This programme contains emotional conversations
around suicide and self harm
that some viewers may find upsetting.
Most of the cases that I see,
there's usually a business aspect.
You're not really developing a personal relationship
with the people that you're stealing from.
For this one...
This one stood out.
Tacoma woman defrauded friends of more than $0.5 million.
You don't want to admit that you...
...fell for it.
It's manipulation.
It's pulling on the heartstrings of people who actually care.
Ugh! I just... I'm sorry.
The amount of harm that she caused
in all of these amazing communities...
...is frightening.
It's really scary.
So Seattle is a really, really nerdy city.
We have a really vibrant comic book and anime convention scene.
A lot of introverts. The weirder, more niche stuff that you're into,
the more interesting you are.
The burlesque in Seattle is very vibrant.
It's really neat.
There's a big geek type of scene in Seattle.
You're part of one community.
You have your toes in some of these other communities.
It's a group of fantastic misfits.
My name is Aaron.
I'm a software engineer.
Specifically, I'm a video game programmer...
...programming how the characters move,
how the controls work,
stuff like that.
I really enjoy making things that make other people happy.
And when I'm not at work,
I am an Eagle Scout.
I really like to volunteer and be of service
and kind of help my community out.
My graduating class literally had one woman in it
because it was big, nerdy school, so not a lot of women went there.
So back in 2007, I would say
I was definitely looking for a relationship.
I was kind of aware of what a disaster it can be, dating.
So, one day I was going through craigslist,
and I came across this ad.
It was essentially a rant about how white guys in Seattle,
which is the primary demographic here, weren't really interested,
or were afraid to date, black women.
My first message, honestly, was apologetic.
So we're conversing a little bit.
We send a couple pictures back and forth.
It was such a big deal to get a date, at that point!
We met at the off-leash dog park.
I was terrified of dogs.
My first impression of Sabrina was she was super-cute.
She was nerdy, was into all the same things that I was.
We were just chatting about anime, comic books.
It was a breath of fresh air meeting a woman like that.
She was finishing up her double bachelor's
in Women's Studies And Public Health,
going to go to med school, hopefully.
Just really awesome.
Sabrina and I just kind of started hanging out more.
I would go over to her apartment,
and she came over to mine a couple of times.
We went on just movie dates.
Sabrina made me feel, like, appreciated and wanted.
And that...
Because we had so many nerdy things in common,
it made me feel less alone.
Like, it made me feel like there was
the possibility of feminine companionship
with someone who was also into all the nerdy stuff I was into.
Because I wasn't used to that.
And then, like a month or two in...
...we went to our first Sakura-Con together.
It's really an opportunity to commune with people
that are into a somewhat niche interest.
Anime, comic books.
Everyone there has a huge amount of passion.
Going to Sakura-Con with a girlfriend was just...
It was revelatory.
This was the first convention like that that I'd really been to,
so I got to meet all these new, interesting people,
and I got to meet them with my girlfriend.
Anime conventions are the world's biggest costume party.
It's so much fun.
All can come, all can enjoy,
and nobody is left out.
I first met Sabrina the year
that I was the assistant director of relations for Sakura-Con.
She was amazing.
She was like, this warm, charismatic,
like, kind of goofy nerd.
Kind of like me, you know?
Like I'm a people person,
and I really like making new friends.
And the whole reason I joined Sakura-Con to begin with was,
like, to make more friends.
Because it's hard to do that when you're grown-up, right?
So, I met her and Aaron.
We would play risk.
We'd do, like, ridiculous day trips.
We became really good friends.
Aaron and Sabrina's relationship, I thought, was sweet.
Aaron is just like this muppet of a guy,
and, um, and... and Sabrina was just so, like, cutesy and animated,
and I thought that they paired really well together.
We were both pagan.
We're both solo practitioners.
Just as the name implies,
it's when you practise your worship by yourself,
and just kind of have your own altar and do those kind of things.
Sabrina met some people from the Aquarian Tabernacle Church.
We started going out there once or twice a month.
My first impressions of Sabrina,
she seemed fun, she seemed energetic.
She had a positive attitude.
She brightens things, right.
When she smiled,
like, she had a smile that reached her eyes.
To be able to worship in a group setting was just a massive change.
Really helped to solidify my connection
to the new friends we'd made.
Aaron and Sabrina seemed happy,
but he seemed to not have a voice,
um, if that makes any sense.
Like, he was, he was always quiet,
and, you know, she was always like...
Like, she would be grabbing him and taking him somewhere.
She was always in the lead. Right?
I was very used to the idea of being the chivalrous boyfriend,
and she was in college,
so I was the primary earner in the relationship.
So, you know, that was just a reasonable thing,
for me to pay for dates, pay for dinner, I... Stuff like that.
Sabrina had very expensive taste.
She only bought her make-up from MAC or Sephora.
The clothing that she bought always was as high-end
as she could possibly get.
So about 9 to 12 months in...
...Sabrina has moved in with me.
We'd been living together for a bit, at this point.
She complained about her back hurting,
some other just general pain issues.
She was supposed to go to the doctor.
I was at work, so I couldn't go with her to the appointments.
Um, but when I got home...
...we both sat down on the couch in the living room.
She kind of said, "They're pretty sure I have MS."
It was terrifying to me
because that's what killed my dad's dad.
I held her.
We were... We were sobbing because it's definitely something
that's going to dramatically shorten your life.
I was concerned.
I have a person very close to me in the community who has MS.
I have family members who have MS.
I don't want to see people in a situation
where they have to battle an illness,
because it's not a lot of fun.
My uncle died of multiple sclerosis.
So, like, I knew a lot about, like,
the kind of drugs that she was going to be taking.
Multiple sclerosis is a very expensive disease.
Sabrina was on a lot of medications.
Depression and anxiety, had other medications for that.
The MS diagnosis just increased the number of medications.
I was usually paying for it.
Sabrina almost never had insurance.
She was supposed to keep up the payments.
And the idea was that I would just pay the co-pays on the medication,
but I would regularly go to the pharmacy
and, oh, her insurance doesn't work any more.
And, OK, well, how much is the medication?
Oh, it's $450.
Um, so I would call her.
RINGING TONE
She'd be crying.
She's freaking out and...
...battling some excuses.
Eventually she says...
"We can't get this.
"I should just kill myself."
Sabrina was threatening to commit suicide.
Like, no, don't do that.
Trying to talk her down.
Spend, you know, 20 minutes talking her down, and then...
...find the money.
Which usually meant spending money I didn't have.
And, you know, this was monthly.
I was taking out payday loans,
taking cash advances on my credit cards,
just anywhere I could get that money.
Because I was in love.
I was head-over-heels,
and this was someone that I didn't think
I was going to just stumble across again.
When she needed help, that was my boyfriendly duty.
Eventually, I get a job at Nintendo.
Um, Nintendo was a dream job to me.
When I first got those business cards
that said my name on them with the Nintendo logo, like...
...you can't put a price on that feeling of accomplishment,
of reaching that point in my career,
as someone who had been playing Nintendo games since I was four.
There's a better salary...
...and just access to the perks...
...to help keep stuff stable, for the moment.
Sabrina had discussed with me, around the time she turned 25,
she was supposed to get her inheritance from her grandfather,
which was supposed to be 75 grand.
We did a lot of planning for our future based
on that amount of money.
It gave me the confidence to really overextend myself credit-wise,
financially, because I was assured that,
you know, we could square all this in a couple of months.
The demands kept coming.
I was trying to get her to a point
where she could go to med school
and maybe start balancing the books a little bit.
Interferon was brought up.
Interferon was a intravenous medication
that was $700 or $800 a treatment.
And this was every month or two.
I got a 50% raise from my job.
I was like, "OK, we're going to be good."
The demands grew with my supply.
Literally, within a month or two,
we were living pay cheque to pay cheque again.
Sabrina put a lot of pressure on me to get a new car.
It couldn't be a used car,
and it had to be this very specific model.
She says that she needs to have a house.
I had to ask my parents for a down payment.
It was about $15,000.
It was a big ask.
We got closer and closer to the date that the inheritance payment
was supposed to show up.
We hit the magic date, and she told me that her aunt and the lawyers
who were running the trust embezzled the last, like, $300,000
that was in the account.
That was a gut punch.
I was dumbfounded.
Um...
I'd spent all this money.
I was so angry with her.
As it became clearer that Sabrina wasn't going to get the money,
she was worried that Aaron was going to leave her.
She would threaten self-harm.
She'd lock herself in the bathroom,
and Aaron would call me,
and he'd be like, "I don't know what to do."
KNOCKING ON DOOR
So I drove down there and we talked her out of the bathroom together.
And she did it more than once.
I was spending multiple hours of the work day every day,
trying to talk Sabrina off the ledge.
You're constantly afraid that something is going to hit her wrong,
and she's going to die.
It's so stressful.
It's...
Ugh! I just... I'm sorry.
It got to a point where I wasn't really doing my work.
Eventually, my bosses had to let me go.
I'm using unemployment and my savings and my retirement
to pay all the bills.
Sabrina is only paying for Sabrina.
Er, and now I have to find a way
to make an already stretched budget...
...stretch past its breaking point.
Sabrina started approaching various friends and acquaintances for loans,
sometimes using my name as a guarantee
for it getting paid back.
She came up to me and was like, "I can't afford my MS medication.
"Everything is..." You know, and she's crying.
And I was really concerned.
I was like, "Oh, my gosh!
"You have a community here who's looking out for you."
She alienated most of my friends.
She would go to them and beg for money without my knowing,
and they didn't want to get in the middle,
so they just stopped talking to me.
I broke.
I had no friends.
I didn't have any money.
I'm $80,000 in the hole.
No-one would loan me money at this point,
and I'd sold everything I had that was worth a dime.
There's a term in poker called pot committed,
which is when you've put so much money into the pot
that you feel the need to keep going
and keep throwing more money in, to see the result of the hand.
My only shot of making the rent was to go to a casino and get lucky.
I took 200 or 300 bucks into the casino,
and tried to turn it into 1,000.
Terrifying.
Crushing amounts of pressure.
I really felt I needed to get lucky.
I busted out.
I was just in tears on the way home.
I'm screwed.
That... was...
...without a doubt, the worst time of my life.
Sabrina and I...
...the sexual part of the relationship had been
pretty nonexistent for a while, at this point.
Sabrina talked about opening up our relationship.
Um, I found out, after I agreed to it,
that it was also to retroactively forgive her
for making out with a friend of ours.
Um, that's when I met Kia.
I live in Renton, Washington, which is just outside of Seattle.
I am a burlesque performer and producer.
Ah!
Kiya was smart,
and very confident and self-assured.
I met Aaron at a party.
Something that I really enjoyed about connecting with Aaron was
that the things that he was passionate about,
he was really passionate about.
We both really nerded out about
the Marvel Cinematic Universe together.
It was very bonding.
Aaron and I were at this party, and it was really cool.
I go to grab a couple of drinks at the bar,
and Aaron is getting, you know, it's the flurry of text messages.
She said she was locked up in the bathroom
with a stomach full of pills.
I was just freaking out.
Kia could see that.
We go back to the apartment...
...and just parked on the street.
She said she was locked up in the bathroom
with a stomach full of pills,
and she'd left to go to dinner.
LAUGHTER
Going out with friends because she thought I was at the party.
The house of cards just fell apart.
I don't understand how he didn't see it until that moment.
Aaron, while he was in this relationship with Sabrina,
it was financial domination and financial abuse.
I couldn't believe what was going on.
Sabrina blamed MS for everything.
My very good friend has multiple sclerosis and she takes Interferon.
Sabrina, the only thing I ever saw her taking was pills.
She never went for infusions,
and that was fishy to me.
I contact the MS Society.
I told them the medications that I was told that she was taking...
...and they said, "That's not what that's for.
"I haven't heard that being used in a case like this, ever."
I couldn't believe that someone would make up a story like that.
It's hard enough to have an invisible disease,
and watch people with this invisible disease try to navigate the world
when there's people out there that lie about it.
So, yes, it makes me very angry on a visceral level.
The next morning, I sat Sabrina down in the living room
and I told her our relationship is done.
I'm not going to support you financially any more.
Ten minutes after she'd left for work,
there was a moving truck in the driveway.
I mean, it felt like a heist.
It felt like you had removed a kidnap victim
from their captor while they're gone.
It felt like this could be the end of it, right?
And it was not the end of it.
When Aaron and Sabrina initially separated, I was relieved.
Now things might calm down.
But then, she started trying to, like, poison the well against him.
She was spreading rumours about Aaron.
She was spreading rumours about me.
Horrible lies about us.
Just because, like, she felt like
she needed her friends group on her side.
Sabrina told me that Aaron beat the crap out of her,
that he was mentally and physically abusive
and that he was the man of the household,
and, you know, what he said went.
I was furious with Aaron.
AARON SIGHS
I've never abused anybody.
I've never really gotten in a fight.
I've never raised my hand to anybody in anger.
But to be accused of that...
...really pushed me over the edge.
He was very depressed.
He was weirdly emotionally stunted.
Like, he would rarely cry.
And I'm just like, "There's a moment to cry.
"This is a moment to cry."
I essentially ceded all of our social circles to Sabrina.
I knew she was spreading rumours about me,
and I had no interest in getting into public fights about it.
And quite frankly, with the pagan community, I was a little concerned
that there were a couple people that might believe her
about... about physical abuse and try to give me payback.
But as long as I had my relationship with Kia, I was going to be good.
Kia and I's relationship proceeded fairly quickly.
We got engaged fairly quickly.
We got married.
It was like stepping through an airlock.
I was leaving the cold, violent outer space
and entering this safe haven.
It was like a dream.
When we got married, Aaron was in debt at least $90,000
that we could document. At least.
Um...
Aaron's debt,
we didn't realise how bad it was
until we started talking about potentially having a child.
We really wanted to have a child together.
And I'm like, OK. And so we started really looking at the numbers.
And I was the first person to realise that
we were never going to have a baby.
And he couldn't be the one to say it to me.
My relationship with Sabrina caused a lot of problems
that I didn't fully address.
It led to a bunch of problems
that inevitably led to the end of that relationship as well.
She took the future that I thought I was going to have with this man.
The impact, um...
...emotionally and mentally, that...
...that this inflicted on Aaron transferred into our... our marriage.
I saved him from this relationship.
But I sacrificed ours.
I am a veterinarian, and I live in Burien, Washington.
I really don't have a type.
I've dated all genders.
First boyfriend was 6' 5",
and I dated a girl in college
who was not quite five feet tall.
Back in 2017, I met Sabrina on a dating app.
She lived on Capitol Hill, which is a pretty expensive area.
It was like packed with all of her anime stuff.
She always dressed well.
Sabrina was excited about things,
and also kind of endearingly awkward.
And I think that's really
what kind of made me put down my defences.
My relationship with Sabrina became more serious,
partially, I think, because I gravitate towards caretaking.
I knew that she had some serious health issues,
and I wanted to support her,
and also, at the time, really focus on finding, you know,
a long term relationship.
The first time she asked for help paying for her medication,
it was $700 for the transfusion.
And of course, I didn't want her to get sick.
So, it was like, "Of course. I have...
"I can I can do this for you, so I'm going to."
When, a couple months later, she told me
that her brother had gone to jail years ago for marijuana possession,
and he was still paying off fines of some sort.
She said that if he didn't give them the money,
that he would potentially go to jail.
First loan that she asked me for her brother was around $3,000.
It was kind of a set-up so that,
you know, me giving her that money would solidify my commitment to her.
Yeah, I don't really see ever getting that money back.
The Japan debacle is my favourite thing that's ever happened
in the history of things,
because it just played out so beautifully.
I get a text message from a mutual friend of myself and Aaron.
I got a phone call from Sabrina.
She had just checked her bank account and it was completely empty.
The fact that she had $22,000 in her bank account,
and she had been asking me for money,
was a little bit surprising.
Everyone kind of hops on their social media to figure out
what is going on.
We were driving in the car,
my friend Colleen was in the backseat
and she was flipping through Facebook.
And Colleen goes, "Oh, my God! Sabrina's going to kill herself!"
And I was like, "What?"
Sabrina is threatening to commit suicide.
Threatened to kill herself.
Oh, my God, she just said that she's going to throw herself
in front of a train in Japan,
and all this stuff is happening,
and she's stuck there, and she has no money.
Somebody stole all of this money from her bank account.
"I'm sick with MS.
"I don't have any more of my medication.
"I can't get home."
I gave her an excuse for why I couldn't give her the money.
She went from being very sweet and helpless
to being very vindictive and angry.
Text Sabrina like, "Oh, my God, are you OK?
"I don't... Please don't do this."
We're going to get this figured out.
I'm, you know, I'm going to start a GoFundMe.
I had not been in contact with her
in more than three years previous to that.
I responded to the person posting the fundraiser.
I shot back like, "How dare you?"
Basically, I told him he was he was a piece of shit,
and he had no way...
He shouldn't be commenting on this.
And it wasn't a big surprise that they were siding with Sabrina
because Sabrina knew how to make herself the victim.
There's a ton of people,
I have no idea who these people are, who are donating money.
Some random guy just donated $1,000.
And it's growing so quickly.
It was Facebook, so it was easier
for somebody to share it on both sides. Right.
There was a lot of her asking, "Have you found anything out yet?"
Like, she was very persistent.
It's classic Sabrina. The fundraisers, the...
You know, the community is rallying around Sabrina's financial crisis.
It's nothing new.
When I heard about the message,
I knew pretty much that this was just Sabrina levelling up.
She had discovered new and fun ways to steal money from people,
and that this was just her escalating.
Rain had given Sabrina,
"Hey, here's the username. Here's the password.
"We can get this switched over into your name."
When I start seeing things.
I am getting tons and tons of messages.
People I don't know.
There were a lot of different people and different groups
all kind of telling the same story.
Something has to ring true. Yeah.
And I was like, "Oh, God! What have I done? What have I done?"
It was really fascinating to watch
other people who have dealt with Sabrina
in various different ways all come to the realisation...
...we're literally watching the scam play out in real time.
I was in communication with friends in Japan
who were documenting all the stuff that happened while she was there.
Sabrina claimed that she spent the day considering throwing herself
in front of the bullet train in Japan,
when, in reality, she spent the day at Disney Tokyo.
At the same time, she was begging for money from people in the States.
She was spending $1,000 on toys and stuff to take to bring home.
Thankfully, there's a delay
between when somebody... Yeah. ...donates money
and when the bank says, "OK, now you can take it out."
Mike switches the... the password.
And I am like, "What the hell have I just done?"
The pattern of her fraud really started to emerge, at that point.
Friends in Japan started a website to document all of this stuff.
It was basically just a blog website.
They were posting their experiences with Sabrina,
and then other people were approaching them with... with stories
that they would post up on there.
A friend of mine tagged me in it.
I read the whole thing and I was like, that tracks.
That's... That is Sabrina Taylor.
After a lot of freak out,
I had to pay everybody back.
I was angry that she would use something like suicide
to manipulate people.
And I was sad that she wasn't really as nice as I thought she was.
I was contacted by the FBI.
I gave a bunch of information to the agent in charge.
A lot of times, the difficulty in fraud investigations is
determining where the money came from and where it went.
But that was easy.
Tracing the money with Sabrina was easy.
It went into her bank account,
and it got spent from that account
on things that weren't what she said she was spending it on.
The difficult part was proving a negative.
She would say that my brother needs money to get out of jail.
Now I need to search all of the prison records
to see was her brother in jail.
The other big lie was that she had MS
and needed money for medication.
So, once we learned that these big lies weren't true,
we felt pretty comfortable
that we would get to the point of charging her.
When the gentleman from the FBI contacted me,
I almost didn't really believe that it was real.
I considered myself a pretty smart person
and just, you know, admitting to the fact
that someone had taken advantage of me was... was really hard.
But I just didn't want her to keep doing it.
The number of people who came forward was shocking, even to me.
By the end of the investigation,
we'd identified maybe eight to ten victims
who, collectively, had lost over $600,000.
You know, charging somebody federally is a...
It's a big... It's a big deal.
We charged her initially with four counts of wire fraud.
When Sabrina was arrested, part of me couldn't believe it.
At the time, I couldn't imagine a world in which she was going
to actually face some consequences for her actions.
The amount of money that she took staggers me.
I can't...
Like, I would never have attributed that much money
to what she had done.
Like, this... It's insane!
It blows my mind, and I can't believe it.
There was a sense of relief because I'm like,
Well, maybe we'll finally figure out where all the money went."
She spent it on travelling internationally.
She spent it on, um... comic books.
She spent it on beauty products.
You know, she had spent more money at Sephora
than I think I will ever have spent in my entire life.
I would say that it was like she was on vacation.
All of the spending was for fun.
It was, um, living the good life for four to five years
with really no consequences.
It wasn't a particularly complex fraud.
It wasn't somebody sitting in the anonymity of the dark web.
It was really done, you know, interpersonally.
Honestly, seeing Sabrina in court was a little terrifying.
Part of me was concerned that she would stand up
and start screaming at me or call me a liar.
This is probably among the biggest days of the defendant's life.
There's always kind of a sombre mood in the courtroom.
Tacoma woman pleaded guilty and admitted to lying
about her health, employment and education to get money.
I lied, and I have used people.
I have no way of atoning verbally for the things that I have done.
I'm aware of the pain that I have caused.
I know that I have made people hurt in ways
that no-one should be made to hurt.
I am more ashamed than I can ever admit,
and I cannot tell you, from the bottom of my heart, how sorry I am.
27 months in prison.
That's the sentence federal prosecutors suggested
for Sabrina Taylor,
who defrauded friends of more than $0.5 million.
Sabrina said she felt sorry
in her plea to the court for leniency, but I don't believe it.
The fact that she continued the same scams that she was running on me
for years afterward
just shows that there's no conscience there.
You know, it's made me a little more wary of taking
what someone says at face value.
She told people she was sick.
It takes a special kind of terrible human to take it that far.
She did it because she could.
Then when she found out how easy it was
to talk somebody out of their money,
that she kind of got addicted to it.
What I took issue with is the fact
that she was targeting a group of individuals
who are also marginalised.
The majority of her victims were involved,
were part of the LGBTQ plus community.
And to me, I found that to be really predatory.
These were people that were looking for connection,
looking for relationships, not always completely accepted
in what... what is deemed normal.
And it's like she picked them on purpose,
and... and knew that they wanted that companionship,
knew that they were needing that.
And that's how she exploited them.
Since Sabrina, I don't trust people as easily.
I try to be very involved in the queer community,
and there's a lot of people who are...
...struggling and asking for money and support.
And... I'm sorry.
I still want to help people.
But I don't know if they're just another Sabrina.
She took dreams.
She took hope from people.
She created wedges and divides
between all of these amazing and vibrant communities.
Genuine hurt and harm
that she caused people mentally and emotionally.
Financially, the final total was just shy of 100,000.
I can't put a price on the emotional toll.
I could win the lottery next week and square all of my debts.
No amount of money will...
...ever...
...get that amount of trust that I had in other people back.
Subtitles by Red Bee Media