A young woman fooled the governments of three countries. What does her con reveal about how we see the world? Illustration by Boyoun Kim

On the afternoon of October 10, 2013, an unusually cold day, the streets of downtown Dublin were filled with tourists and people leaving work early. In their midst, one young woman stood out. She seemed dazed and distressed as she wandered down O’Connell Street, looking around timidly, a helpless-seeming terror in her eyes. She stopped in front of the post office, or, as locals would have it, the G.P.O. Standing between the thick columns, she looked even more forlorn. She was dressed in a purple hoodie under a gray wool sweater; tight, darkly colored jeans; and flat, black shoes. Her face was ashen. She was shivering. A passerby, stunned by her appearance, asked if she needed help. She looked at him mutely, as if not quite grasping the essence of the question. Somebody called the police. An officer from the Store Street garda station answered the call. He took her to a hospital. It seemed the best thing to do.

She was a teen-ager—fourteen or fifteen, at most. At five feet six, she weighed just more than eighty-eight pounds. Her long, blond hair covered a spiny, battered back. Once she did talk, some days later, it became clear that she had only the most rudimentary grasp of English—not enough to say who she was or why she’d appeared as she had. But the girl could draw. And what she drew made her new guardians catch their breaths. One stifled a gasp. One burst out crying. There she was, a small stick-like figure, being flown to Ireland on a plane. And there she was again, lying on a bed, surrounded by multiple men. She seemed to be a victim of human trafficking—one of the lucky ones who had somehow managed to escape.

Three weeks later, the girl still wasn’t talking—or, at least, nothing she said made much sense. The state was throwing everything it had at getting her help. Who was she? Where was she from? Into early November, the Irish authorities poured more than two thousand man-hours into a hundred and fifteen possible lines of inquiry. Door-to-door queries. Reviews of CCTV footage. Missing-persons lists. Visits to airports, seaports, rail stations. Guesthouse bookings. Did anyone fail to turn up, or fail to return? It was costing a pretty penny—two hundred and fifty thousand euros— but every cent was worth it if it brought them closer to helping a child regain her lost home and her fragile sanity. The investigation was dubbed Operation Shepherd. Eventually, the police came up with and systematically tested more than fifteen possible identities for their charge. All came up short.

On November 5th, the Garda Síochána won the right to undertake an extraordinary step. It would distribute the girl’s image publically. (The picture itself had been taken on the sly; she’d refused to be photographed and had shied away from anyone in anything resembling an official uniform.) The girl was not only a minor but in a highly vulnerable state; the decision was an unprecedented one. But nothing else had worked. As the child’s picture was broadcast on television and printed in newspapers, the Irish National Police told the world what they knew about the teen. “She has limited English. We’re unable to decipher her nationality at the moment,” a sergeant said. And anything anyone knew would be most welcome. “Any information is vital to the investigation, and the welfare of the child,” the police implored. “Any information passed to us will, of course, be treated in the strictest of confidence.” The girl’s temporary guardian, Orla Ryan, concurred: “I am extremely concerned about the welfare circumstances of this young person. What we know about her, at present, is limited. It is in the child’s best interests to be identified, and I fully support An Garda Síochána in their continuing investigation.” The media frenzy began right on cue. It was such an odd case, and everyone had a theory. The teenager was quickly dubbed “G.P.O. Girl,” for the place she’d first turned up.

Ten hours later, the garda received a phone call.

Samantha Lyndell Azzopardi was born in 1988, to a middle-class couple, Bruce Azzopardi and Joan Marie Campbell. Sammy to her friends, she grew up with her mother and brother, Gregory, in Campbelltown, New South Wales, just outside of Sydney, Australia. From her days at Mount Annan High School to a job waiting tables at Pancakes on the Rocks, a welcoming Campbelltown restaurant, she was seen, as her former boss put it, as a “lovely girl” who “had issues.” In the late summer of 2013, Sammy decided to visit her mother’s ex, Joe Brennan, in Clonmel, a small town some hundred and seventy-five kilometres southeast of Dublin, along the bank of the River Suir. It wasn’t much, but it was the largest town in County Tipperary. For three weeks, she lounged about, enjoying a summer break away from it all. Then, abruptly, she left. Joe had done nothing to provoke her, as far as he could tell, but, then again, Sammy had always been prone to erratic behavior. He wasn’t worried. She pulled this kind of thing all the time, and he simply assumed she’d returned home without telling him.

It came as a surprise when he saw the news that November afternoon. That photograph. That poor, lost girl. The horrifying story of human trafficking. That was Sammy. Brennan picked up the phone to call the police.

With the help of Brennan’s tip, the story of the G.P.O. girl began to unravel. The garda called Interpol and discovered that Azzopardi—who was twenty-five years old, not fifteen— had more than forty aliases: Emily Peet, Lindsay Coughlin, Dakota Johnson, Georgia McAuliffe, Emily-Ellen Sheahan, Emily Sciberas. Her criminal history dated back to her teens. The police confronted her. She wouldn’t speak. As more evidence poured in, she started communicating with short notes—in English. But her steadfast refusal to let the ruse go entirely prompted a second psychological evaluation. The girl might not be who she said, but she did not seem mentally all there. Still, a subsequent professional evaluation gave her a clean bill of mental health. Cleared for travel, Sammy was returned to Australia, her native country, with a firm injunction to stay away from Ireland. She was never formally charged with a crime, but the censure was severe. Her deception, the Irish judge George Birmingham said, had come “as a shock to everybody and as a surprise.”

How had it happened? Azzopardi instinctively knew how to get emotions going to the point where nothing else mattered. Her pictures had told a story—a devastating story that no sane person would ever lie about. Who makes up a history of sex trafficking? What kind of person do you need to be?

Storytelling is the oldest form of entertainment there is. From campfires and pictograms—the Lascaux cave paintings may be as much as twenty thousand years old— to tribal songs and epic ballads passed down from generation to generation, it is one of the most fundamental ways humans have of making sense of the world. No matter how much storytelling formats change, storytelling itself never gets old.

Stories bring us together. We can talk about them and bond over them. They are shared knowledge, shared legend, and shared history; often, they shape our shared future. Stories are so natural that we don’t notice how much they permeate our lives. And stories are on our side: they are meant to delight us, not deceive us—an ever-present form of entertainment.