A few days ago, someone wanted to raise $50,000 for a Sarah Phillips documentary. As we remember, Phillips got into all sorts of trouble while she was a columnist at ESPN and a gambling columnist at Covers.com. But this proposed documentary didn't set out to wrestle broader themes like creepy scams or the vagaries of…

Remember our old friend Sarah Phillips, the internet huckster and former ESPN columnist? One of her many tricks, we learned, was to buy followers on Twitter—a new scheme for a new era. The more followers you have, the more influence you can claim to have. In a monetized social-media landscape, the Twitter follower…

What does it mean to work at ESPN in a post-Sarah Phillips world?

Last week, we published a long story about Sarah Phillips, the ESPN columnist who, among other things, used her connections to the Worldwide Leader to hijack a teenager's Facebook venture. The story developed quickly from there, getting progressively more complicated as more tipsters came forward with their own Sarah…

So far, we know that former ESPN columnist Sarah Phillips and her partner, Nilesh Prasad, hijacked a 19-year-old's Facebook page, misrepresented their connections to ESPN, and engaged in some sort of minor-league hustle at a Corvallis, Ore., T-Mobile store. To that list, let's add another, more serious allegation:…

How did a poseur like former ESPN columnist Sarah Phillips get so far in the gambling world, a place where you might expect people to value experience, wisdom, and verifiability above all else? Well, remember where she—and presumably her partner, Nilesh Prasad—got her start: the gambling message board at Covers.com.

Here, at last, are some photos of former ESPN columnist Sarah Phillips and her partner, Nilesh Prasad, the low-rent Bonnie and Clyde of social-media ripoffs. The reader who sent the one above said it was taken in April 2010 during a trip to Cancun. This was a "top performer vacation reward," our tipster writes, "for a…

On Tuesday, Sarah Phillips took to Twitter. She told us she was 22. She said she's happy that she's no longer involved in sports media.

What have we learned about Sarah Phillips, the woman who was apparently scamming people on the Internet when she wasn't writing a column for ESPN.com, in the 24 hours since our story was published? The most interesting bit is that she and her partner, Nilesh Prasad, apparently engaged in some low-grade scamming in…

Lost in this whole sordid, twisted Sarah Phillips fiasco was the brief cameo by Brent, the proprietor of @FauxJohnMadden, Twitter's leading source for tweets definitely not composed by the legendary Hall of Fame coach and Tinactin spokesman.

Sarah Phillips, the former ESPN.com contributor and self-professed gambling guru, is having a bit of conscience cleansing tonight, in the wake of our investigation into whether she was part of a larger, more nefarious con job and how ESPN editors could actually employ someone—freelance or not— that they had never…

A few weeks ago, ESPN columnist Sarah Phillips concluded her weekly “Junk Mail” column with a question from an unnamed reader: