I’ve spent 15 years speaking to people who fake cancer online – this is what they tell me
Netflix’s hit show ‘Apple Cider Vinegar’ retells the story of Belle Gibson, who infamously lied about dying of cancer – but she is far from the only one. Zoë Beaty speaks to Bill Petrich, who has spent years in the bizarre world of the fakers, hunting them down and unearthing answers to the most important question of all: why?
Bill Petrich’s life’s work lives on his computer, in a database titled “The Fakers”. The file is vast: in it, more than 1,000 people’s lives are documented, analysed and sorted into sub-categories like “Age”, “Gender”, “Motivation”, “Legal outcome” and “Did this faker go to Disney World?”. This is not his job – by day, he works in biotech, managing marketing for agencies that make cancer treatments in Oregon, USA. By night he sets about finding people doing the unthinkable: lying about dying from cancer.
For 15 years, Bill has dedicated thousands of hours to unpacking this extraordinary social phenomenon. He isn’t a “hoax hunter”; his aim isn’t to find active “fakers” and expose them to the public, and he isn’t “into pushing desperate people into more desperate positions”. He’s also not an apologist for their crimes, though he admits there’s a morbid curiosity to it all. “It’s like true crime without the murders,” says Bill.
Over the years he’s documented heinous offences – financial and emotional – and depicted the bizarre reality of a world few of us understand. At least 10 cases on his spreadsheet used cancer fraud to cover up breast implant surgery (“as if that’s somehow more shameful than faking cancer,” he says); scores “had help” from partners in on it too.
But, beyond the boundless betrayal, Bill’s work tells a story that cuts deeper than the narrative we’re familiar with. In private conversations, those who have cast elaborate lies confess their darkest secrets to him. His aim is to uncover answers to the one big question that confounds us all: why would someone do this?
The subject has long been a point of public fascination, particularly right now. Hit podcast and soon-to-be-released documentary Scamanda, which tells the shocking story of Amanda Riley, a devout Christian who stole more than $100,000 in donations after revealing her stage 3 Hodgkin lymphoma diagnosis, has left listeners slack-jawed.
The unfathomable tale of Elisabeth Finch, a longtime writer on Grey’s Anatomy, who for years duped producers into believing she had a malignant tumour in her spine, has captured the attention of millions in Peacock docuseries Anatomy of Lies. And now, the new Netflix series Apple Cider Vinegar looks at perhaps one of the most infamous cancer frauds ever exposed: the curious case of Belle Gibson.
“I know pretty much all there is to know about Belle Gibson’s story,” Bill says. In 2013, Gibson falsely claimed she had healed her inoperable brain cancer by eschewing traditional medicine and adopting alternative treatments, predominantly healthy eating.
She documented her recipes and lies on Instagram before launching a highly successful “wellness” app, The Whole Pantry, and subsequently landed a book deal with Penguin, making her an estimated AU$1m in the process. She was lying – spectacularly so – having already tragically influenced thousands of cancer patients to believe that they too could “beat” the disease holistically. “The thing is,” Bill continues, “if you rise as high as Belle Gibson, you’re going to fall all the harder.”
Ironically, Gibson’s downfall became her most viral moment. When the lies inevitably started to close in, she added more – blood cancer, spleen, liver, uterine and kidney metastasis; a local newspaper investigation found that thousands of dollars she promised to charities in need were never donated. She later admitted in a magazine interview that “none of it was true”, and was dramatically grilled on Australia’s 60 Minutes TV show. In 2017, a federal court handed her a fine of AU$410,000. It remains unpaid.
Her story is morbidly captivating, and many others are equally so. In fact, says Bill, faking cancer online or otherwise is astoundingly common. He estimates that in the one week that’s passed since he began a TikTok page to talk about his vast research, more than 1,500 additional people have contacted him about someone in their circle who lied about their health, a small number of them confessing in the privacy of his DMs that they did it themselves – including one who was already on his spreadsheet.
For years his research process has gone a little like this: he searches the internet for a case and finds as much information as possible. Then he tracks down a phone number or email address using software usually operated by private investigators. Then he prepares and cold-calls the faker.
“Most of these calls go unanswered, as you can imagine, but in a handful of them the person is willing to talk,” explains Bill. “Some are so surprised that someone found them, and so shocked that someone actually wanted to hear their story from an empathetic place, that they just start spilling. More often than not, there’s an awful lot of trauma underlying it all.
“They haven’t really ever been able to talk about this to anyone … For some fakers, revealing their darkest secrets to someone who isn’t trying to attack or judge them is therapeutic … It seems like confession to me is absolving in some sense.”
Bill has a unique insight into this world. Around the same time as Amanda Riley’s and Gibson’s stories began to unfold, post by post, he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma at the age of 21. He’d been studying at university when he began to feel generally unwell, “And then one night, a bulge started appearing in my neck, almost beating like a heart – a golf ball-sized bulge. It was terrifying.”
The prognosis was good, and Bill took that at face value. “I just sort of rolled with it,” he explains, quite unbothered. “But because I wasn’t worried about my own mortality that much, I really just started becoming fascinated with the process and what I was seeing. I was struck by how fearful friends were who came to see me in the hospital. I handled cancer pretty differently to how people expected; I threw a cancer party when I got out of the hospital and had all these dark jokes and cancer puns… and I looked relatively healthy. I played dodgeball.
“Looking back, it was the kind of tone and presentation that might have prompted someone to think, ‘OK, this guy might be faking cancer. This doesn’t seem like what someone would be behaving like if they had cancer’.”
After a couple of months, Bill went back to college, now bald from chemotherapy. People paid attention. “When I had cancer, I was the same guy but the tone of people I’d known for long before, the way they approached, their willingness to help me, changed,” he explains. “People wanted to give me rides. My teachers made it clear that deadlines didn’t apply. Anything I did, I had the benefit of the doubt. I had no idea I would have this elevated social status because I had cancer, and I kind of milked it. I played up to it – it was fascinating.”
Bill started becoming intrigued by the social dynamics of being a young cancer patient, and by those who seemingly wanted to be. He found around 20 cases right away. His reaction wasn’t one of disgust, but curiosity. “And I thought, I get it,” he says. “If you could have that status I had, but not have to go through the medical part, that might be awesome. Especially – and crucially – if you’re a lonely, troubled person who wants more meaning in your life.”
It’s this idea that has been a hot topic of discussion following the recent release of Apple Cider Vinegar. There’s no hiding the bare-faced manipulation or the abhorrent acts committed by Gibson and their impact in the six-part series – but the wider context we’re shown of a lonely young mother, clearly troubled and desperate to be liked, also paints a curious picture of the type of person who might go to any lengths to be seen.
“That scene where no one turns up to her baby shower,” says Bill, “that really happened. Belle faked cancer not to become a famous influencer and get a deal with Apple and make a bunch of money [but] because she was really struggling to make friends. Probably because in real life, Belle is too much. She’s very try-hard.”
This is the sort of story that Bill comes across frequently – people like Gibson and Riley, who kept up the act for seven years by falsifying medical bills and records and targeting generous church communities, are generally “the mould”, he says. “Where some young person fakes cancer to be a celebrity or to get a bunch of social status, takes money and is really crass about it.” There are majorly predominant traits: being white, being female, being young, for example. Bill categorises “motivations” into two columns – social and financial. More often than not, the two naturally begin to overlap.
There are others that cast a more harrowing light on the subject. Bill retells one tale: “If you read the news reports of one woman’s story, it is that she had scammed her whole community out of money, and got sent to jail for fraud. What that same woman told me was a radically different story.
“She was married to a man who was abusive when she had a real cancer scare. She was in the hospital for a couple of days and really worried – and her husband stopped being nasty to her. So when she got the results back that it was benign, she couldn’t take that for an answer and lied. It worked but, as it does, word got round in the community and she couldn’t contain the lie.”
The woman was eventually jailed for four years, which, Bill says, she now lauds as “the best thing that happened to her because she got to focus on herself and therapy, and really figure out the kind of person she wanted to be. Twenty years on, she’s achieved that – she’s ‘survived fake cancer’.”
Many of the secrets and lies have similar points of shame – ceremoniously shaving off hair, or seeing devastated loved ones exhausted by care-giving. Victims of cancer fraud have told him their heartbreaking stories, too – their ability to trust shattered, and money depleted from their bank accounts. But Bill’s biggest fear is that his work would lead not to more curiosity and exploration about how we view death and disease in psychological and sociological contexts – especially in the digital age, where being ill online has become a social currency of sorts – but as a catalyst for people to be wrongly accused.
“I didn’t look that sick when I had cancer – it’s so dangerous to assume something about a patient based on what they look like and how they act. I’m already seeing that in some of my comments on TikTok,” explains Bill. “I’ve also spoken to people who had cancer and were wrongly accused [of faking] and it ruined their lives.”
The truth will always come out, he says. And it’s unlikely that this global phenomenon will end any time soon. “The thing is, you don’t have to lie well about cancer for people to believe you. Cancer makes people extremely uncomfortable. But no one has ever improved their lives by faking cancer,” he says. “One of the things that has always stuck with me is that some of these people, who obviously feel that they need something meaningful in their life, or that they’re missing something, go to extreme lengths. The amount of time, energy and effort they put into faking cancer is extraordinary.
“And they’re going to all these extreme lengths just to shoot themselves in the foot, which is a fascinating, self-destructive human situation. Beyond that, it’s like – God, if you would have just spent even a quarter of that time and effort cultivating a new hobby or career, you probably could have done anything.”
It’s only now, after all these years that Bill feels “qualified” to talk about the subject – he’s hoping to write a book and release a podcast discussing his findings. Considering he’s gained more than 7,000 followers in just a few days on TikTok, it appears there’s definitely an appetite for it. But there’s one more unanswered question: why has Bill dedicated so many years of his life to this subject, and these people?
“I think originally getting into this was my odd way of processing my own cancer survival, and my own relationship with death and disease as a young person 14 years ago.” And now? “I never get sick of hearing about these dramas.” A sentiment any viewer of Apple Cider Vinegar will surely agree with.
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