Mother Arrested For Pretending To Be Luke Bryan To Stage Fake Kidnapping Of Her Mentally Disabled Daughter

You know how we always tell you not to message with people claiming to be celebrities online?

Well this mother landed behind bars for going to some pretty extreme lengths to teach that lesson to her daughter.

In a wild story out of Arkansas, 59-year old Tamara “Tammi” Hamby was arrested recently after a bizarre plot that involved faking the kidnapping of her mentally disabled daughter, reportedly to teach her a lesson about why she shouldn’t talk to strangers online.

According to 5news, deputies with the Crawford County Sheriff’s Department responded to reports of a kidnapping involving Hamby’s 22-year old daughter. But as it turns out, it was all a scheme orchestrated by Hamby, who enlisted others to pretend to be someone associated with country singer Luke Bryan online to organize a meetup.

The group then planned to have someone pick up Hamby’s daughter and take her to a field, where they would tie her to a tree before demanding money. At that point, the mother would then show up to “rescue” her kidnapped daughter.

Court records allege that Hamby contacted Shannon Yazmin Yvonne Childers, who was the daughter’s in-home nursing assistant, to help with the plan, and Childers then recruited David Qbao Quach and Nico Austria to show up to the home wearing a ski mask and “kidnap” the daughter.

The plan didn’t work out because Hamby’s daughter reportedly broke free after being zip-tied to a tree and was able to escape on her own before calling 911 to report that she had been kidnapped.

According to deputies, the daughter “was in fear for her life and clung tightly to a teddy bear the entirety of me speaking with her during her interview.”

The Arkansas Department of Human Services has reportedly filed a petition for emergency custody of Hamby’s daughter, and the mother has since resigned her position as a member of the Crawford County Library Board.

All four involved in the plot were arrested and charged with kidnapping and endangering the welfare of an incompetent person in the first degree, while Hemby was charged with kidnapping, false imprisonment, abuse of an endangered adult or impaired person, battery, and terroristic threatening.

Speaking on the case, Hamby’s husband Jeffrey, who’s a doctor in Arkansas, says that his wife was simply trying to teach their daughter a lesson after she was found talking to a scammer pretending to be the country singer online:

“The predator developed a relationship with her, and he said he was Luke Bryan, the singer. And my daughter adores him. So, over the last six months, he’s developed somewhat of a trauma bond, now that we’ve been able to see the chats and the messages, and he was attempting to obtain her or get her.”

The predator reportedly kept finding ways to contact the daughter even after her parents took her devices away, and that they contacted local police who were able to trace the scammer’s phone number to Nigeria.

“We tried everything, and she has not stopped communicating with him, and he was going to get her. He was going to take her. And so, my wife, without my knowledge, with her aide and a couple of their friends, tried to do an intervention…

Now DHS has taken my daughter from me, and my wife is arrested for trying to do the right thing, for trying to save my daughter, who has never known evil, has been sheltered all of her life, and we couldn’t talk her into understanding that danger existed, and so we wanted to show her that evil does exist, and now she’s in DHS custody, and my wife is facing jail time.”

The husband admits that the plot was “really poorly executed” and “ill-conceived,” but insists that his wife’s heart was in the right place and says that he’s upset that she’s being “disparaged” in the media.

But Crawford County prosecutor Kevin Holmes disagrees, saying that the group weren’t “hardened criminals” but they have to face the consequences of their poor decision making:

“Listen, these aren’t hardened criminals. These aren’t people that have a have any criminal record whatsoever. But I mean, they made horrible decisions, and those decisions have consequences.”

Yeah, not the most well-thought out plan. If somebody’s talking to people they shouldn’t be online, wouldn’t the best plan to just be…cut off their access to the internet?

Either way, just another reminder: Stop talking to people who claim to be celebrities online. They’re scammers 100% of the time, probably from some call center in India or Nigeria, and apparently you may even get kidnapped for talking to them…by your own mother.The post Mother Arrested For Pretending To Be Luke Bryan To Stage Fake Kidnapping Of Her Mentally Disabled Daughter first appeared on Whiskey Riff.