Sabrina Michelle Taylor was in Japan from May 17th to May 28th, 2018. On May 18th, $22,000 was withdrawn from Sabrina’s bank account in America. It would turn out to have been a legal removal of funds owed for an unpaid loan.
Lauren: I met Sabrina five years ago through my coworker, who was her boyfriend at the time. Our friendship started about two years ago when I was living in Kyoto for work. She asked to stay with me while she was visiting Japan. She ended up visiting me several times over the two years.
After I returned to America permanently, I mentioned that I planned to make a short trip back to Japan to collect my last rescue cat (I rescued cats in Kyoto) . She offered to use her father’s airline miles for both our tickets and we could make a trip of it.
The following is Lauren’s first FB post, May 30 . She originally posted the text as screenshots from a word document. It was subsequently transcribed ( with editing by Kathryn ) and that was posted in the comments of a second post. We will start with the second post, the transcript, and end with the screenshots.
May 30 at 1:52am
Sabrina has unfriended me.
Since my post was made, and since Ebony posted her post, people have been coming out of the woodwork to say that she also scammed them or they know people that have been scammed. At the same time, there are people who are fiercely defending Sabrina about this, saying that the life of a suicidal person is more important than money. Of course it is. But at this point we think with the different amounts people are saying they’ve lent her plus student loans, she has likely taken over $1,000,000 from people that she doesn’t intend to pay back.
1 Million Dollars.
A human life is worth more than any amount of money. But considering that Sabrina lied about checking into Harborview last night (a concerned bystander called and there is no record of her having gone) and never tried to kill herself in Japan, there’s no indication she would, at least at the moment. I don’t try to force people to suicide for a hobby. I want her to check into Harborview for real this time because she clearly needs help.
I’d like people to consider, since Sabrina will inevitably attack me going forward like she is with Ebony and other past friends we’re learning about now as a result of making this info public — how does it benefit me to falsely accuse someone of the sort of behavior that screenwriters couldn’t even come up with if they tried real hard? How crazy is a certain behavior when it makes you look like you are insane just to post about it? I was on my phone on the street talking to my dad a couple hours ago and when I mentioned the amount of money she owes Aaron this guy walking by was like “SERIOUSLY?? HOW DID SHE EVEN MANAGE THAT?” and I’m like “your guess is as good as mine, bud”. I don’t go on Facebook to make up the sort of story some dude walking down the street who overheard needs to physically stop to deeply try to ponder the logistics of.
I tried repeatedly to just get her to provide proof that none of this is true. If someone asked me to prove where I work or where I went to school, I’d be able to do it in like 30 seconds. Just her telling people I am a liar doesn’t explain that student clearinghouse says she doesn’t have any degrees she says she does and people at Fred Hutch say she doesn’t work there.
My side gig is rescuing ungrateful and mean-spirited homeless cats.It makes me broke. Anyone who knows me knows (I hope) that I don’t want or need to bend over backwards to create drama like this out of thin air regarding claims that should be laughably easy to prove wrong.
Thanks everyone for expressing concern.
#sabrinataylorscams
Edited Transcript:
Hi! Sorry about yesterday.
No need to respond. I’ll send what I know about what’s going on.
So, last week Sabrina lost her phone and while I was out looking for the phone I got several frantic messages from her saying that her bank account had been cleared out.
I thought that that was connected somehow to someone getting her phone (as her phone case also had credit/debit cards) so I was on my way to the police station to report everything but then she said Wells Fargo was saying that it wasn’t fraud, it was legit.
She told us the name of the firm that made the charge/withdrew the money in a lump sum. I looked them up and they’re a debt settlement firm which is allowed to take money from a person’s account to repay debts via a default judgement in the state of WA if the person doesn’t respond to a summons.
I had previously heard from several people that she owed them money, I thought maybe they had sued her and this was a legit settlement, so I reach out to them.
Meanwhile, Sabrina posted a thing saying that she tried to kill herself (on a train platform). My friend Ebony in Japan, who we were staying with and who was physically present with her during that time, said that she didn’t, she was fine.
People from Seattle were contacting me asking if she was dead and stuff. One person mentioned having lent Sabrina $8k for her brother’s legal fees. Sabrina had also asked me for money for her brother’s legal fees before so I was like , that’s weird.
Then ( redacted1 ) wrote and said that he was telling her not to kill herself over insurance money like she’d mentioned because an insurance payout to him wouldn’t even cover what she owed him.
So now I was, like, wait what?!?
I told my friend Ebony what I was hearing and she said that Sabrina had told her that she figured out she could borrow $20k from ( redacted1) and then had immediately calmed down and started talking about going to Disneyland and whatnot.
But she was still posting pretty emotionally manipulative stuff on FB about feeling ashamed about not having any money, and the FB fundraiser was started for her.
So those of us in Japan where like, wait, why doesn’t she shut this down because she’s already going to be borrowing more than enough money for an average person to live off of for, like, a year.
Meanwhile a mutual friend of all of ours, Randy, who was also visiting Japan, (and was in the group chat she started with all of us when this started re:money removed from bank) told us that she’d tried to hit him up for $3k instead of listening to his advice on how to budget and recover when she found out the money was gone.
So I’m like Jesus Christ on a cracker. (redacted1) May be lending huge amounts of money to someone he might not be get money back from because her account is literally being drained by debt collectors. So I wrote ( redacted2) because I was thinking she could be emotionally there for ( redacted1 ) if/when he finds out…and SHE says she lent Sabrina $3k for her niece going to the ER.
I also know Sabrina’s ex, Aaron, because he’s my co-worker and still friends with her family. I asked him if Sabrina’s Brother indicated that his daughter nearly died or that he’s been in and out of jail in the last 2 months. Aaron said HELL NO and then told me that Sabrina took $90k from him she’s never paid back. And that when they broke up and he confronted her about the money she went to FB to say he beat her.
He also told me that she doesn’t have MS, all the money she borrowed was on the pretext of MS. She could never provide any proof she was getting treatment but was simultaneously buying PS3s and stuff
So at that point I was like, this person has a problem with the truth.
Aaron told me that all her medications in her bag would be straight psych meds. And I looked, because I personally needed to know whether I was dealing with a person who is ok about lying about very serious things. And just like Aaron said, there was no medicine for MS. Not even medicine that’s prescribed secondarily for MS symptoms.
Ebony looked to see if Sabrina was enrolled in school or not, since the whole reason ( redacted1 ) was lending her all this money is because she’s promised to get it all back to him as soon and she finishes her PhD.
The article (redacted3 ) wrote was only last year—people don’t refer to students in their master’s programs as seniors in general. So Ebony looked Sabrina up an the student clearinghouse website (a site for fact checking if a student actually enrolled in an institution) and there’s no indication that she’s a UW student.
So we thought, well, Sabrina is always talking about working at Fred Hutch so what about there? We looked into their website’s staff list and she’s not there. We know it’s possible they might not list lower level staff, so it’s not proof, but it looks weird considering how we now know she’s not a UW student either.
She also told people that she got accepted into Kyoto University, but Ebony called and they said they didn’t know who we were talking about.
So basically everyone (except her) is incomplete panic mode because nobody feels like they can trust her, especially because she’d created a situation on FB of saying “I don’t feel like I deserve to go to Universal Studios and Disney and have a good time in Japan because I’m a terrible person (frown emoji) I’m going to go home early.”
And all of her friends are of course very nice people who don’t think that she owes money and is hitting up people for more money than some people make in a decade, so they’re like, “no no no you go to USJ and you go to Disney because you are a beautiful human being and you deserve to enjoy yourself in this horrible time!”
So of course she’s like WELL OK THEN and just blows through USJ and Disneyland spending tons of money too, which, like nobody here understands why because she’s been telling people that she’s going to be homeless and destitute and kill herself.
There was a whole lot of emotional manipulation going on for us in Japan as well as towards everyone she knows in FB. It was calculated to make her appear to be humble, apologetic, and victimized.
At Disneyland (where she told people on FB and here she really didn’t want to go) she ditched me twice because I wasn’t keeping up and she walked like 20 feet in front of us the whole time.
Meanwhile she was writing Ebony that Mara was a big bitch because she forced Sabrina to go to Disney when she didn’t even want to go, which in reality was visually and factually nowhere close to the truth.
So we were mentally all done with her at this point.
I wanted to wait until those of us traveling with her got back to Seattle before going public about this because a) I didn’t want ( redacted1 ) to come across this info without having been informed by someone personally about it first and b) Sabrina was the one who got my ticket with her miles (or, more probably, ( redacted1 ‘s ) money and she would not send me the itinerary and I didn’t want my flight to get canceled and for me to be stuck in Japan with my rescue cat. Just getting a different flight wasn’t a good solution because pets need to be booked significantly in advance. (I recognize that b is super selfish and I’m sorry)
But when we got on the plane Ebony and Kathryn were like, “we don’t feel comfortable staying quiet on this just because of you (me) when there’s a chance that Sabrina could be getting more money from people literally right now.
(Editors note, both Sabrina and the writer had WIFI access on the plane)
I agreed and I reached out to ( redacted1 ) with this info and asked if it was ok for Ebony to go ahead with her post. He said ok as long as it’s not publicly naming him.
So we’re literally on the plane and Sabrina comes over to me (traveling with the cat required separate seating locations) and told me to get up and go to the back of the plane. So we went.
She’s, like, did you see this? Do you believe her?
And I was like yes, frankly I do.
She demanded why I hadn’t just told her. She said she could have explained! She said that everything that looked bad about her was Gamergate’s fault! I said that Gamergate wasn’t responsible fo the lawsuit against her for unpaid student loans from 2004. I told her that everything she was doing looked suspicious and when we tried to corroborate her stories none of it added up.
I said that I knew she didn’t even talk to a lawyer about the charge to her account because when I asked Sunshine (friend of Sabrina’s) , who supposedly referred her to her “lawyer” , to refer me to them too because I actually do have a charge I want to dispute. Sunshine said she didn’t refer Sabrina to anyone.
Sabrina was like, no I have proof I’ll show you right now.
And I said to her that she was telling people that she’s Ebony’s cousin…and she’s not.
She claimed “ It’s a friendly thing! I felt bad that Ebony doesn’t have any family so I told her I wanted to call her cousin and she agreed! I have proof I can show you!” But Ebony had told me, when I originally told her what Sabrina had been saying, that she literally could not understand why Sabrina would say that. I know they’re not cousins, I’ve known Ebony for 11 years.
At that point the flight attendants, who Sabrina was telling that we weren’t having a problem and that she wouldn’t sit down, were like dude, you need to sit your ass down,
We went back to our separate seats. She was texting me being like: who did you talk to that said they lent me money? WHO?
I started to feel sort of uneasy about my safety at that point.
Then she started demanding whether I told ( redacted1 ) anything or asked to him about anything because he wasn’t responding to her messages.
And I started to feel really unsafe at that point because I was the person who talked to ( redacted1 ) because he deserved to know that he’s probably being duped, but I didn’t know how Sabrina might react to someone whose tattling has basically negated her ability to keep cashing-in huge check to fund her life.
I asked our friend Randy, who was already back in America to take one for the team and say that HE had talked to ( redacted1 ) . He was like, go for it.
Sabrina claimed that she needed ( redacted1’s ) money to survive.
$20k is a ridiculous amount of money to ask someone for just to “survive” on.
She was talking about starving and dying of MS and being homeless or whatever without it and at the same time she was apparently blowing up ( redacted1’s ) phone.
Flight attendants were coming up to me like “Hi….. is person who’s hysterically crying near the front of the plane your friend? What’s going on?.” And I sort of briefly explained what was happening and that she might get mad at me because if she talked to ( redacted1 ) he might mention that I told him everything. I hadn’t been able to coordinate with him in advance about what to say. They agreed to like tell her to keep moving if she tried to wait for me when we left the plane. I was way back at the plane and she was in Comfort Plus section.
( redacted1 ) wrote me and told me that he’d told her he’d still give her the $20k.
So she wasn’t fine, but she wasn’t freaking out.
But she started to worry about her reputation. She went on FB and was all “my mean friends in Japan are accusing me of stuff that’s all Gamergate’s fault because I’ve never been guilty of anything in my life I’ve only ever been the victim of literally everything.”
She asked me “How do I go on? I’m ruined I’m freaking out.”
And I was like this is really easy to clear up because literally all you have to do is provide some proof about whether anything Ebony said is untrue.
I was like “do you have like an email from your UW account you could forward to me? Or a work email from Fred Hutch?” And she was like no. I have No UW email because I already graduated. This isn’t true, you can access your email from the school’s web client after you graduate.
I asked if she didn’t have her email, what about her master’s thesis? She’d probably have sent it to a bunch of people to proofread, could she forward that. And she was like, I could probably do that but I’ll need a couple days.
I personally sent my thesis to like 800 people in multiple formats including email and stuff, but whatever, to each their own.
Then I asked about the Fred Hutch stuff. She said she could prove those but it’d be a letter or call from her boss.
Ok….both of those can be easily faked but ok…..
Basically she said she couldn’t refute anything Ebony said for at least multiple days.
If someone asked me to prove that I work at Nintendo I’d have like 900 ways to prove it immediately.
We land at the airport. With her promise of money she was no longer mad and hysterical but she was depressed and moody.
I offered to get her a Lyft home because I honestly didn’t want to spend much more time around her.
Later, ( redacted1 ) came over and I told him basically everything ever.
On the plane she’d told me the extent of the money he’d lent her before this promise of $20k was 10k. He immediately confirmed that was untrue. She’d told me that the insurance policy he’d mentioned while being “suicidal” in Japan and told him would help her pay him back after death was$ 10k.
If she really worked at Fred Hutch, or even just had personal life insurance, it would usually be significantly more than that. I could get my cat a $10k life insurance policy.
So ( redacted1 ) then contacted his friend who verifiably works at Fred Hutch who checked the internal employee registry and she wasn’t listed anywhere.
The FB fundraiser was stopped. Because the person who, out of the goodness of her own heart started it, saw Ebony’s post and was like…whoa…this is not cool.
Sabrina went online to inform her FB brigade that she’d actually told that person to take it down and she hadn’t, acting against Sabrina’s wishes…and that the fundraiser is a bad person for making Sabrina look bad. (this was subsequently removed before we could get screenshots)
And Sabrina was still trying to reach ( redacted1 ) to work out getting her money, hopefully that very night.and he wasn’t responding because, guess what, he’s at my apartment.
So she started calling me being like DID SOMETHING CHANGE WITH ( redacted1) ?
I was like, I dunno. He’s his own person he can do whatever he wants tbh.
She’s was like “I’M GOING TO BE HOMELESS. I FEEL LIKE YOU KNOW SOMETHING YOU’RE NOT TELLING ME.” And then she started trying to video chat with ( redacted1 ) .
She then was freaking out at me and telling me she wants to talk to me on the phone.
Back on the plane I’d already told her that I didn’t have anymore emotional bandwidth after this trip and wasn’t going to do anything other than focus on myself for the first time in two weeks.
But there she was, still trying to get reaffirmation that I hadn’t talked to ( redacted1) and that she’ll still remain financially solvent and that she hasn’t done anything wrong.
For the first time in two weeks I said No.
She’d been talking previously about checking herself into a hospital but was refusing to do so until she’d spoken to ( redacted1 ) about money.
I told her something like “look, you need to check yourself into the hospital like you’ve said multiple times you’re going to…because I can’t deal with you right now.”
Afterwards she posted on FB that she’d checked into a hospital. Usually when you check in for a psych hold they take away your phone, but she was still tagging me in pictures of cats n’ shit?!?!
So, did she even check herself into a hospital?
I woke up the following morning and went to work. over lunch I looked up her enrolment dates for the UW, which you can purchase online.
She had claimed that she didn’t show up on the UW registry because she’d had her records removed from the site because of Gamergate…but the student clearinghouse provides informational all sorts of stuff because it’s used as a way for employer to verify people’s education.
I confirmed that Sabrina only attended the UW for 2 months in 2014, over summer. It was probably one of the summer courses that you don’t need to be an official UW student to attend (Editor: or she was accepted and enrolled full-time but then dropped out)
Meanwhile, she’s been attending SCCC (Seattle central community college) on and off for 8 years.
She’s not getting her PhD or the salary she said she’d be getting afterwards and paying back (redacted1) from…ALLEGEDLY. It even looks like she’s scamming the student loan system to keep getting loans but never paying them back because she’s constantly enrolled.
(New School Added to the roster as of 6/11/2018)
That’s everything up to now,
Good luck digesting that.
While Sabrina was taking money from people left and right in and using it to go Tokyo Disney and Cowboy BeBop cafes and buying hundreds of dollars of anime goods, my good friends there (and Mara who was traveling with us) were all dealing with serious personal issues prior to this happening. They were forced to use huge amount of emotional energy they did not have to deal with Sabrina.
Sabrina seems like a wonderful person. She’s fun to hang out with. She’s kind and funny. She’s generous. But I can’t be ok with someone who appear to be doing all of this for a living.
If I’m wrong about all of this I will gladly accept all criticism aimed me from everyone.i will shout from the rooftops that I was wrong. Ebony has agreed to to.
We want to be wrong.
We don’t want Sabrina to really be doing this,
I don’t know what’s going to happen when I post this.
She knows where I live.
Will she want to come talk to me? Will she try to leave Seattle? I don’t know.
It’s very unnerving and a little scary.
SabrinaTaylorScams 