Cambodian Match-Faker Pleads Guilty, Gets Out of Jail

NAPERVILLE, IL — An Indiana woman got out of the Will County jail by pleading guilty to scamming a former co-worker who believed she was arranging his wedding.

Sayannee Kim, 34, bilked her former friend out of nearly $40,000.

On Wednesday, Kim, who had done more than three months behind bars, pleaded guilty to a single count of felony theft. She was sentenced to the time she already spent in jail and four years probation, and she must pay restitution.

A source close to the case said prosecutors expected Kim to come up with $2,000 for restitution before she made her plea, that she was to turn over her tax refund when she gets it and will pay her victim $300 a month.

That victim, a 36-year-old Naperville man, previously told Patch how he and Kim struck up a friendship as trainees for a company in Lisle. Kim knew he wanted to start a serious relationship, he said, “so she said she’d talk to her parents and look into arranging a marriage for me. She said her parents and one of her brothers were married that way.”

Kim then created a false persona for a prospective bride and used it to communicate with the man online — supposedly from Cambodia but with an IP address that came back to Indiana — he said. She also allegedly pulled photos and a video of a woman from the Internet and sent them to the man.

“She just seems to be someone that Sayannee found online and decided to pretend to be,” he said of the woman he thought was planning to marry him.

Over the course of the last six months of 2014, the man said he paid Kim $38,700 in various amounts.

The groom-to-be was supposed to fly to Cambodia at the end of November 2014 for his wedding. Kim was to meet him there.

“The day before my flight Sayannee got in touch with me and said she got a message from her uncle and that I wasn’t supposed to go now,” he said. “The story was some confusion (about how the bogus bride’s) manager had booked her to work for some reason. The new plan was she was just going to catch a plane on Dec. 26 (2014) and come here instead.”

But instead of arriving in Chicago on the day after Christmas, the woman supposedly had “some issue with her visa and … got stuck in London,” and only another $1,500 would get her unstuck, the man said.

When the man finally balked at sending his supposed fiancee $200 for yet another issue, she told him she was stricken with liver cancer. He still wanted to marry her.

Kim was living in Bolingbrook when she and the Naperville man first met. After she was evicted from her apartment, she moved to Mishawaka, Indiana, and was still residing there when she was taken into custody last month.

Kim was arrested in January in St. Joseph County, Indiana, where she had been living with her children, and was then taken to Joliet to face justice.