6 Maria Gonzalez, owner of a trucking business in California, turned up at a house partially tied and injured. She claimed to have been kidnapped, robbed, and sexually assaulted by two masked men. However, a police investigation revealed that she staged the whole thing as she was short of $,9000 to pay to her subcontractors.

This 32-year-old woman from California didn’t have money to pay two truck drivers who worked for her. So, she made up a story of being robbed and kidnapped to avoid the payment. For this, she faked a head injury and tied up her hands with a telephone cord and turned up at a random house in the city, pretending to be looking for help.

When being examined at the hospital, Gonzalez told the police that two men, one of whom was armed with a gun, forced their way into her car when she had stopped for two dogs to cross the road. They then bound and gagged her and made her drive before she lost consciousness. She woke up to find $9,000 stolen from her purse and “moisture in her underwear” indicating that she may have been sexually assaulted.

Her fairytale soon lost its credibility after she couldn’t explain to the police how she managed to untie herself from the backseat of the car. (1, 2)

7 After being absent for 14 days from his residence in Bedford-Stuyvesant, a Brooklyn man, Rahmell Pettway, was terrified of facing his girlfriend. To provide an explanation for his absence, he showed up tied and beaten on the street, claiming to be kidnapped.

Thirty-six-year-old Rahmell Pettway was first spotted by a passerby on Macon Street. At first, he couldn’t recall how he ended up in this condition but later claimed to have been kidnapped by two men. His abductors, covering his eyes, took him to obscure places. They then left him on the street where he was discovered, hog-tied and beaten, and with pain in his ribs. Also, the tape roll wasn’t cut off and still hanging from his wrists.

This gave the police enough reason to doubt Pettway’s story. He later confessed to lying. He took all this effort to hide his actual whereabouts from his girlfriend. He wanted to prove to her his absence was involuntary and forced. His attempt at covering up his fortnight trip was called “pathetic.” (1, 2)

8 Joanna Grenside, a long-time bulimia sufferer, wanted to avoid the upcoming Christmas parties so as not to trigger her eating disorder. So, she faked her kidnapping and stayed at Heathrow Airport for 36 hours.

Ten days before Christmas, Joanna Grenside’s colleagues raised an alarm of her disappearance after the fitness teacher didn’t report to work. A rape alarm was found near her car by the police. This led to a massive search for the missing teacher. The search team included dogs and helicopters. Two days later, Grenside reappeared claiming to have been kidnapped for two days by two men. They kept her locked all alone in a house, blindfolded.

When police interviewed her, she couldn’t come up with a reasonable explanation as to why she didn’t take off her blindfold when she was left alone in the house.

After a long interview, Joanna Grenside admitted that she disappeared purposefully as she suffered from bulimia nervosa, an eating disorder where a person binges on food and later vomits to prevent weight gain. She didn’t want to attend the looming Christmas parties and face the accompanying food but was also ashamed to open up about her disorder. (1, 2)

9 A teenager in Ohio sent parents into a frenzy by reporting to the police that she was kidnapped from a bus stop.  Many parents showed up at the bus stop carrying guns. It was later revealed that she lied about the abduction to skip school.

A girl in her teens reported to the police her fake kidnapping so she could skip school. She described her kidnapper to the police, who she said attempted to grab her from the bus stop, but she managed to escape.

The news created a stir and panicked parents flocked the bus stop with guns to protect their kids. They were on a lookout for a man in a black vehicle, matching the kidnapper’s description.

When the police interviewed the girl in the presence of her mother, she admitted to lying and making up the story so she didn’t have to go to school. (1, 2)

10 In a desperate attempt to tarnish the image of her opponents, Sabrina Belcher, a mayoral candidate in the upcoming 2020 elections, hired a man to kidnap and assault her. The staged kidnapping was recorded and live-streamed on Facebook to gain sympathy votes while blaming other candidates for the assault.

The South Carolina mayoral candidate tried to run a smear campaign against her opponents by blaming them for kidnapping her. To carry out her plan, she sought help from Christopher James Eaddy by hiring him to beat her up and break her car windows.

The whole debacle was live-streamed on Facebook, where a man out of frame is heard threatening to kill her. She is seen to be hit several times before being pulled out of the car. Then the video stops abruptly at the broken windows.

She then went on to file a complaint with the police. However, the whole drama was uncovered by the police, and both Belcher and Eaddy confessed to staging the whole thing in a petty attempt to gain sympathy from voters while blaming her opponents for the attack. (1, 2)