‘She sucks you in immediately’ – victims of fraudster ‘Carrie Jade Williams’ on getting scammed

Samantha Cookes, who has used a number of aliases including Carrie Jade Williams, Lucy Fitzwilliam and Sadie Harris to scam people, is believed to still be in the country and her victims warned she could be targeting others. Ms Cooke told some of the people she met that she suffered from the rare genetic neurological condition Huntington’s disease.

Speaking on RTÉ Radio 1’s Liveline, victims said a support group had been set up on WhatsApp.

Joe Duffy revealed today that the serial fraudster ‘Carrie Jade Williams’ tried to get on Liveline a number of times, in what he claimed was an attempt to get money.

The RTÉ presenter said that the show realised that Williams, whose real name is Samantha Cookes, was not telling the truth and did not let her on the show.

The British woman was previously caught defrauding a UK couple by posing as a surrogate mother and posing as a psychologist for an Irish family who were looking for an assessment for their child.

After moving to Ireland she had built an online profile under the name Carrie Jade Williams, posing as a writer and disability activist who was bravely fighting Huntington’s Disease while developing groundbreaking technology for disabled people. It all came crashing down in 2022, when she went viral after claiming that fictional guests at her Kerry Airbnb were trying to sue her for “being disabled.”

It soon emerged that Williams was actually the fraudster had also been subletting her Kerry rental property on Airbnb without the permission or knowledge of her landlord.

Soon, a number of Irish families came forward to say that Cookes had inveigled her way into their lives – often as a live-in au pair.

On Wednesday, Mr Duffy told listeners that Cookes had written to the show multiple times under the alias Carrie Jade Williams. He was speaking after RTÉ recently released a podcast about how its audio documentary team was also initially duped by Cookes story.

“Liveline didn’t believe her,” Mr Duffy said.

“On four separate occasions, calling herself Carrie Jade Williams she tried, unsuccessfully, to get on Liveline. On each occasion, looking for money with a sob story.”

Mr Duffy read out excerpts from the emails, which had been sent to the programme as far back as 2021.

“‘I have a terminal illness,’” Mr Duffy quoted, before adding: “You’re a liar, you don’t.”

He said that after the programme’s production team spoke to her, it found “lots of worries” about what she was saying which could not be proved.

In the second email, Cookes claimed again to be suffering from a terminal illness but told the programme she had “decided to use my remaining time to advocate for the inclusion of assistive technology in Irish society.”

She said that she wanted to come on the programme to talk about an accessibility event she was hosting.

“Go somewhere else Carrie Jade, you ain’t getting on Liveline,” Mr Duffy said.

In another email, she claimed to have developed a €16 robot that could turn spoken word into braille. “An incredible feat, if it could be done,” Mr Duffy observed.

The Real Carrie Jade is a new podcast by RTÉ’s Doc on One. Ronan Kelly, the series producer, was initially invited down to Kerry to meet “Carrie Jade Williams” at her invitation, to interview her about her battle with her terminal illness.

But soon the story began to unravel, and the documentary team began to understand that Cookes was in fact a scammer.

“She may have initially conned us into interviewing her for a podcast but that was nothing to what she did to her real victims: she stole their money, their property and, worst of all, their sense of trust,” Mr Kelly said.

Lynn McDonald told Joe Duffy Ms Cooke used the alias Lucy Fitzwilliam, and presented herself as a therapist who could provide special needs assistance to Ms McDonald’s daughter Daisy.

“Lucy was introduced to me by my old next door neighbour Hillary, who I would trust completely and Hillary is also a mum to a child with additional needs,” she said.

“Lucy was introduced to me as a minister’s wife who ran a women’s refuge and was a qualified therapist, and she had a background in special needs assisting. You meet somebody like this and you go ‘wow, an absolute angel’.

“She has a warm, smiley, bright face. She has a beautiful demeanour, capable of listening and absorbing what you say. She just sucks you in immediately.”

Ms McDonald said Daisy’s condition had become “quite medically complex” at the time she met Ms Cooke and the family had “zero services for her”.

“My invitation from lovely Lucy was she had offered to babysit Daisy and let me go off for an hour for a cup of coffee. Straight away that was a no for me because I wasn’t able to leave Daisy. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust her.”

She said Ms Cooke was “wangling her way into my home” and became very focused on her other daughter, Ellie.

“She was becoming a friend and a confidante. She was focusing in on Ellie, so she had offered play therapy and art therapy with Ellie, which she did twice a week for a few weeks, and she gained Ellie’s trust.

“She was building this little girl up who was having a tough time, who wasn’t getting the attention from her mum she needed and deserved, who was missing out on parties and everything else.”

Hillary, the woman who introduced fraudster Sam Cooke to Ms McDonald, said her son has autism and she called her after he had “a really bad weekend”.

She was charged €100 per therapy session by Ms Cooke and organised a trip to Lapland for vulnerable children at €380 per person – a trip that never happened – and said she knew in hindsight Ms Cooke was not a qualified therapist but she didn’t know any better at the time.

“She puts her box of tricks down in my house then she won’t let my son near it. We use a thing called Lámh, she doesn’t use any keywords. She just has this control over him where she’d go ‘ah, ah, ah, don’t touch the box’,” she said.

“She was more interested in the food when she was in my house,” Hillary said.