Fascinating new details have emerged regarding Canadian-Israeli Gill Rosenberg (31), who made waves when she joined the Kurdish forces battling against the Islamic State (ISIS) terrorist group in Syria, and who on Monday dispelled rumors she had been captured.

The Canadian National Post released an investigative report into Rosenberg’s background on Thursday, dispelling myths and detailing the past of the former IDF soldier, and among other things showing that she tried to join Israel’s Mossad secret intelligence service – before joining a crime organization.

The report noted that Rosenberg in 2007 was quoted in Israeli media as saying she was a commercial airline pilot who quit her job at American Airlines to join the IDF’s Home Front Command.

She had indeed joined Home Front Command; Israeli government sources who spoke to the Canadian paper revealed she began two years of service as a lone soldier on a search and rescue unit.

However, she never flew for American Airlines. Andrea Huguely, the airline’s spokeswoman, told National Post “she did not work at American.”

Rosenberg was raised by her divorced mother in White Rock, south of Vancouver, and graduated as class valedictorian in 2001 from Maimonides Jewish High School as it was then known.

At the British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT) in Burnaby she finished a 16-month “airport operations” course in 2003, but didn’t study aviation at the school according to its spokesman Dave Pinton. She left the school in 2006 without completing her studies.

Rosenberg made aliyah (immigration) to Israel in 2006, and aside from her service in the IDF’s Home Front Command she also tried to join the Mossad, an attempt which fell through. She also applied for an officer’s course in the IDF but was rejected.

While on leave from the IDF in July 2007, Rosenberg started working with a crime organization saying she needed money and that her $250 army salary which was in addition to room and board was not enough.

Recalling the incident to Israeli media later, Rosenberg said she met an old friend who said he had a job for her if she could “be a little crooked. I told him that if it is not selling my body, I agree.”

The job was a phone scam, in which she called elderly people in the United States and conned them out of their life savings, telling them they had won lottery prizes and needed to send thousands of dollars for “fees” and “taxes” to addresses in New York. She made $20,000 to $30,000 a week.

After completing her IDF service, she focused her efforts on the phone fraud, until it was busted in July 2009 and she was arrested with several other accomplices. Before being extradited to New York where she plead guilty to three counts of fraud, she told Israeli media she felt like “a victim” and wanted to “send a message” to those she had conned, saying “I hope they will forgive me.”

The fraud racket had stolen more than $8 million according to the US Attorney’s Office.

After being released this July following roughly four years in jail, she was back in Israel by August, before setting off to Syria to join the fight against ISIS.