Honey-trapper who made thousands seducing wealthy men so she could swindle them in two-year crime spree reveals why she did it - and says her victims were 'gullible'

Daily Mail​

4 days ago

A woman who swindled tens of thousands of dollars out of men before being outed as a fugitive has opened up about her story, revealing the methods and motivations behind her crime.
Kari Ferrell, 37, who was interviewed for the What It Was Like podcast, became known as the 'Hipster Grifter' after being exposed for writing bad cheques and 'conning trust fund babies across Manhattan'.
Among her untruths, she also claimed to be suffering from terminal cancer, and she lied to some of her marks about being pregnant and needing an abortion. She even lied on her resume to land herself a job at Vice magazine.
Kari, who now lives in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighbourhood of New York, with her husband of 13 years, Elliot Ensor, and their rescue dog Gertie, 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.
Writing 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, she said that the Mormon church gave her a 'masterclass in the art of manipulation'.
'I saw just how gullible people are, and how they will believe anything and everything,' she added.
According to Kari, as one of just two Asian people in her school, she 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 started shoplifting, with her social circle starting 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 started to swindle friends out of money, carrying out her first con - stealing $500 from her trusting boyfriend - when she was 18, and still living in Utah, before then using the same ruse with other friends.
She explained that she would tell people she was having issues with her bank, and couldn't take money out of the cash machine, but was able to write cheques.
Kari would write a cheque, and ask someone to cash it, saying she would not only pay them back, but would give them an additional $100 and take them for dinner.
'It began with people who actually wanted to help me, because they actually cared about me, because they were my actual friends,' she said on the podcast.
'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 estimates that in Utah, she swindled 'five to six' people out of around $2,000.
However, before getting out of town, she was arrested, and behind bars for 'a very brief stint', but after posting bail, she skipped town, moving to New York City to 'become who [she] had always wanted to be'.
'This was not a scammer, not a criminal - [rather] just a person who gets to express themselves and immerse themselves in culture,' she said.
Kari didn't plan to write more bad cheques, 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, then choose a mark, and write a note she would 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 be one night stands, others, she would develop an ongoing relationship with, stealing items 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.
She 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 wonders whether this is 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 revealed, she started thinking of herself as 'a kind of f***** 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 - who says she probably scammed 'at least 20, if not more' men - landed a job at Vice magazine as an admin assistant.
'I finally got my dream job, which was at Vice magazine,' she told the podcast. '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 colour, 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 her employment at Vice 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.
'It was kind of like little old me, this 20-year-old who had written bad cheques -but not to an enormous degree - was on a most wanted list next to murderers, next to people who had legitimate proper Ponzi schemes,' she said. '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 which went viral.
Titled Department of Oopsies! - We Hired a Grifter, 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, with one branding Kari the 'Hipster Grifter'.
According to Kari, she 'enjoyed that [she] was stirring s*** up', adding 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 fetishing me'.
She added that while this didn't justify her conning them, there were occasions on which she hadn't planned to swindle someone, 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 the DVD set for Flight of the Conchords, text 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 explained: '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".
'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?".'
Kari added that she was thinking 'this guy has a lot of stuff, like, there's me thinking, "okay, if I'm going to do this, I obviously have to make this worth my while".'
She revealed that 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 cheques. Refusing to name the man, she revealed that he is now a 'person of note' - a business man who has disrupted an industry, and whose name is known in the US.
At this point, she realised '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'.
'I did want to take care of it,' she told the podcast. '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 centre 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 to Utah.'
She says 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 yourselves 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, and 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.'
Kari also discussed what was 'by far the worst thing [she] ever did', which was lying to multiple people about having cancer - which she did while living in New York.
'That is just f***** up beyond belief,' she said, adding that she lied 'for the attention'.
She explained that she came up with the cancer lie when a woman she had a crush on was in a burgeoning relationship with a man, and she wanted her attention - even getting the woman to accompany her to hospital appointments.
When asked how she was able to go to hospital given she didn't actually have cancer, Kari explained: 'Because it's easy to manipulate anyone and everyone. But also, if you go into a hospital and you say "I have all of these things that are happening to me," they're internal things, it takes time for them to parse out whether or not you're lying.'
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. And so in finding that people are interested in what I have to say, it feels like a disservice to not utilise that in some way, toward moving the needle toward a more compassionate society in some way.'