A 38-year-old Brazilian woman who claimed to be a 12-year-old girl has been jailed for 'emotionally kidnapping' a couple who took her in.
Amanda Maria Souza de Oliveira leeched off the kindness of the couple by convincing them to care for her, and lying to explain her grown-up appearance.
She pretended to be handicapped and to have the mental age of a child - even drinking milk from bottles and sucking on dummies.
But her ruse was found out - and she has been sentenced to a year and a half in prison for fraud in a case that gripped Brazil.
The extraordinary sequence of events began with Oliveira attending services at an evangelical church in Joinville, southern Brazil.
Here 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.
Amanda Maria Souza de Oliveira, 38, pretended to be a 12-year-old girl to exploit a couple's kindness
She claimed to look older because her father had forced to take hormonal supplements from a young age
Oliveira eventually admitted to the elaborate ruse - and said she had spun the same lies to a number of families over the past 15 years
She said she had fled from abuse thousands of miles away in the northern state of Para, and that she only looked like a woman nearing 40 because her father had forced to to take hormonal supplements at a young age. The couple believed it all.
For the next 14 months, Oliveira lived as their daughter and spun ever-more elaborate lie, including that she was severely autistic.
Her disturbing behaviour became increasingly that of a baby - so that she began using baby bottles and dummies.
She also managed to convince the pair to pay for a course of weight-loss drugs.
The alarm was eventually raised by a relative of the couple, who 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.
She later admitted to her deceit and told investigators she had pulled the same stunt for at least 15 years across several Brazilian states.
'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 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.