The Crying Girl Grifter of Davis, CA
I use Instapaper to archive interesting online articles I come across, but don’t have time to read right then and there. Even if you don’t have an iPhone, you may be interested to check out their home page, which contains a hand-selected list of interesting articles… and also shows the most popular articles other Instapaper users are reading.
Something I found yesterday was a wiki entry about the Crying Girl Con Artist of Davis, California. The city of Davis has its own wiki (at daviswiki.org), and like all wikis… the site is a collection of pages authored by multiple individuals. The core idea behind a wiki is that absolutely anyone can edit or update content. And based on the responses about this girl and her scam… it seems like a lot of people have run in to her (oftentimes more than once).
Above is a photo purported to be Jillian “Jill” Johnson, who many have claimed is the girl who frequently uses a fake story (complete with actual crying) to get money from people. Depending on who the target is, the Crying Girl will sometimes claim her boyfriend left her stranded in Davis, or that her mother stranded her.
In the photo above, the Crying Girl is holding a piece of concrete. According to the person who took the photograph, this was hurled at the photographer shortly thereafter.
Amazingly, others on the Davis Wiki have spotted the girl on MySpace, and even went so far as to ID certain people they feel are her accomplices. A surprising thing for me to learn was that she wasn’t acting alone, and would often have at least one person in a nearby car, keeping lookout and ready to make a quick getaway.
In addition to being the getaway, the Crying Girl accomplices are also said to have threatened and sprayed someone with a can of mace (which ended up being deodorant or cologne). The fact that there are multiple people working in tandem on this fake panhandling scheme is amazing – the fact that it escalates to actual threats and violence is a little staggering.
Though the overview itself is interesting to read, the comments from others in the Davis community (some who fell for her story, others who didn’t) is equally fascinating. Lots of good links out to other online articles and media mentions, throughout the wiki entry too.
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