'Hipster grifter' scammer who swindled 'gullible' victims reveals her cunning methods

Daily Mail​

2 days ago

A woman who swindled tens of thousands of dollars out of men before being outed as a fugitive reveals the methods and motivations behind her crimes.
Kari Ferrell, 37, who featured on the What It Was Like podcast, became known as the 'Hipster Grifter' after being exposed for her writing of bad checks and conning trust-fund babies in Manhattan.
Among her untruths, she also claimed to be suffering from terminal cancer, and lied to some of her marks about being pregnant and needing an abortion - she even lied on her resume in order to land a job at Vice magazine.
Kari of New York, who's been married to her husband Elliot Ensor for 13 years, was born in South Korea in 1987.
She was adopted by an American family, who moved to Salt Lake City in Utah - which she described on the podcast as 'Mormon Mecca' - when she was two-years-old.
In her memoirs You'll Never Believe Me: A Life Of Lies, Second Tries, And Things I Should Only Tell My Therapist, which was published earlier this year, Kari said how the Mormon church gave her a 'masterclass in the art of manipulation'.
She said: 'I saw just how gullible people are, and how they will believe anything and everything.'
As one of only two Asian people in her school, Kari struggled with finding a sense of identity, and 'would bounce from friend group to friend group [...] just constantly trying to be the person that I thought everyone else needed'.
During her adolescence, she would shoplift, and her social circle started the 'scumbag Olympics', where they would set out to steal certain items.
The 'winner' of the competition would then be given all of the things that had been purloined by the group.
Kari's crimes escalated when she swindled friends out of money, carried out her first con by stealing $500 from her trusting boyfriend when she was 18, and she used the same ruse on some of her friends.
She would tell people that she was having issues with her bank and couldn't take money out of the cash machine, but she was able to write checks.
Kari would write one and then ask the person to cash it after revealing that she'd pay them back and give them an additional $100 - and take them for dinner.
She said on the podcast: 'It began with people who actually wanted to help me, because they actually cared about me, because they were my actual friends.
'They were the people who never considered that I would ever be lying to them when I'm, you know, spouting this ridiculous story about my bank.'
According to Kari, she 'ran [herself] out of Utah', after word spread that she was conning people, and no one wanted anything to do with her.
She estimated that in Utah, she swindled 'five to six' people out of around $2,000.
However, before getting out of town, she was arrested and put behind bars for 'a very brief stint', but after posting bail, she skipped town, moving to NYC to 'become who [she] had always wanted to be'.
She said: 'This was not a scammer, not a criminal - [rather] just a person who gets to express themselves and immerse themselves in culture.'
Catch he if you can: After leaving Utah while on bail, Kari was put on a 'most wanted' list, which she was unaware of for some time
Kari didn't plan to write more bad checks, however, getting a job and earning money was more difficult than she had anticipated, and she soon found herself needing money, which made her fall back into her bad ways.
Explaining how she carried out a con, she revealed that she would go out to a bar, choose a mark, and then write a note which she'd slide over to that person.
The note would say 'something silly', like 'I want you to give me a massage - from the inside'.
Some of her marks would end up being one-night stands, she would develop an ongoing relationship with others and then stealing from them when she went to their homes, including an iPod, which had been gifted as a graduation present, loose cash that was lying around, and an expensive camera.
Kari said: 'What I remember was how I was like, "Wow, this person has so many things that they never asked me about any of the stuff that I've taken."
'It was never like, "Oh, I lost my iPod but I do remember it being here, and I remember you being here that same time".'
Kari said she still wondered whether that was because they trusted her or because 'they just had so many things they just didn't care, or they didn't think about it or they could just buy another one'.
As a result, she started to think of herself as 'a kind of f***ed up vigilante type', and 'Robin Hood-esque' - a character her fans would later ascribe to her after her story went public.
In 2009, after falsifying her CV, Kari landed a job at Vice magazine as an admin assistant.
She said on the podcast: 'I finally got my dream job, which was at Vice magazine. And Vice for me represented everything that I thought was cool, but that I wanted to be, which was edgy, risk-taking, a little off-color, all of that stuff.'
She added that finally having a proper job meant she wouldn't have to continue with 'all the shady s***' she had been doing.
However, it was during that employment that her precarious existence started to unravel.
Having skipped Utah while on bail, Kari had a number of warrants out for her arrest, as well as court dates she had missed - meaning she was on a 'most wanted' list, something she was unaware of.
She said: 'It was kind of like little old me, this 20-year-old who had written bad checks - but not to an enormous degree - was on a most wanted list next to murderers, next to people who had legitimate proper Ponzi schemes. That was very confusing for me.'
When someone at Vice Googled Kari, they discovered she was wanted.
Rather than quietly let her go, they 'unceremoniously' fired her by publishing a post that went viral.
Titled Department Of Oopsies! - We Hired AGrifter, the piece said: 'When the time comes for you to take on a new administrative assistant, try plugging your prospective employee's name into this new Internet dealie called Google to make sure she doesn't have any less-than-desirable traits, like, say, five outstanding warrants for fraud in Utah, where she also faked numerous abortions and was run out of town after earning a colorful nickname such as 'The Filth".'
The story spread beyond Vice, and was picked up by other news outlets, and one branded Kari the 'Hipster Grifter'.
According to Kari, she 'enjoyed that [she] was stirring s*** up'.
She added that to her, her victims 'very much represented, to me, the kind of people that I grew up with - all of these white guys who were objectifying and fetishizing me'.
She added that while that didn't justify her conning them, there were occasions where she had not planned to swindle anyone, but then had done after they made 'triggering' comments, like: 'I've never had an Asian girl before.'
After the story broke, a man she had met several days before at the launch of a DVD texted her and offered to help, saying she could lay low by staying at his place.
He promised he wouldn't give her up to the authorities, then sent a car, so she could travel to his home.
However, she said: 'When I get there, immediately he answers the door, pulls me in, and starts kissing me. And I'm like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa! We never talked about this, we never agreed to this. This is not something that I'm wanting to do. I'm going to get out of here."'
Kari added: 'And it was essentially a situation where it was like, "Well, you're already here, you're in my place, I'm offering these things, and what's going to stop me from calling the authorities on you now?"'
She thought 'this guy has a lot of stuff, like, there's me thinking, "OK, if I'm going to do this, I obviously have to make this worth my while"'.
The man she was staying with had 'a thing for infamous people', and wanted her to provide some unusual services for him - like reading articles about herself while he pleasured himself. Setting a two-article limit, she agreed to it. According to Kari, when reading the articles, she became indignant about factual errors in them.
Going to bed in what was a second bedroom/office space, she thought to herself: 'What am I doing? I'd rather go live in a roach-infested apartment rather than here with this weirdo.'
While there, she decided to make the most of it, and scoured the room for items to steal - including a paperweight, thumb drive, and book of checks.
Refusing to name the man, she revealed that he's now a 'person of note' - a business man who's disrupted an industry, and whose name's known in America.
She realized 'something has to give', as her limited options were limited to living in a roach-infested apartment or in this spare room - 'neither of which were the most palatable'.
Kari said: 'I did want to take care of it. I wanted it to be over. Basically, I took a bus to Philadelphia and was met by several police officers who arrested me, and so I was in a Philadelphia detention center for about 30 days until the State of Utah sent two detectives to handcuff me and put me on a plane to fly me back [there].'
She said that in total, she spent around a year incarcerated, and now feels she is totally reformed.
Kari explained: 'I truly believe that I will never go back. I will never be incarcerated again. But the parts of me that are reformed are not [reformed] because I went to jail.
'It's 1,000 per cent because of the people I met there, and all of these amazing women who I saw, who have just been completely knocked down and are there's no way for them to get back up.
'There's no way to, you know "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" if you don't even have boots to begin with.'
Going on to describe the stress of living with her lies and manipulations, she said: 'I am a queer woman, so my entire life, I felt like I was waiting for the other shoe to drop, that I was going to be caught, and that I was running away from something - and that I was bad.
'So it certainly was a heightened version of that, but it was not that uncommon from all the feelings I had had my entire life up until that point.'
Opening up about why she had lied to and conned people, Kari said: 'The best that I can give is because of, at the time, my own insecurities, and my own ego, and my own confusion around who I am as a person.
'And now, it's a double-edged sword having a story like this. So, in finding that people are interested in what I have to say, it feels like a disservice to not utilize that in some way, toward moving the needle toward a more compassionate society in some way.'