Unmasking Samantha Cookes (The Many Lives of a Serial Fraudster)

‘Lies? Yes, everyone lies. I’ve lied ever since I could remember. It’s the only thing I do well, and I think we should all play to our strengths, don’t you?’ Unmasking Samantha Cookes is the chilling true story of a master manipulator who spent more than a decade reinventing herself across the UK and Ireland with an arsenal of false identities. Once known to millions as ‘Carrie Jade Williams’, she slipped seamlessly from au pair and nanny to therapist, psychologist, terminally ill author and online ‘sickfluencer’. Each persona carefully crafted. Each lie more audacious than the last. And each one designed to gain trust – and exploit it. What started with the tragic death of a baby soon became a trail of fraud, deception and shattered lives. Every reinvention brought new victims, until her most audacious lie, a fabricated terminal illness, triggered a TikTok reckoning. Drawing on exclusive evidence and firsthand accounts, Unmasking Samantha Cookes pulls back the curtain on a mastermind of deception hiding in plain sight, and reveals just how easily trust can be weaponised, with an unsettling question at its core: how well do we really know the people we trust with our children?