An individual from Poland who asserted to be the missing girl "pursued that myth" and stalked the missing girl's parents by dispatching electronic messages, making phone calls and turning up at their residence, a trial was told.
Karen Spragg and Julia Wandelt conducted a "campaign of harassment", Leicester Crown Court heard, and in Ms Wandelt's case, that lasted for thirty months.
At the trial's commencement, jurors were told the defendant repeatedly claimed she was the missing child and was taken and taken to the European nation.
Ms Spragg and the second accused each deny a count of stalking resulting in significant distress and anxiety to Kate and Gerry McCann between June 2022 and February this year.
Madeleine's disappearance in 2007 - at the age of three during a family holiday in the European country - is among the most extensively covered child disappearance incidents and continues unresolved.
Legal counsel also spoke of the international focus that Madeleine's case had directed toward the parents.
"One of many tragic consequences for Madeleine's parents has been their constant inability to escape the glare of media attention that came with that incident.
"The focus they have received has sometimes lacked compassionate, sometimes far from it.
"There continues to exist a group of individuals who continue to fail to acknowledge their plight and spread unfounded claims.
"Unfortunately, these two defendants belong to that second category."
Escalating Behavior
Testimony revealed from mid-2022, Ms Wandelt had begun to speak to "any willing listener" that she was the missing child.
Legal authorities said that, in January 2023, the accused was in communication with a Polish charity created to help with historic missing persons cases and provide assistance and guidance to people seeking those who had disappeared.
Based on court testimony, the defendant first claimed she was missing German girl Inga Gehricke.
But after these claims were dismissed by the charity, Ms Wendalt then contacted the group with a conviction she could be another missing child - a disappeared infant from Utah in the United States - before messaging them about her insistence she was the British missing child.
'Did Not Deter'
Her belief escalated to an effort to contact the medical facility where both the McCanns worked.
A lengthy telephone conversation to the switchboard led to a notification from the health service representative to the investigation team, the UK inquiry into the disappearance.
The jury was told Ms Wandelt made further attempts to reach out to officials and then the father personally through electronic mail in June 2023.
In one email, she wrote: "It's possible I am your child, it's possible I'm her."
She added people were "attempting to conceal the case" and claimed there were resemblances between her and the child, including having scars in the identical locations.
But her attempts went without response, which the prosecutor said "did not deter" Ms Wendelt - who then made contact with Madeleine's younger sister the sibling via online platforms.
Informing her she was her "only hope", she sent altered photographs to show they were "possibly connected" and asserted possessing memories of events prior to disappearance, the court heard.
These claims, the proceedings revealed, were repeated in 2024 when Ms Wendalt is alleged to have "repeatedly" contacted Mrs McCann's cell phone over the course of a day - referring to her as "mother", claiming to recall feeding Madeleine's younger brother the boy, of engaging in children's games in the rear yard of the family's home in Rothley, the English county, and of the night Madeleine was abducted.
In one message, she said: "I remember you visited my room before the abduction, touched my hair and said 'I love you and I will find you'."
Court proceedings of the first defendant, of Jana Kochanowskiego in the Polish city, Poland, and Ms Spragg, of a location in Cardiff, continues.
