In the spring of 2009, Vice published a blog post, notorious even by its own standards, titled “Department of Oopsies!—We Hired a Grifter.” An employee had started chatting with the magazine’s new executive assistant, Kari Ferrell; after she reportedly began coming on to him over instant messages, he Googled her, only to find out that she was on the Salt Lake City Police Department’s most-wanted list. Instead of simply firing Ferrell, Vice outed her online, confessing that it probably should have done a cursory search before hiring someone with “less-than-desirable traits, like, say, five outstanding warrants for fraud.” Oopsie! Read it now and you might find the post unrepentantly confessional in a prescient kind of way, anticipating a future in which any sin or failure can be transfigurated as long as it makes for good-enough content.
Which is to say: The fact that only now is Ferrell profiting from her own story illustrates how innocent—easily shocked, even—we once were, and what brazen shamelessness we’ve since come to accept as normal. In 2009, Ferrell’s unfortunate tendency toward pathological lying and light theft made her the internet’s main character for weeks on end. She was fodder for countless Gawker updates and a detailed profile in The Observer titled “The Hipster Grifter” before she ended up serving time in jail and changing her name to evade her past. Conversely, consider Billy McFarland of Fyre Festival fame, sentenced to prison in 2018 for defrauding investors of more than $26 million, who, during the 2024 presidential campaign, served as a conduit between rappers and Donald Trump. Or Anna Delvey, convicted in 2019 for stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars while posing as an art-world heiress, who, since her jail stint, has gained more than 1 million Instagram followers and drew attention for a recent appearance on Dancing With the Stars in which her court-mandated ankle bracelet featured prominently.
You can understand why Ferrell might think it’s well past time for a comeback. Her new memoir, You’ll Never Believe Me, is subtitled A Life of Lies, Second Tries, and Things I Should Only Tell My Therapist, as if to sublimate the unreliability of its narrator into an honest and unfiltered account. And, for the most part, it works. Ferrell is, as she herself confesses, a gifted communicator and manipulator of words, charming and garrulous and breezily intimate. Her story is compelling by any standard. She tells us she still doesn’t know exactly why she did what she did: tricking her closest friends into cashing bad checks, leaving one on the hook for thousands in bail fees; lying about having terminal cancer; seducing easy marks by writing them notes in which she invited them to “throw a hot dog down my hall.” (Her Instagram handle is still “hotdoghandjobs.”) But she is at least willing to consider the question—which these days is perhaps as much as we can ask for.
New York, in the spring of 2009, was still reeling from the financial crisis, which had revealed profiteering and scammery to be essential American traditions. The implosion of the global economy had fostered a kind of hedonistic nihilism among many recent graduates, which Ferrell worked to her (minimal, it turned out) advantage. But there also just wasn’t that much happening online yet—it was the era after Myspace had normalized online connection and before Instagram had turned creative self-branding into a viable career—which helps explain why the exposure of a very small-time Brooklyn grifter with a prominent chest tattoo fascinated people so much. After The Observer’s Doree Shafrir ran a lengthy feature on Ferrell, uncovering her history of conning her friends and lovers, she became an obsession at Gawker, Gothamist, and other New York–area publications. She was an origin story for an enduring generational cliché: the feckless, inked-up Millennial indulging in petty larceny and shameless self-mythologizing for avocado toast and a Viceland email address. (Remember Hannah Horvath on Girls, quietly filching the cash her parents had left for their hotel maid?)
Ferrell resists this kind of lazy stereotyping. She is, and has only ever been, she insists, entirely her own person. The early chapters of her memoir act as a kind of ABCs of scamming, trying to lightly analyze how she might have been led astray. Adopted from South Korea as a baby, she was raised lovingly by parents who did their best, recalling a home where household goods were often purchased on layaway. When Ferrell was 2, her parents became Mormon converts, packing their family up and moving to Salt Lake City. Ferrell credits Sunday services for providing her with what she describes as “a MasterClass in manipulation,” and a doctor who put her on a diet as a child for unintentionally teaching her to lie (to her parents, about what she’d eaten that day). She writes that, as a teenager, she shoplifted with enthusiasm from big-box stores, as did her friends, but also had a gun drawn on her once for stealing a Sidekick from an acquaintance’s little sister.
With regard to her first con, which she orchestrated in Utah when she was 18, Ferrell writes, “It all sort of happened.” The mark was Charlie, her “brilliant, emotionally mature … caring, and trusting” boyfriend at the time; the scam was to get him to cash a check from her at his bank and pass her the funds (which she didn’t have in her account). That was it. After scoring her first $500 from Charlie, Ferrell repeated the scheme with other friends and acquaintances, sometimes ripping off new people to pay back the old ones when the checks bounced. “I didn’t steal money for drugs,” she writes. “I stole money in hopes that people wouldn’t forget me.” I’m not a therapist, but it’s hard not to psychoanalyze Ferrell’s behavior: the need to feel loved and tended to, coupled with the compulsion to lie and steal, forcing the people closest to her to reject her in ways that would ultimately affirm her worldview. When she was arrested for check fraud, identity fraud, and forgery, she marveled at how flattering her mug shot was and wondered whether she could buy it as a high-res print. She then persuaded another friend to pay her bail, before skipping town when a group of her victims banged on her door demanding their money back.
Ferrell fled Utah for New York, where she had dreams of working at Vice or some other idealized cult brand. At first, she wanted to turn over a new leaf. But, she writes somewhat unconvincingly, she “grappled with how to be good in a world that punishes kind people. Mr. Rogers always said to ‘look for the helpers’ in times of turmoil, but whenever I found them they’d be getting kicked in the face by a richer, more ambitious person in power.” Still, she insists, “I didn’t want to blame the world for the way I was.” She’d often laser in on men at parties and concerts, send them sexually aggressive notes, and then pinch whatever she could from them. She’d reportedly love-bomb friends with offers of VIP passes; if they proved resistant, she’d occasionally tell them she had terminal cancer or a psychotic ex-boyfriend who was threatening her, or that she was pregnant. (Not all of this is in the book—I’m relying on other sources.) “I could have gone anywhere to find my marks, but I liked to shit where I ate,” Ferrell writes. This was ultimately her downfall—when her mug shot first appeared online, it wasn’t hard for gossip bloggers to find people who knew her. Some even had Ferrell stories of their own.
A strong personal brand is helpful for a Millennial internet personality; it’s less so for a con artist. You might wonder why people got so caught up with what Ferrell was alleged to have done at the time, given the $1.3 trillion value of subprime loans in 2007, or the $18 billion lost in Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme before his arrest in 2008. But the reality is that money lost to institutions can feel depressingly clinical. The betrayal of being robbed by a friend, or a lover, or a hipster with a pixie cut who likes all the same music you do and signs her notes “Korean Abdul-Jabbar,” is different—more intimate, and much harder to anticipate. Combine this dynamic with revelations about Ferrell trying to scam for things as trivial as Flight of the Conchords DVDs and cab fare, and you have all the absurd, small-scale ingredients for a bona fide internet spectacle.
The title of Ferrell’s memoir is, if you recall, You’ll Never Believe Me, and we probably shouldn’t—there’s enough that she seems to omit, or gloss over, that her account is best taken as an interpretation of events rather than as historical record. But she’s commendable for the ways in which she does try to confess, reflect, self-analyze, adjudicate. Her inability to check her worst impulses seems to have caused her considerable pain, to the point that when she was finally arrested, she writes, she was smiling in the photos—“an expression of pure relief.” Of all the infamous, shameless scammers who emerged after her, none has tried as she has to wrestle with the need to cheat others and the psychology behind the art of the steal. For that, consider You’ll Never Believe Me a job worth waiting for.
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