Utah human rights advocate arrested for faking cancer diagnosis

By: Patrick R.

A Utah human rights advocate was arrested for allegedly faking a cancer diagnosis and collecting thousands of dollars for medical expenses.

Coco Berthmann, 28, was taken into custody Wednesday and booked into a Salt Lake County jail while being investigated for communications fraud, according to a report. She has not been formally charged.

Berthmann, who was arrested in the Salt Lake City suburb of South Jordan, is a German national who has spoken out about human trafficking – and claims to have been a victim herself.

Cops began probing Berthmann earlier this month after a tipster complained that she had collected big bucks by lying about having cancer, according to the arrest affidavit, obtained by KSL.

Berthmann has been “a habitual liar throughout the years, claiming Coco’s mother was sending people to the United States to kill her, she had had a stage 4 cancer which was miraculously cured, and she had been raped on many occasions,” according to the complaint, which accused Bertmann of telling people she had “stage 3 mantle cell lymphoma cancer in order to obtain funds for treatment.”

A friend of Berthmann’s started a GoFundMe page to support her medical costs, raising more than $10,000 in the “Help Coco Fight Cancer” campaign. The page, which has since been removed, stated she had “aggressive cancer,” with a 30% chance of survival.

The well-meaning pal told police Berthmann had shown her medical records in January related to the cancer diagnosis, and that “she had expressed financial concerns to the creator of the account due to the treatments being expensive,” according to the affidavit.

Berthmann told cops she was too weak to meet them in person, and failed to provide documentation of her illness, said cops, who couldn’t verify her claims that she was being treated by specialists in Alaska and Chicago.

One physician Berthmann said was treating her for cancer was actually a PTSD specialist whom she was seeing for anxiety, police said.

Berthmann is known for speaking out against human trafficking and claiming to have been trafficked by her own family for years, before she escaped – but that has now been called into question.

There have been allegations that Berthmann was not actually a victim of child sex trafficking, said police, who could not verify her claims of working with the FBI or the David County Attorney’s Office as a witness.

Berthmann has established the Coco Berthmann Scholarship Fund to help fight human trafficking and has been a speaker at anti-trafficking conferences, such as the Human Trafficking Policy and Education Summit at the Malouf Foundation in Logan last year, KSL reported.