And considering that Cory’s employment history has been sketchy, and being a children’s educator is not a high-paying profession, that appears to be a huge motive for why Amanda went to those extreme lengths to commit financial fraud.
Amanda’s former friend Lisa Berry says in the documentary that Cory and Amanda equally lied about Amanda having cancer. According to Lisa, Amanda and Corey got to know Lisa and her husband Steve because Amanda was a friend to Lisa and Steve’s daughters. Amanda repeatedly told Lisa that Lisa physically resembled Amanda’s mother Peggy, so Amanda often described Lisa as being like a second mother to Amanda.
Lisa says Amanda and Cory first told Lisa and her husband Steve that Amanda had cancer in 2010—two years before Amanda claimed on her blog that her cancer diagnosis was in 2012. Lisa and Steve gave Amanda and Cory money to help pay for Amanda’s so-called cancer treatments. Other people in the community also gave money to Amanda and Cory for the same reasons.
Lisa also believes that Amanda got the idea for the cancer scam after Lisa had mentioned to Amanda that a community member who had cancer recently received $100,000 from a community fundraiser to help this cancer patient and his family. Lisa says that Amanda called her the next day to tell Lisa that Amanda had cancer. And then, the fundraising for Amanda began.
Lisa and Steve Berry ended their friendship with Cory and Amanda when Lisa figured out that Amanda was lying about having cancer. This moment of clarity happened when Lisa saw Amanda nimbly swimming in the Berrys’ swimming pool, right after Amanda said that Amanda came from a medical appointment where fluid was supposedly drained from Amanda’s brain. Lisa says in the documentary that’s when she knew “I wanted Cory and Amanda out of our lives.”
In 2015, Lisa saw a social media post that investigative producer Moscatiello was looking for information on people lying about having terminal illnesses. Lisa was the first person who tipped off Moscatiello about Amanda’s suspected fraud when Moscatiello began her investigation in 2015. At the time, Lisa told Moscatiello that she wanted to remain an anonymous source. But in the documentary, Lisa says she’s no longer afraid to publicly admit that she was the tipster.
Moscatiello is the true MVP in this story because it was her persistent and meticulous investigation over the years that was used as crucial evidence when law enforcement took action. The first law-enforcement agency that Moscatiello went to was the San Jose Police Department, which then referred the case to the IRS. Once it became a federal case, Amanda was on her way to getting arrested and charged with fraud.
Before that happened, Moscatiello went through a legal ordeal when Amanda and Cory tried but failed to stop Moscatiello, by suing her for harassment. Moscatiello won in that lawsuit. Moscatiello is one of the main people who was interviewed in the “Scamanda” podcast, which has more details about Amanda and Cory’s failed attempts to silence this heroic investigator.
Webster doesn’t have much to add to the “Scamanda” docuseries that she didn’t already discuss in her “Scamanda” podcast. The documentary includes archival footage of Webster meeting Amanda briefly for the first time when Webster gave her business card to Amanda after Amanda left a courthouse. Webster and Amanda began having conversations with each other shortly afterward. There’s a scene in the documentary (that’s not in the podcast) where an imprisoned Amanda calls Webster on the phone for a nearly half-hour conversation, but on the condition that Webster not record the phone call in any way.
After getting that phone call, Webster says in the documentary that Amanda told Webster that Amanda and Cory were getting divorced. Cory (who currently lives in Austin, Texas, with sons Carter and Connor) filed for divorce from Amanda in January 2024. It seems as if Jaymie doesn’t really want anything to do with Amanda or Cory because, as a cancer survivor, she feels deeply offended by this cancer scam.
It’s a sentiment of many other people interviewed in this documentary. Several of them have also been personally touched by real cancer diagnoses. Moscatiello had a sister who died from cancer. Former IRS agent Lee had a twin sister who died of cancer. Former Amanda supporters Smailey and Fraley are cancer survivors. Amanda’s former friend Cafiero had a boyfriend who died of cancer.
Family Community Church member Wilder says she felt betrayed by Amanda on a religious level. Wilder comments that before she joined the church, she was an atheist. Amanda was the first person whom Wilder seriously prayed for, according to Wilder, who adds that she still believes in Christianity, but her faith was shaken because of Amanda’s cruel deception.
The “Scamanda” documentary falters when it repeats too much of the same archival footage of Amanda, or when it uses melodramatic re-enactments with actors. It’s an overall adequate documentary that has very good interviews. However, the documentary filmmakers didn’t do much more investigating to give details of how much Amanda’s closest adult family members really knew about her fraud before she was caught. “Scamanda” is ultimately yet another cautionary tale about how people should not believe everything they see on the Internet.
ABC premiered “Scamanda” on January 30, 2025.
