Penticton fraudster convinced everyone she had cancer — including her husband

WHILE ON PROBATION FOR FRAUD, SHE FOUND PLENTY OF NEW VICTIMS IN THE OKANAGAN.  Scott can clearly remember where he was six years ago when his wife told him she had cancer. She’d gone for blood tests earlier that day and came home looking very sombre. As she walked up the stairs, the Kelowna man asked her if she was OK and she started crying. "She could barely talk," Scott said. He asked her if she had cancer. "Yeah, it’s terminal." "We both just broke down and started bawling on the stairs together," Scott said. The couple had a one-year-old daughter and hadn’t been married for long. He wondered how he would survive with just him and his daughter. But the emotional pain caused by his wife’s cancer diagnosis fell to the wayside several months later and was replaced by even more powerful emotions. Scott's wife, Krysta-Lyn Williams, didn’t have cancer. She lied about the whole thing, even to her own husband. "This has completely destroyed me," Scott told iNFOnews.ca. "I felt like everything that I knew had been ripped away from me.” He requested partial anonymity for this story to protect himself and his daughter. It was all part of an elaborate scam to con thousands of dollars out of unwitting friends, family, and strangers on a GoFundMe campaign. But this was only one of many tall tales Williams has spun over the years for her own benefit. She’s left a trail of victims feeling used and manipulated, and often out of pocket. Everyone iNFOnews.ca spoke to said the same thing: she’s very charming and personable, and no one had the faintest idea they were being conned. Williams' fake cancer fundraiser story made headlines, as the GoFundMe picture, complete with her bald head, appeared on nightly news https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/fraud-charge-for-calgary-woman-accused-of-faking-cancer-1.3941451 . In 2020, a judge in Calgary, where they lived at the time, sentenced Williams to six months jail followed by two-and-half-years probation. She served four months and moved back to the Okanagan, settling in Penticton. Prison didn’t deter her. She borrowed her mother’s maiden name, Neadow, to continue her scams. Last month, RCMP in Alberta announced Williams, 36, was charged with a $60,000 online fraud https://infotel.ca/newsitem/penticton-woman-charged-with-fraud-in-60000-meat-scam/it107420 ostensibly selling meat from a company supposedly based in Kelowna. "Investigation has determined DBL Meats is not a legitimate company and had fraudulently obtained money from the victims," police said. She was arrested in Picton, Ontario, where her parents and brother live, and transported back to Calgary, where she is currently in custody and unreachable for this story. When Scott heard the recent news it hit him hard. "It affects me very, very badly… (I) took a week off work," he said. His daughter, now eight, asked him if it was OK, "if I hate my mom.” It’s a brutal question coming from a child, and he told her it was her choice. "I'm not ever going to stand in the way, but… that's why it hurts me so because of all the harm she's caused all these people and continues to do it," he said. "It's got to end.” If it wasn’t for Scott, many victims would never have got their money back. Kelowna realtor Sharlene Kjorven hired KNC Coatings and Finishes in late 2021 for a kitchen renovation. The firm was run by Williams who at the time presented herself as Krysta Neadow. "I liked her because she was a female doing construction," Kjorven said. "She had given me references, she had given me photos, I felt like I did my due diligence." However, the references and photos weren’t legitimate. "It was all a scam," Kjorven said. Neadow was friendly and personable and sounded like she knew what she was doing. She demolished much of the kitchen and then asked for money for a new countertop. Kjorven handed over $9,000 but the countertop never arrived. "She's really, really smart with her scamming," Kjorven said. "Very savvy." Williams told Kjorven that the subcontractor delivering the countertop would text her and sure enough texts followed offering excuses for the delay. "They were all burner phones… she was basically pretending to be different people from these phones," Kjorven said. Neadow once said the countertop company was raided by West Kelowna RCMP and the countertop seized as evidence. She gave the name of the sergeant in charge, and a quick internet search confirmed they were a real RCMP officer. However, when Kjorven called the police they had no idea what she was talking about. She made more calls to kitchen suppliers and got the same result. She started digging and noticed Neadow made a crucial error. She gave her a receipt with a different name on it - Krysta-Lyn Williams. She Googled the name and found the Calgary cancer scam story. Kjorven confronted her. "I said give me all my money or I’m going to the police," she said. Almost immediately the RCMP called Kjorven. "I winded up within an hour getting a phone call from an officer saying I was threatening her, and she felt physically scared for her life," Kjorven said. "She really knows how to use our system knowing every angle of how to do something to make herself look like a victim, and make other people look crazy." Kjorven then turned to the courts. On Aug. 3, 2021, Kjorven filed a Notice of Claim against Williams for $14,688.21 in the BC Small Claims Court for the counter top, other expenses and punitive damages. The hard part was serving her papers. Williams was nowhere to be found so she hired a private investigator. "He couldn’t find her either, he was shocked," Kjorven said. However, out of the blue Scott contacted Kjorven after learning she was suing his ex-wife. "He said… 'I'm so sorry this happened to you, you're not the first person she scammed,'" Kjorven said. After Williams' cancer lie was exposed Scott and his daughter had moved back to his parents in Kelowna. Williams was coming over soon to drop Christmas presents off for her daughter. Scott’s mom happily served her with Kjorven’s court papers when Williams dropped off the gifts. In court, Williams agreed to monthly payments of $250 but didn’t always pay.  "She had a story every time at court for something new," Kjorven said.  'IT WAS ALL A SCAM' Scott wasn’t the only one to notice Williams was being sued and other victims reached out to her, including South Okanagan resident Hudson Harder. Harder wanted to renovate a new property and buy some new appliances. He mentioned this to a friend, who said he had a tenant in Penticton who got a new fridge and other stuff at a really good price. The tenant also got them some meat from her family’s business. The tenant's name was Krysta Neadow. “Everything they ordered she delivered on," Harder said. So, based on his friend’s experience, he handed over $8,000. He said Williams was very charming. "I went off of a recommendation from somebody who was being groomed," he said. Once money was handed over, the excuses started. "She said that her brother had died in a car crash in Ontario, and she has left to fly out there," Harder said. "It seems suspicious… but this isn’t impossible." More delivery dates were booked but they always fell through. She had excuses but Harder sensed something wasn’t quite right. "And then I just started digging," he said. Williams had multiple bank accounts, and had at one point transferred some money back to him. There was a black line through the name, but when Harder zoomed in he could see the name underneath it. "Krysta-Lyn Patricia Williams." "I Googled that name and found the cancer scam," he said. Williams eventually paid him back in full. He thinks being friends with her landlord was the only reason why. Now that victims were in contact with each other, Harder told Kjorven that Williams must have money because she’d paid him back in full, as well as others. Kjorven took the information to the courts. In a text message filed as part of the small claims process, Kjorven called Williams out. Hey Krysta, I haven’t received last months payment, I would like you to pay the remaining amount owing that is court ordered in the total of $6,415.12," the message reads.  "Further more I've been in touch with Hudson (Harder), Justin, Jocelyn and Josh, and to my surprise they have all been paid back in full for the money you tried to take from them which was a total of almost $9K. I also saw on Marketplace that your boat sold for $9,200. "I am prepared to share all this information with the courts to prove your ability to pay and expose your ongoing criminal enterprises… at our next court date." To Kjorven’s surprise, Williams paid back the remaining $6,500 debt soon afterwards. But not everybody was so lucky. When Kelowna resident Paul Mountney first met Williams, he found her very personable. It was late 2020 and she was running KNC Coatings and Finishes, under the name Krysta Neadow. Mountney hired her for some kitchen and bathroom work. When their dog died, Williams sent over a bottle of wine and a card. "She's a sophisticated fraudster," Mountney said. He handed over $10,000 and she turned up with a man called Daniel Stockmann. The pair took the kitchen cabinets away to be painted. While the kitchen cabinets were supposedly being worked on, Williams pitched Mountney on a business opportunity. She said she had a brother in Ontario who owned a company called BFW Construction which had partnered with a major developer for a large-scale development of towers on the shores of Lake Ontario. Williams sent a non-disclosure agreement to Mountney and he invited a friend who’s a wealthy real estate investor to come and and listen. "I was going to get an insider's special price," Mountney said, and Williams tried to convince his wealthy friend to invest millions. It never happened because, at the same time, Mountney was still wondering where his new kitchen and bathroom were. "She would get a project started and get stuff torn apart. And then she would get money from you for materials and then she would just kind of never come back. And she would just… give you excuses," he said. "It would never come to be, you'd never get the job completed and she was always just trying to get more and more material money out of you." When Mountney put two-and-two together he posted on Facebook. "Scam Alert. Company will take your money for renovations and provide fake receipts from suppliers for ordering materials that will never arrive," he wrote. "Company owner is currently on probation for fraud charges in 2018 relating to false cancer Go Fund Me Scam." Not long afterwards he got a cease and desist letter from a known Kelowna lawyer demanding he stop harassing his client. We were unable to determine if it was legitimate. "Given the serious nature of your actions,” the letter says, ”RCMP have been notified of these concerns of your behaviour." Mountney ignored the letter, and his social post is still up. MORE VICTIMS It’s a bold move for a convicted fraudster to send a cease and desist letter while she was still on probation. It’s just how she does business. "I have letters from a lawyer that she'd hired saying that they were going to sue me for defamation of character," Kjorven said. Mountney lost about $5,000 in the end, as he managed to reclaim the other $5,000 from his credit card company.  While Mountney smelled a rat and didn’t hand over any more cash, plenty of people become victims of fraud each year in Canada. According to a 2023 Ipsos poll, 43% of Canadians say they have been a victim of fraud or a scam at some point in their lifetime. As of Oct. 31, the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre got 40,623 reports of fraud from 28,634 victims, who lost a combined $503 million so far this year alone. The actual number is likely much higher as the Ontario Securities Commission say that only 5% to 10% of frauds are reported. Much of the conversation around scams is about looking out for seniors and vulnerable people who are more susceptible to falling prey to scammers. But Williams’ victims weren’t elderly or vulnerable, they were middle-class professionals, who all said the same thing: she was really nice. And that niceness was key. “Fraudsters take advantage of blind spots in our decision-making known as behavioural biases. They exploit these biases in order to manipulate people and take their money,” the commission says. Fraudsters use “optimism bias” which is the tendency for people to overestimate the probability of positive outcomes over negative ones. They also use the “halo effect” where a positive impression of a person in one area positively influences our impressions of that person in another area. Calgary resident Nicky Glass certainly had a positive impression of Williams when she started waitressing with her in 2018. “Krysta was such a good person to me,” Glass said. “She went out of her way to help me.” Hill was pregnant, and Williams brought over a load of baby stuff, and always checked in when she was sick. “We all thought she was the nicest person. And we all got along with her,” Glass said. When Williams announced she had cancer, her new friend jumped into action, using her many contacts in the city to drum up financial support for the GoFundMe. With a shaven head and bumps on her skin, Williams once sent a photo to Glass of her on a trip, saying she was having chemotherapy treatment. A fake raffle for a WestJet ticket raised $10,000, but when one of Glass’ friends won it, it appeared that something wasn’t right. What Glass and her colleagues at the casino couldn’t have known was police were already onto to it and Williams was arrested. Glass’ friend betrayed her. Williams was found with business cards stating she was the director of marketing for the casino, not a part-time waitress. Over the years, Williams has said she owned several companies including Wolf Painting, KNC Coatings and Finishes, BFW Construction, and Rad RV & Boat Rental. She has gone by different names on Facebook, and has used Lwn Kry and Neadow Krose. And she has got people to invest with her. South Okanagan resident Andrew Buckley was introduced to Williams because his girlfriend was an acquaintance of Williams’ friend, Daniel Stockmann. In 2022, she pitched him a great investment opportunity with monthly dividends. "It was all fabricated," Buckley said. Williams told him she bought a lucrative boat rental company in Penticton from her brother. She had a long story about how it all came to be. "She did a damn good job… the fabrication of the thing was really well done," he said. A lawyer sent over a non-disclosure agreement with receipts and a contract. It all looked legit. Buckley invested $5,000, others put in $10,000. In total, he thinks there were eight or nine victims. "It was such a house of cards that… if we took out one thread it would have all come down," he said. "But we were all taken in." He realized her story didn’t stand up. He made phone calls to people in the boating industry in the Okanagan and no one had ever heard of her. He asked for his money back, and got it seven months later. He thinks it was to make the scam look more legit. INVESTMENT DEAL But not everyone was so lucky. "People that lost money felt crappy. We were fortunate to get a grab of ours back, but I imagine a lot of people got screwed out of cash," he said. Buckley said he knows someone who got stung on a boat sale scam which he thought cost them $50,000. "Everybody felt… kind of stupid about this whole thing," he said. It’s unclear how many people were involved and how much was lost. The man who introduced them — the mysterious accomplice, Daniel Stockmann, vanished. So where was the RCMP on all of this? According to those involved, they took no interest. Buckley went to Penticton RCMP but was told it was only a small amount, although collectively it wasn’t. "They were never interested in it," he said. "They did a little bit of work but…  they decided it wasn't worth the effort to pursue," he said. Harder also had a similar experience. "I went to the RCMP in Penticton, and I got nowhere with them," Harder said. "I walked into the front asking to talk to an officer, and they turned me away." They told him it was a civil case. Kjorven heard much the same thing from the Kelowna RCMP. They said there was nothing they could do and they wouldn’t even start a file, Kjorven said. The Mounties told her to go to the small claims court. Williams was ripping people off around the Okanagan while she was on probation for fraud. With no help from police, Mountney went to Williams' probation officer. "The bit that kind of surprised me the most out of everything is I handed her on a silver platter with all the details of the scam to her parole officer and they just brushed me off," he said. When asked what action, if any, was taken, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Public Safety and Solicitor General said it couldn’t discuss individual cases because of privacy laws. "BC Corrections can confirm that any criminal allegations involving clients under their supervision are taken very seriously," it said in a statement. Neither Kelowna nor Penticton RCMP responded to iNFOnews.ca's request for comment. While the police told victims to go to the small claims court, it's no easy feat. In a Notice of Claim filed in Penticton Oct. 20, 2020, Samuel Kuoppala claims Williams of Wolf Painting owes him $5,750. "Krysta cashed a check (sic) into my father’s bank account and I pulled out the cash for her to pay her workers. After five business days the check bounced," the hand written court document says. "I am also owed $1,000 for the work I did for her." The court document says the day the cheque was cashed was the last time Kuoppala had any contact with her. "And I haven’t heard from her since," it reads. Williams never responded to the Notice of Claim. When reached, Kuoppala said she still owes him $6,000. While the lies and the money lost are tragic, Scott lost a lot more than money. "We were together, but I don't even know what is true in my life at that point," Scott said. "I don't even know who that person is." They met in 2015 through the Plenty of Fish dating website. She was working as a security guard at Mission Hill Winery at the time. The pair fell in love and moved to Calgary, where most of Scott’s friends were. He got a job from a friend selling steel and she was waitressing at an Original Joe's. A couple of months later, Williams told Scott she was now managing the bar. He doesn’t know if that was true. She started waitressing at the Deerfoot Casino and Scott quit his sales job and took a significant pay decrease to start as an apprentice heavy-duty mechanic. Then Williams told him she had cancer. After a while, he quit work to look after her and remembers nights he would wake up to find Williams hunched over the toilet throwing up. He’d stay up stroking her hair, being supportive. Every time Scott tried to join her for her chemotherapy treatments, it wouldn’t work out. "She'd already done it or she didn't want me to go. She wanted to just go by herself," he said. There were large bottles of pills around the house, and Williams went to great lengths to make it seem real. "One night I went into our bathroom… and I came around the corner and saw her put her hands through her hair and hair came out," Scott said. She put hair remover cream in her hair to give the perception it was falling out due to the chemo. "That's how deep she went with the scam," he said.  She then shaved her head and cut herself to mimic little cuts, often a symptom of chemotherapy. A GoFundMe was set up and Williams said her boss had a connection at Westjet. The airline would give away tickets to any destination in the world to be a prize in a fundraising raffle. The money started coming in.  The Westjet raffle brought in $10,000 and the GoFundMe $6,000. On one occasion, Williams faked needing bowel surgery and Scott dropped her off at the hospital. "I picked her up in the emergency room.  She was sitting there waiting in a wheelchair and then didn't eat for two days," he said.  Scott isn’t sure who blew the whistle on the scam, but there were signs. "My friends started telling me, ‘you know, Scott, there's something not right here,’" he said. He was furious at the suggestion. "I stood behind her and I said, 'I can't believe you guys would say something like this, she’s sick, I need your support,'" he said. Scott went back to Kelowna for a week and during that time, Williams was arrested. She was released but never told him. When he arrived back in Calgary, he found a knife in the bathroom and Williams told him she was suicidal. He took her to the hospital one morning and Williams went in for an assessment. Scott spoke to a nurse and told her he was worried about his wife’s cancer. "You think she has cancer," the nurse replied. "Are you saying she doesn’t?" Scott replied. The nurse said she thought he better talk to his wife. But he didn’t need to. "I left the hospital. And that's how I found out," he said. An hour later, her fraud charge was all over the news. "I felt lost," he said.  BETRAYAL He called the police and went in for an interview. They told him they already knew he wasn’t part of it. "There's really isn't words for it to be honest with you," Scott said. "It still feels like it's not even real." Scott has never spoken about it publicly before and says he has a hard time thinking about it. "There's a lot of things I forgot because it's just… too painful," he said. Now his sole focus is on himself — going to the gym twice a day — and being there for his daughter. "If I went down the bad trail, I don't know if I'd be here today," he said. After the revelation, Scott’s mindset changed. "I tried to go to therapy, and that made it worse. I honestly feel like I'm on my own with this, because nobody understands. Just me," he said. "It's completely changed me in every day-to-day things. Sometimes my emotional response to things are not there, and I know people don't understand, and I don't even know how to explain it to people." He said people do try to talk to him about it but he doesn’t engage. "The person that I'm supposed to trust the most and we're supposed to get through anything together… she just stabbed me in the back," Scott said. He said the couple had a normal marriage, with the usual ups and drowns. "There were signs of when she was doing the cancer thing that I wish… I’d asked more questions, but again, I was trying to be a supportive husband," he said. Does he have any good memories of their time together before the cancer scam? "No, They’re gone. Those kind of memories get wiped away," he said. Scott threw away all their wedding photos the day he found out. In the years since, Scott has moved on. He finished his apprenticeship and became a heavy duty mechanic. He’s also engaged to be married, and his daughter calls his new partner “mom.” He says he still struggles with what happened, but he’s doing his best. “I feel like I'm doing pretty good most days,” he says. "I hope she gets some time (in jail) and pays back these people.” "She’s got to stop." To contact a reporter for this story, email Ben Bulmer mailto:bbulmer@infonews.ca  or call (250) 309-5230 or email the editor mailto:news@infonews.ca . You can also submit photos, videos or news tips to the newsroom mailto:tips@infonews.ca  and be entered to win a monthly prize draw. We welcome your comments and opinions on our stories but play nice. We won't censor or delete comments unless they contain off-topic statements or links, unnecessary vulgarity, false facts, spam or obviously fake profiles. If you have any concerns about what you see in comments, email the editor in the link above. SUBSCRIBE to our awesome newsletter here https://infotel.ca/newsletter .