Coined ‘Instagram’s worst con artist’ Belle Gibson is now a household name after she made a name for herself as a wellness influencer before she made an even bigger name for herself as a scamfluencer.
Who is Belle Gibson?
Hailing from Brisbane, Australia, Belle Gibson, now 34 years old, started making waves on Instagram back in 2013 when she was just 21 years old. The influencer quickly grew a cult fan following as she posted about her struggle and journey whilst living with terminal brain cancer.
Belle’s page was a wholesome account filled with recipes and stories about her life, often talking about her autistic brother and rocky childhood, not knowing her dad and living with a mother with multiple sclerosis.
The single mother made it clear to her followers that she was only given a few months to live, however, she managed to beat those odds, not through traditional cancer treatments like chemotherapy and radiation, but through eating a plant-based, gluten and dairy-free diet as well as partaking in alternative medicines like oxygen therapy and colonics.
Of course, her following grew tenfold after releasing the news that she’d essentially “cured” herself of a terminal disease.
She then went on to create an app called The Whole Pantry in 2013 which skyrocketed to fame, gaining 200,000 downloads in the first month of launching. It was even voted Apple’s Best Food and Drink App of 2013.
The natural progression for Belle was to create a cookbook with the same name with all £213,500 of the proceeds to be donated to charity.
All in all Belle Gibson had created a community of die-hard fans, all supporting the cancer patient, young mum and entrepreneur by buying her cookbook, app and engaging on her social media platforms. She even won Social Media Star of the Year at Cosmopolitan magazine’s Fun Fearless Female awards in 2014.
What did she do?
The downfall of Belle Gibson and The Whole Pantry happened just as quickly as her rise to popularity.
In July of 2014, she shared with her followers that her cancer had returned, this time spreading to her blood, spleen, brain, uterus and liver. Her fans were then left confused, considering she claimed to have cured her malignant brain tumour through healthy eating and lifestyle changes. Throughout her second wave of cancer, people began to question the influencer's health, considering she was still posting every day and looking not at all sick.
Suspicions continued to rise, one of her close friends claiming that she witnessed Belle having a seizure but when talks of calling an ambulance were discussed she miraculously got better. The same friend also noted that she often saw Belle excessively drinking on weekends despite being extremely ill.
It was then that others started to question the influencer's claims and in 2015 Fairfax Media made the choice to contact the charities that she had been donating to since her cookbook and app launch, only to find that most of the named charities had never received a payment.
From then on things continued to decline popularity-wise for Belle, a month after the Fairfax Media investigation she was interviewed by Women's Weekly Australia where she admitted to never even having cancer.
Her lies continued to unravel over the course of a few short days, her mother even commenting that “her brother is not autistic” and that her alleged rocky childhood was “a load of rubbish.”
Her followers and fans were of course shocked and outraged, her publishing deal with Penguin was pulled and her books taken off shelves, her app was deleted from the app store and she was fined £240,000 for lying about donating to charity.
Where is she now?
The con artist is allegedly now living in Melbourne as part of the ‘Oromo' ethnic group and now goes by the name 'Sabontu'.
The story of Belle Gibson and her scam has recently been made into an ITV series which is available to watch now.