Amanda Riley is a 39-year-old woman from San Jose, California, who faked being diagnosed with Hodgkin's Lymphoma, an aggressive type of blood cancer. She began discussing her alleged diagnosis online in 2015 and raised over $100,000 in donations for her alleged treatment. However, it was later discovered that Amanda had faked her diagnosis after she faced a trial, she was sentenced to 60 months in prison.
Amanda Riley reportedly started her blog named Lymphoma Can Suck It in 2012 where she wrote articles about battling cancer. Her posts soon began attracting attention from her community and donors on social media, who wanted to help her by giving her money for the treatment.
Amanda raised thousands of dollars in donations and used that money to fund her reportedly lavish lifestyle. However, seven years after she began posting about her journey, she was caught. Journalist Nancy Moscatiello received an anonymous tip about Amanda and she conducted a five-year investigation into Riley and exposed her supposed cancer.
Amanda Riley's story and her alleged scam are all set to be documented in ABC's docuseries Scamanda, which was released at 9 pm EST on January 30, 2025. Scamanda will be available for streaming on January 31, 2025, on Hulu.
Amanda Riley was born on June 24, 1985, as Amanda Maneri, and spent her childhood in San Jose, California. She met her future husband, Cory Riley when she was 17 and used to teach his younger daughter dance.
When Cory and Amanda met, he was already married to a woman named Aletta and the two had two daughters, one of whom, Jessa, had been diagnosed with cancer. Cory and Aletta eventually separated and married Amanda Riley. They also filed a legal report to take full custody of Jessa, without Aletta's permission.
According to some of Amanda's friends and family members, she often faked being sick to get out of work.
Amanda's friends and colleagues revealed that she often faked her illness as an excuse from her work. Cory eventually separated from Aletta and went on to marry Amanda Riley. The couple filed a legal report to take custody of Jessa, without Aletta's willingness.
In 2012 Amanda Riley started her Lymphoma Can Suck It blog where she described herself as a Lymphoma cancer patient. Around this time, Amanda also began working as a guest teacher at a local school before she was promoted to a full-time job and she also gave birth to her son, despite her alleged cancer diagnosis.
Amanda Riley's blog rose to popularity between 2012 and 2015. In the blogs, she pretended to be a cancer patient asked people for financial support, and ensured that her content was curated in a manner that she seemed to be undergoing treatment
Amanda also had multiple profiles on social media where she posted images of her on the hospital bed and presented fabricated medical records. She also shaved her head to mimic the aftereffects of chemotherapy. As per Newsweek, Amanda added a link to her blog, which redirected to a donation page in September 2013.
Despite the diagnosis, she reportedly gave birth to her son before having her second son in May 2014. However, Amanda Riley had never been diagnosed with cancer and had reportedly used the blog to scam people.
U.S. Attorney's Office, Northern District of California revealed to People that the money that was donated to her was transferred to Amanda's personal bank account. She allegedly used it to fund her lifestyle.
Apart from financial donations, Amanda also received complimentary gift cards, meals, travel vouchers, and free babysitting. She began calling her supporters "#TeamAmanda."
Riley also allegedly bribed doctors to give her fake medical records and bills, according to the United States Attorney's Office, Northern District of California.
In June 2015, a journalist named Nancy Moscatiello received an anonymous message that claimed that Amanda Riley had been faking her cancer diagnosis. The tip also shared a link to Amanda's blog and as Nancy began reading the articles, she discovered several inconsistencies in her stories. Moscatiello described the loopholes that she found in Amanda's blogs to multiple news outlets
She said that her sister had stage 4 lung cancer and a friend of hers had helped her research clinical trials. The journalist added that the friend looked at the blog and pointed [out] multiple issues with Amanda's stories.
"My sister had stage 4 lung cancer years before and a friend of mine helped her by researching clinical trials. She looked at the blog and pointed me to inconsistencies, like treatments that were not available at home or could only be administered by a medically trained person — and medicines that could only be kept in a laboratory fridge."
Moscatiello also visited the hospitals mentioned in Amanda's blogs to confirm the authenticity of her treatments. Though most medical staff kept the patient's history confidential, they revealed that the treatments Amanda described in the blogs weren't the procedures used to treat Stage 4 blood cancer.
As per TV Insider, after gathering concrete evidence against Amanda's alleged scam, the journalist talked to a detective in the financial crimes unit at the San Jose Police Department in 2015. The information was passed to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) in 2016, which led to a raid at Riley's residence.
According to a report in People, when Amanda found out about Moscatiello's investigation, she filed civil harassment, pleading for a restraining order. Amanda Riley claimed that due to Moscatiello's defamation, she and her husband Cory were fired from their jobs, and harassed by their friends and family.
In January 2018, a judge ruled out Amanda's restraining order after Moscatiello's lawyers provided emails and texts, showing that Amanda had made up health issues to compensate for poor attendance at her job. The investigation into Amanda's scams continued for two more years.
In July 2020, Amanda Riley was officially charged with wire fraud by IRS special investigator Arlette Lyons-Lee. Her blogs, donation links, and social media posts were presented proving her scam. Amanda initially pleaded not guilty but went on to plead guilty in October 2021.
Amanda's attorneys requested a six-month sentence and 18 months as per the solicitor guidelines. At her trial in May 2022, she apologized to the jury and her donors, for her span of crimes. Judge Labson Freeman, from the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, sentenced Amanda Riley to five years imprisonment.
She was given a three-year probation and asked to pay money to all her donors with an interest rate. Amanda Riley had reportedly scammed a sum of $105,513.43 from 349 people in a transaction. Nancy Moscatello revealed in a Reddit post that an additional $80,000 in donations were taken as cash.
Amanda Riley is currently serving her sentence at the Federal Medical Center Carswell in Forth Worth, Texas. Moscatiello revealed in an Instagram post, that Amanda was released from the federal prison, and is likely to be put under house arrest. She is expected to get her bail in 2026.
To know more about Amanda Riley's cancer scam, watch ABC's docuseries Scamanda on January 30, 2025, at 9 pm EST.