The Hipster Grifter

That summer Ms. Ferrell moved in with Mr. Hansen because the kids in the straight-edge house weren’t paying rent and they all got evicted. She was working at a kennel that would later file a civil judgment against her for $1,201; she dropped her dog off at the kennel so she could live with Mr. Hansen. “She turned into my sugar momma in a way. She had all this mysterious money,” he said. “She didn’t really want me to go to work. It was a really pathetic time in my life.” She soon got a notice from a bank saying that someone had tried to cash a check of hers, and she called the fraud unit of the local police department and accused one of her former roommates of doing it.

One night after they’d had sex, she accused Mr. Hansen of cheating on her. “I came downstairs and she was sitting over her phone, crying,” he said. “She said someone had pictures of me with my ex-girlfriend. I never had had a girlfriend before, let alone, how did someone have pictures of me?” A couple weeks later, Mr. Hansen went to Los Angeles with his band; Ms. Ferrell and some of her friends tagged along. She accused a guy of hitting on her and Mr. Hansen said, he "almost knocked his teeth out."*

In the fall, she told Mr. Hansen that she was finally able to access the money that she hadn’t been able to get to because of the previous fraud on her checking account. “She started depositing all these checks into my account, literally depositing $300, $500, $1,100 at a time,” he said “They keep giving me money whenever I wanted to withdraw. She kept saying she couldn’t use her ATM card, telling me, ‘You cash these checks and give me the money.’ One day I hand them a check for $1,200 and I asked the teller, ‘Are these good? I assume they are, because you guys just keep giving me money and you’re a bank, but can you just check on this?’ And he tells me they’re good.” This went on for about a week and a half, for a total of $10,600, before the bank belatedly realized the checks were written from an account that wasn’t even open.

“I was in denial,” said Mr. Hansen. “She’d always make up something to prolong it.” Mr. Hansen tried to break up with her. She told him she had cancer. She told him she was being stalked again. “I go back to her house and bring a metal bat and I carry a knife and Mace, and I become a security agent,” he said. “She keeps getting these weird texts.” They started having sex again. He went on tour in February 2006, and the night of his 21st birthday, she texted him to say she was pregnant. A few nights later, she called to say she was going to commit suicide.

In October she got a new roommate, a friend she’d known for several years, and, according to Mr. Hansen, scammed him out of $3,000. Later, Mr. Hansen somehow thought it would be a good idea for him to buy a used car, a Volkswagen Jetta, for Ms. Ferrell to make the payments on. It was a five-year loan at 20 percent interest. She made two payments on the car. Mr. Hansen ended up filing for bankruptcy.

The day after Ms. Ferrell turned 21, in February 2008, she went to jail in Salt Lake City for three months. When she got out, she started dating a guy named Brian MaWhinney; she’d met him because she’d dated his roommate.

I asked Mr. MaWhinney if he knew about Ms. Ferrell’s jail time and her propensity for check fraud. “I looked past it,” he said. “She said she was helping out her boyfriend and that she got out of jail early because he stepped in and said, ‘Here I am, this is my thing.’ I don’t think that was true.” Her mother and stepfather came to visit; she owed them thousands of dollars that, she told Mr. MaWhinney, she’d sent to them via Western Union. Hadn’t they gotten the money? (When contacted by The Observer, Ms. Ferrell’s stepfather refused to comment.) Western Union called in the cops, and Ms. Ferrell spent another 48 hours in jail; the bail was $5,000, and since she only had $500 in her wallet, Mr. MaWhinney posted the rest.

“When she was dating me,” Mr. MaWhinney said, “she said she worked for GoldenVoice and 24tix”—another concert organizing company. “Later, we found out she never worked for 24tix and I don’t think she worked for GoldenVoice. I don’t think she had a job the whole time I was dating her. She always used cash. I don’t think she had a bank account. She said she had these jobs because while she was at the University of Utah, she majored in music and started to intern at these jobs and then got hired on. I found out later she never even graduated from high school.”

 In July of last year, Ms. Ferrell told Mr. MaWhinney that she was going to take him and his friends to Chicago for the Pitchfork Music Festival. “We all got work off, and packed and got ready—we were going to leave on a Friday morning,” he said. “She called and said she got a call from her boss saying it had been delayed. She kept calling, saying it had kept being delayed, and then finally we didn’t go.”

In August 2008, Ms. Ferrell moved to New York, telling Mr. MaWhinney that GoldenVoice was letting her transfer to its New York office. She also told him she had a court date in Salt Lake City in December, at which point he would get back the money he’d posted for her bail. She never showed up.

The week that Ms. Ferrell was actually gainfully employed was a busy one, according to a Vice employee who worked somewhat directly with her: “We found out she had been calling up clubs saying she wanted to be on the list, was from Vice and was going to review the show. Weird, right? But not that insane for a young kid to do. Then we got a package from HBO with Flight of the Conchords DVDs that she had requested for review. O.K., so she’s kind of abusing her role to get swag and fucking with people we work with—not cool.” Then, the staffer said, Vice found out that she had “booked a table at The Box for ‘the surprise birthday party for the publisher of Vice.’ In the correspondence she had been all, ‘I’m emailing you from my personal email because we are having server issues, don’t contact the publisher, it’s a surprise.’”

The Salt Lake City Police Department remains very, very interested in finding Ms. Ferrell. According to a police spokesperson, if Ms. Ferrell is indeed in New York—or Philadelphia, where several of her friends told me she visited often and talked frequently of moving to—the police are powerless to extradite her without an extradition order from the Salt Lake City District Attorney’s office.

“I called over to the DA and spoke to my contact over there,” the police spokesperson, Sergeant Fred Ross, told me. “I’m just waiting for the prosecutor who’s actually assigned her cases.” If she’s picked up in New York, two officers from Salt Lake will fly out to pick her up and bring her back to face charges. (UPDATE: The Salt Lake City Police Department now has an extradition order for Ms. Ferrell. Anyone with information on her whereabouts can call Mr. Ross at 801-799-3366.) Sergeant Ross also drew my attention to his department’s use of YouTube in pursuit of Ms. Ferrell:

“What I find so strange is that she uses her real name,” Bobby, the 23-year-old Rutgers student, said. “I was thinking she’s just a really good liar. She goes after people who are very trusting, and exploits that. She really had me going—my first instinct is not to Google someone when I meet them.”

*This story has been modified from its original version.