Twenty-year-old TikTok scammer who got caught faking cancer diagnosis pleads guilty to felony charge, faces up to 10 years in prison
The 20-year-old TikTok influencer who made headlines in January after being caught faking a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer on social media pleaded guilty on June 14.
Madison “Maddie” Russo allegedly used her social media presence to share her battle with cancer and raised almost $40,000 on GoFundMe before Iowa police received a tip that her story might not be true. Russo raised money from 439 donors by claiming she had acute lymphoblastic leukemia and a tumor the “size of a football that wrapped around her spine.”
Iowa police said they had received anonymous tips that there were “medical discrepancies” in Russo’s social media posts that were not consistent with her claim of Stage 2 pancreatic cancer, the local outlet KWQC reported at the time. Detectives later learned that Russo had stolen photos shared by real cancer patients and passed them off as her own.
A subpoena for medical records concluded that Russo had “never been diagnosed with any kind of cancer or tumor from any medical facilities within the Quad Cities or surrounding cities.” Russo was arrested on Jan. 23.
Russo had been profiled in the North Scott Press newspaper only a few months before her arrest, describing her supposed battle with cancer.
“Life has been crazy,” she told the outlet in October 2022. “It’s like a Catch-22. I can’t win for losing. I feel like I’ve been rocked to my soul, and right now, everything is kind of uncertain. I just want to know my game plan, and right now, I don’t know what that is.”
She lied to the newspaper and said her journey began in 2020, with fevers and random nosebleeds. She dramatized the moment she had found out about her condition, saying that she had stepped out of her classroom in February 2022 to take a call from the University of Iowa Hospital’s oncology department.
She said she had been given an 11% chance of surviving the next five years.
“At 19 years old, I don’t know if I will live to see the day I graduate from college, get married or become a mom,” she said at the time. “In the meantime, I will fight.”
Russo told the same story as a guest speaker at her college, St. Ambrose University, and at the National Pancreas Foundation in Chicago, on a podcast for Project Purple, a nonprofit organization dedicated to raising awareness of pancreatic cancer.
One donor, Louis Frillman, told WQAD in January that he had donated $500 after reading Russo’s story.
“My thinking is, say a prayer for this young kid, because she’s going to have a lot of terrible consequences as a result of this,” he said. He added that he had been surprised when GoFundMe refunded his donation, and had assumed that Russo had died.
Russo appeared before a judge on June 14, and pleaded guilty to first-degree theft, WQAD reported. She could serve up to 10 years in prison for committing a Class-C felony in Iowa.
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