if anyone is interested in trying to decipher this tale, go to deadspin and read the entire [very long] article.
I remember when I saw her posting over there last year, and I was like no shot she is a She.
Still don't know if they really found the answer in this amazing Story.
I read the whole thing, plus there was another article that was kind of attached to it.
Bottom line, She/he and another guy had conned a couple of guys out of money and grabbed some guys facebook page to boot. Also ESPN has fired her/him.
Here's the part where She/He took a guy for a few $1000
Matt, a Los Angeles man in his early 30s, has been wondering who Nilesh Prasad was since August.
Matt was an avid Covers reader, and he began chatting with the site's star columnist Sarah Phillips last summer. They corresponded first through a private-message function on Covers and then began to email and Gchat. They'd share picks—Matt was a particularly adept baseball bettor, and Phillips was strong with the WNBA.
He said nearly every conversation was about money. In June 2011, Phillips wondered if Matt would be interested in entering a baseball challenge for $2,500. They'd go head-to-head for the rest of the season, and the winner would take the money. He declined. A month later, she asked him if he wanted to bet against another one of her Covers.com readers, posing as her.
"Do you want to go against [the other Covers user] tomorrow for $250 as me? I've already won $1250 from him," she wrote in an email.
Again, he declined.
Campbell, the editor, said there's no specific rule against Covers columnists betting with or against readers, but he said that the practice isn't exactly condoned, either. He said that it would be too hard to monitor that sort of behavior.
By late July, Matt's relationship with Phillips took another turn. She was in the process of starting her own website: SarahPHI.com. The site would focus, in part, on betting. But there'd be another component to it.
"We're looking for something humorous, cutting edge, shock value, etc," she wrote to him in a message on Covers. "Think of South Park meets sports betting meets Celebrity Rehab meets Jerry Spring."
On Aug. 3, Phillips told him in a Gchat conversation that he should work with her.
"My goal is to generate $1.2 million per year in advertising," she wrote.
She noted that the site wouldn't have many employees, and that Matt would stand to make upwards of $200,000 a year.
Soon after, she had another proposal: If he worked for the site and made picks, he could make as much as $1,000 per day.
Phillips complained bitterly to Matt that she didn't have much adspace on the page. Matt felt bad for her and believed if the site had better looking advertising, it might entice other advertisers to actually buy some space on the site. He gave her $2,100.
The payments, he told Deadspin in an email, "were supposed to go towards purchasing legitimate ad space for her website. We had been gambling together, sharing plays, in addition to working on her website. She claimed to have lost thousands based on my opinions on plays. She was cool about it at first, which made me feel bad, so I offered to give her some money for the website. We were still friends at this point. She had cheap google ads, and wanted real companies involved. I asked a few friends if they'd be interested in having their company banners on her site and I would pay for it. Everyone declined saying they didn't want their companies associated with gambling. I told her to keep the money and put up some real ads and send me an invoice so I could at least write it off. We agreed on Teamrankings.com."
But when he agreed to pay her, he saw a curious name attached to the Paypal invoice he received: Nilesh Prasad. Matt had no idea who that was and asked Sarah about him. She told him that he was a "close friend" and "her accountant," according to a screengrab of a Gchat conversation between Matt and Phillips.
A few days later, Phillips asked Matt for his advice on a Cardinals-Brewers game. The over/under for the game was 7.5 runs. Matt told her to take the over. She said she was betting $3,000 on the game. She sent him the betting slip to prove it, and he thought this was way over the top. Well, he thought to himself, at least I'm not betting against her.
The final score of the game? 5-2. She lost her $3,000, and she was mad. She responded by sending him an invoice for $5,000 through Nilesh Prasad.
"She said I owed her that money in addition to thousands more for reasons unbeknownst to me," he told Deadspin. "She said if I didn't paypal it to her that night she would have the LAPD come to my apartment and rob me. I told her I don't carry cash, and kept a hunting knife by my bed for three weeks." (
According to a screengrab of a Gchat conversation, she told him the LAPD would "cordially come by" his apartment to take the money).
Just as Matt became certain he was dealing with a scammer and prepared to cut ties with her, Phillips received some news of her own: She was going to work for ESPN.
Matt was stupefied. Maybe the person he figured for a con artist wasn't actually a con artist? In any case, he didn't want to be on bad terms with someone at ESPN.
Within a few weeks, their conversation once again turned to money. He gave her another $2,000.
"By the third payment I was completely fucked in the head," he said in an email. "She was harassing me everyday. She claimed that because of my actions (contacting another member of Covers who was betting against her) that her life was threatened and she lost thousands of dollars in business from other bettors. While her many other requests for money were ludicrous and went ignored, I could honestly see my part in this particular situation, even though she was manipulating me. So I thought it was the right thing to do at the time, and being that we were still talking business together and she just landed a gig at ESPN, I wanted to remain on good terms. I was still half blind and didn't know what was really going on behind the scenes"
Matt said that she kept asking for more money, but by that point, he declined. Eventually, the Gmail account that Phillips was using was deleted. The two stopped communicating completely.
"All of her conversations revolved around separating me from my money," Matt told me. "Any conversation we had was only a build up to eventually asking me for money and towards the end she resorted to saying that I 'owed her' which was not true."
"The couple times I did send money, it was designated for adspace on her website," he continued. "Guess how many ads went up on that piece of shit website? Zero. To cap it off, she deleted her gmail account, thus eliminating all the evidence on her end, when she could no longer get money from me. A true scammer move."
When we concluded our conversation about his payments, Matt said: "Wow, that was really embarrassing."
SarahPHI.com no longer exists.
