It's a crazy new hipster character fond of criminal and sexual hijinks! Let's meet Kari Ferrell, the 22 year-old tattooed Utah girl who scammed her way through hipster Brooklyn. Sex, lies, cancer, and bands, yea!

Kari's story first came out when she lied her way into a job at Vice. That lasted a week, until someone there Googled her and found out she was wanted back in Utah for fraud, theft, and $60K in bad checks, and was generally a con artist.

But today former Gawkerer Doree Shafrir comes out with a monstrous piece in the Observer on Kari's whole freaking life story (Doree is most comfortable when dealing with the criminal element). Oh it is delightful, assuming you weren't personally unfortunate enough to come in contact with the brash young pathological liar/ vixen! The short version: Kari stole and scammed her way around Salt Lake City for a while, then decamped to Brooklyn, where she resumed stealing and scamming, using aggressive sex appeal and wild lies like "I have cancer" or "I'm pregnant" or "I work there" (sometimes all at once, to her boyfriends!) to get...money? Validation? She's obviously mad psycho.

It was also around November that a guy named Troy was at Union Pool, the Williamsburg bar, when the bartender passed him a note from another customer. It read, "I want to give you a hand job with my mouth," and was signed "Korean Abdul-Jabbar." It was, according to Troy, from Ms. Ferrell. Another time, a patron at Fabiane's, the café on Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg, said Ms. Ferrell passed him a note which read: "I want you to throw a hot dog down my hall."

Now there's nothing wrong with that in the context of a loving, honest, one night stand, but this girl was just trying to manipulate people. Virtually everyone says that she told them she had terminal cancer with only months to live, and she was constantly in the hospital [Kari in the hospital with "Cancer" pic via Flickr]. Maybe she just liked hospitals, and the other crazy people there! Doree even tracked down Ferrell's first teenage boyfriend back in Utah. She was crazy then too, sending herself threatening text messages and being this guy's sugar daddy, with money she stole.

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 knocked his teeth out.

That was probably a mistake, in retrospect! Anyhow Kari Ferrell is still at large and on the run, so if you know her whereabouts, or just have some crazy stories about her, do not approach her directly; just email us at once, and we'll all have a good laugh.

Oh, look we have one already, from our very own Richard Lawson:

While not emo, and not likely to be seduced by a woman, she almost got me. About a year ago I fell into a new crowd of friends, gays and their lady friends—good people like Jason and John and Jerin and Jodi and Chelsea—but there was also a more curious element, a cipher from Utah named Kari who had a terrible story about unloving adoptive parents out in Mormonland and, as I found out a few weeks after our first meeting, a terminal case of lung cancer. "She could go any day," Chelsea told me one day at brunch. How terrible! I suggested we go visit her at the hospital, but Jodi, who had met Kari through MySpace, told me that she was at "a hospital upstate," so we couldn't go visit her. Convenient.

After one or two drunken nights Kari had insinuated herself into my life—not a lot, but there were frequent text messages and many aborted plans to hang out. It made me feel a bit uncomfortable as, after all, I really barely knew her. Finally, after canceling on her too many times, I invited her to a friend's bachelorette party (terrible of me, I know). She met us in the West Village and had a sad story about her wallet going missing and her phone being stolen and mile-high medical bills, so of course I bought her drinks. And of course I paid for our cab to another bar, and then another cab back to my apartment in Park Slope. Where she stayed the night. I passed out in bed and when I woke up the next day, at a healthy 2pm, Kari was still there. Just sort of aimlessly sitting in the living room. We chatted for a bit and then, finally at about 4pm, she decided it was time to leave. That was the last time I saw her.

Unbeknownst to me, my friends' suspicions had started to arise. First she was staying at this hospital, then that one. There was this invasive treatment to be done, but oh, there she was bopping out of "the hospital" on her own just a day later. There was the story about her cell phone—had it been ripped out of her hands as she told some people, or had she been pushed to the ground, hit, and mugged, as she told others? Why had she stayed at a guy's house for three whole days, when she barely knew him?

Whatever the answers were, Jodi, feeling some measure of responsibility for the whole weirdness, I guess, bravely approached Kari. "I don't think you're sick," she told her, in what must have been the most horrible conversation ever. Kari didn't deny that she'd been lying. And then she disappeared. A few months later Chelsea googled her and found that she was worth about $60,000 in warrants back in the Beehive State. Of course she was.

So we were all lucky, I guess, to only lose a little money to the arch grifter. It could have been worse. $60,000 worse.