re: Deadspin: Who is Sarah Phillips?

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What did Sarah Phillips do at ESPN? I

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I told her that my dream was to become a Covers Expert one day and that I was trying to catch the higher ups eyes with my plays. Literally 3 days after telling her this, she was on the front page of Covers and had her own column. I thought I had hit paydirt since I was "with her" from the beginning.

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After a couple of months, Phillips wanted to know if John was interested in working with SarahPHI.com:
On June 30th of 2011, I received a DM from "Sarah" and my nightmare began. She said she was building a site (SarahPHI.com) and she wanted me to be their "featured handicapper". I would have my own page, my own video on the home page that would be updated daily and I would also have control over any other handicapper on the site. She said that she would use her contacts at Covers.com to get me a job as an Expert over there as well because they were looking for people and when they saw my success, they may even come to me.
Enter Nilesh Prasad:
She said she had the whole marketing aspect of the site "handled" but in doing so she used her entire budget for the site. The good news is, it would only be $5,000 to have her developer make a page for me and make an area on the home page for my videos. All I had to do was send the money via Paypal and she could have the whole thing done in a day. I did not like the fact that I had to send the money Paypal and I asked her if I could Western Union the money. I never questioned the validity of this transaction because she was a columnist for Covers.com! It is the biggest sports betting site on the Internet today! When I was told that she would accept a Western Union payment, she told me to send the money to a man named Nilesh Prasad who was the developer of the site.
John sent in the money, and wouldn't you know it? SarahPHI.com never came to be. He concluded that it was a scam, but then ESPN came calling for Phillips:
After months of [SarahPHI.com] being "built" and going "beta", I really felt like I had been scammed and I kept threatening her with legal action. Then in the fall she gets on with ESPN.com! She came up with the "idea" of having one of her new contacts at ESPN build a site for me in the meantime while we waited for hers to go live. She said we can send people there using her ESPN column and then when her site goes live, we can advertise there as well as have me as the feature handicapper. She said that many handicappers have more than one site they sell picks from and the whole thing would be fine if I was patient. [...] Well after a week or so, the email address I had for her was deactivated and she blocked me on Twitter after some nasty back and forth between us.

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