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A wolf in hipster’s clothing
The New York Observer has an amazing/ridiculous story today about a young woman from Salt Lake City who used her feminine wiles, hipster appearance and a barrage of lies, while relying on the kindness, naivete and desperation of friends/strangers, to steal cash from people and gain social currency. It’s like “The Talented Mr. Ripley” meets a 2 a.m. bad decision at Beauty Bar.
Kari Ferrell dropped out of high school in Utah and subsequently went on to rip off boyfriends in Salt Lake City and New York City to the tune of thousands of dollars, as she created an alternate persona built on lies about her failing health, cool jobs and alleged stalkers. The jig was finally up when a co-worker at Vice, a company that apparently hired Ferrell without the tedium of a background check, decided to Google his new Lolita-esque hipster co-worker. His discovery of her outstanding warrants in Utah pulled the first thread that would unravel Ferrell’s felonious world of free drinks, cars and fake check accounts.
After finishing the story, the lede of which reads like it was pulled directly from The Onion, I am amazed not only at Ferrell’s unconscionable guile but also the lack of investigation done by the (mostly) men she duped.
[From The New York Observer]
It’s likely that when Kari Ferrell walked into the Vice magazine offices in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, last month to interview for an administrative assistant job, they thought they’d hit the jackpot. Ms. Ferrell—petite, 22 years old, of Korean heritage—had a huge tattoo of a dragon across her chest and a cute pixie haircut. She was talkative, funny, charming, adorable. She had a tattoo on her back that read “I Love Beards.” She told them she’d been working for the New York office of the concert promotion company GoldenVoice, which puts on huge rock festivals like Coachella near Palm Springs, Calif., and that she’d moved to New York from Utah just a few months earlier. They hired her on the spot.
A few days later, one of Ms. Ferrell’s new colleagues came by her desk. “I said, ‘Excuse me, miss, is [her boss] downstairs?’” the 29-year-old told The Observer. “She thought that was very polite that I said, ‘Excuse me, miss,’ and after that she started talking to me, instant-messaging me. She asked if I was from the South. I told her no. It escalated from there.”
Within the space of a half-hour, Ms. Ferrell was peppering him with questions about his sexual histor— how many women he’d slept with and so on. “She was coming on to me, and I was super into it for the first part of it,” he said. “I realized I could have fun after work—but then I was like, ‘Let me check this girl out.’” He Googled her. Up popped a photo of his flirtatious new co-worker on the Salt Lake City Police Department’s Most Wanted list, wanted on five different warrants, including passing $60,000 in bad checks, forgery and retail theft.
Read the full story here. A note: there is some colorful language used in the Observer story.
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By em
April 15, 2009 1:23 PM | Link to this
I just read this story - so crazy!!!! You can’t make that s* up.
By ctezz
April 15, 2009 2:51 PM | Link to this
where are the pics?