Ray William Johnson: True Story Podcast - He's Faking His Cancer - The Glenn Rycroft story

Episode Date: August 4, 2025

Glenn Rycroft—a former British Airways steward from Salford and a prolific con artist—spent years fooling family, friends, and co-workers into donating money by fabricating a terminal brain tumor, shaving his head, faking seizures, and even using fake medical documents to support his lies

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My whole world is falling apart right now. It's chaos. Watch the Hulu original series. The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. Now streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney Plus for Bumno subscribers. Terms apply. So this flight attendant pretends to have cancer in order to con people out of their money. Now the flight attendant's name is Glenn and Glenn is 24 living in England and he's, you know,

a flight attendant with British Airways, but I guess this job just isn't paying enough. And Bro wants to live a luxurious lifestyle. So one day in the year 2000, he comes up with a way to make a bunch of money. He creates this investment scheme where he cons people into investing. money into British Airways through him. However, he doesn't really invest their money. Instead, he just like puts it straight into his pocket. And he conns a bunch of people he knows this way, and he makes a ton of money. And he spends it, you know, mostly on traveling around, like he takes his friends on nice vacations, he goes to the Bahamas, he goes to Portugal, he goes to Paris a bunch

of times. Now, that's great for him and all, but when you con people into investing their money, eventually they're going to want a return on that investment, and they're going to come asking you about it. And Glenn obviously isn't going to have that money because he spent it all. So when those people start calling, he's got to come up with a new plan. And this time, he plans to pretend that he suddenly has a severe brain tumor and that he's dying. Not only that, but that he needs people to donate money to him so that he can get treatment. And so he gets to work on this terrible plan, and he starts to work. researching and he's reading up about brain tumors and medical textbooks and he like

shaves his head so that he looks the part and once he's all ready to go he quits his job at British Airways and he tells them he has cancer and he starts announcing it to everyone he knows he's like you know I have a serious brain tumor and not just that he pretends he's having seizures and he like puts fake blood on himself sometimes to really sell the idea that he's sick and of course his friends and family they're all devastated and they're not just going to let him suffer with no treatment, so they start donating all this money to him. And he even goes as far as to start doing raffles and fundraising events

so that he can raise even more money for his fake tumor. Now, what is this con man doing with all this money? Same thing he was doing before. He's spending it on himself. Like he's taking a bunch of nice vacations to a bunch of places where he's pretending to get treatment. So I guess he's like, I gotta go get cancer treatment on the beach in the Bahamas.

And I guess people believe him. And so he's traveling around to like Florida and Denver and Las Vegas and Australia, and he's having a great time. Not only that, he's so arrogant about all this that he's even taking friends with him on these trips, but he's such a con man that they don't even know that he's not really there getting treatment. So over the next 14 months, he takes 11 vacations, which is almost one big vacation.

a month. And he's like also setting up businesses on the side, including a hair salon and some kind of business that gives out loans. But then at one point in 2001, this con starts to fall apart. Because he's trying to set up one of these fundraising events for himself at the social club. And so he's at this social club and he's telling the staff this sob story about his medical condition. And he's talking and he mentions that he had two chemotherapy sessions in one day, which anyone familiar with chemo knows that that's just not a thing. And so some people on this staff, they start thinking, you know, I think this guy might be full of shit. And so they start looking into his credentials and he had apparently given them a letter

from a doctor proving that he has brain cancer, but of course this letter is actually fake and the doctor doesn't exist. While one of the other people he's trying to talk to about this event is a woman who he wants to host it for him. And he's telling her his sob story and for some stupid reason, he ends up telling her this weird lie that British Airways has a jet on 24 hour standby for me to fly to get experimental treatment whenever I need it. Now, along with working at the social club, this woman also happens to work for British Airways. And she's like, yeah, that sounds like a bunch of bullshit. And so this woman goes to her bosses at the social club, and she tells them that Glenn is a fraud and that this is all a scam. And so they call the

police and the next day, bam. Glenn gets arrested. And he gets sent to prison and now we'll never hear from him again and he'll never commit another crime ever again. Until. No, no, no. This all gets much worse. Because after a few years in prison, he finally gets out.

And it's now 2006 and he's probably like 30 years old at this point. And Glenn is having money problems again. And so he gets on the internet and he starts cruising through gay chat. dating websites. He's looking for someone to con. And he's gay, by the way. And eventually he meets this guy, who will call McDonald. And Glenn and McDonald, they start chatting and they hit it off, and McDonald thinks he is foined. And they start planning to meet up. Here's the thing about McDonald, though. McDonald is actually married to a woman, and they have three kids together. So he's actually in the closet, and he's hiding his real sexuality from his wife. And one day,

McDonald, he's on the phone with Glenn, and they're chatting. And McDonald's wife, she overhears him planning a romantic weekend getaway with this guy that she doesn't know. And so she gets pissed, and she's like, what are you doing? And he's like, I'm gay. I actually don't know what he really said to her, but I do know that she gets extremely pissed off at him and she leaves him. And so now McDonald, he's free to go live the lifestyle that he actually wants to live. And so he moves out of their home and he moves all the way to Wales to go live with Glenn, the con artist. And, you know, things are going pretty well for them for a while. And Glenn is somehow spending all sorts of money on McDonald.

No idea how he got that money. Probably conned someone. But that doesn't last long. Because pretty quickly, Glenn runs out of money. And McDonald ends up being the one paying for everything and spending all his money on Glenn. And I guess behind his back, Glenn ends up figuring out a way to scammer. McDonald out of a bunch of his money. Because one day, Glenn is out trying to buy some stuff, and boom, his card is suddenly declined. So he checks and he finds that his account has been

completely emptied. And he's like, what the fuck? And of course, he suspects Glenn, because, you know, that's the only person it could have been. Meanwhile, Glenn, he probably knows that McDonald suspects that he stole from him. Because here is where shit gets really dark. One day, Glenn gets on and he starts looking for ways to unalive someone. And eventually he comes up with a plan to unalive McDonald. First, he gets him to come along with him on a little road trip to visit some relatives. Then he pretends to get them lost so that they're in the middle of nowhere and they have to stay at this cheap hotel. And while they're staying at this hotel, Glenn, he grabs a fire extinguisher that's there in the room

and suddenly, pow, he hits McDonald with it and he beats him. over and over again until he's unalived. Then he leaves the hotel for a short while, and he comes back, and he goes to the room, and he pretends that he just found McDonald there, and he starts acting all shocked, and he runs to the hotel lobby, and he tells them to call the police, because his boyfriend was just attacked, and police come out, and I guess they immediately don't believe his story, because, bam, they arrest him. And I don't have a mugshot, but I do have this.

picture of him in real life. And so ultimately, Glenn goes to trial and he's found guilty and he gets sentenced to life in prison.