When Liam downloaded the dating app Tinder, he was looking for companionship with someone nearby. But, in January, he matched with an apparently well-educated, charismatic woman named Sarah Leyshan and began exchanging messages on the dating platform and then on WhatsApp, a messaging app, and Instagram where she had a large following and countless modelling and pageant photos. Unlike many other scams of this kind, Sarah Ann Michele Leyshan was, in fact, a model and pageant queen. They discussed their lives and dating history, and after a week or so they met up for a date.

Liam wanted a long-term, steady girlfriend who enjoyed partying, reading and the outdoors, and Sarah, it seemed was exactly that. He wanted to move overseas and Sarah, by coincidence, wanted the same.

“She started telling me about her grandfather… he was apparently a famous jockey and she was from a really well-to-do family,” said Liam, who asked us not to reveal his last name to protect his privacy. “At first everything was fine. She was so generous and gracious, even with my friends. She bought them all mattress toppers, weird, I know, and also made them free accounts on Disney and Stan.”

After a few dates, Sarah Leyshan persuaded Liam she was the one for him. They dated for a while but then cracks began showing up in Sarah’s story. “She started acting strangely,” Liam told us. “She told me she was doing late night babysitting at the time, but she would never answer her phone when she was on the job and would return home at 5 or 6 in the morning. She started to say she was running low on money and needed my support because she didn’t want to trouble her parents. I believed her and was always helping her out.”

Their relationship continued for several months and over that time Sarah borrowed a total of forty-four thousand dollars. She assured Liam she would return the money in time, or that they would get married and so it wouldn’t matter anyway.

What Liam didn’t know was that Sarah Leyshan was secretly a prostitute. Some parts of her story were true, her grandfather was a famous jockey, but she had morphed her personality around what she thought Liam wanted to see in order to blind him to what was really happening, Liam started then investigating Sarah and found out later, from other prostitutes who worked with her, that she was pathological liar with a long history of mental health issues. She had also been lying about her STI status.
She also told him that she was deported from the state because they thought she was coming to get married to a US citizen, but the truth is that the border officers found out in her phone the real reason behind her trips to the U.S which he assumed was illegal prostituation.

Over the course of their relationship, she was continuing to sleep with men for money through a network for escorts and sugar babies who operate in Wattsapp groups and are constantly on the lookout for new targets.

Other escorts we spoke to say that although society is developing sex-positive and sex-work positive culture it is women like Sarah Leyshan who are holding them back because rather than sex workers, who work in a regulated industry, they are really predators. Sarah later went on to steal money from Liam, regularly using his Credit Card without his knowledge, and when he found out she was using drugs – having a marijuana addiction – he stopped seeing her. He later learned, her pageant victories in Macau had been bought through favours and were a crucial part of her connecting with rich men, who she later duped out of money and love.

We reached out to one of Sarah’s former friends, convinced they knew her like many others, who told us she is currently trying to portray herself as a movie producer and actress while in fact still conning partners into thinking they have the “dream” girl while still escorting behind their backs and siphoning off money for personal use on the side.

Swindlers use dating apps and websites to lure in victims with flirtation and the promise of romance but increasingly predators like Sarah Leyshan are operating in a shadowy world where they use partial truths, like the fact Sarah’s grandfather was a famous jockey, to gain people’s trust. In this case, the idea that Sarah Leyshan was from a well-established family disarmed him to the idea that she might be secretly escorting or stealing from him.

“I don’t trust anyone anymore,” Liam said, who had to go through an intense therapy. He met Sarah in Sydney but after discovering the deceit he has followed his dreams elsewhere. “I couldn’t have believed for a second that she was deceiving me the entire time. If you think it will never happen to you, you’re wrong. It can and it will, and I guarantee you someone you know might be the victim of this kind of predatory behavior.”