A Missouri couple who scammed neighbors by pretending to be the proud parents of sextuplets will face criminal charges as soon as the full scale of their hoax has been discovered, police said.

In this photo provided, Tuesday, April 11, 2006, in Grain Valley, Mo., by the Everson family, shown is Sarah Everson, apparently pregnant with sextuplets, date unknown. A couple's dramatic account of newborn sextuplets turned out Tuesday to be nothing more than an elaborate scam. [AP Photo]

"It's very bizarre. I've never seen anything like that in my career," Grain Valley, Missouri police chief Aaron Ambrose said.

This was not the first time the 45-year-old woman had pretended to be pregnant with multiple babies, Ambrose said.

An ex-husband told police she had faked pregnancy several times during their brief marriage, and co-workers also told tales of pregnancies that would mysteriously end in miscarriage.

It was, however, the first time the woman pretended the babies had been born.

And she managed to scam a number of local business owners and the small town's main charitable organization out of thousands of dollars in cash and gifts by telling them that the babies were in critical condition and had to be hidden away because of a family dispute.

The hoax began to unravel on Tuesday, when the couple's landlord saw a story in the local paper with a picture of Sarah and Kris Everson holding six shirts for the babies purportedly born in March.

The couple had asked him to forgive their December rent in a letter describing how they had just had five children.

"That's 11 babies in a few months," Ambrose said.

The couple issued a tearful apology Wednesday evening, with Kris Everson telling local reporters: "We didn't mean to hurt anybody. ... We did it out of financial reasons."

Ambrose said he expected to press felony charges against the couple in the coming days.