Cold Feet For Cambodian Wedding Scammer?

NAPERVILLE, IL — A woman wanted for bamboozling a co-worker out of nearly $40,000 with promises of a Cambodian bride was expected to turn herself in, the Naperville police said, but nearly a month later, she has yet to get around to surrendering.

Now the man she allegedly ripped off is wondering if she ever will.

“I want something to happen,” said the 36-year-old Naperville man allegedly swindled out of $38,700 by a woman he once considered a friend.

“Who knows?” he said. “She may move again.”

The last time 34-year-old Sayannee Kim moved was after she, her boyfriend and children were evicted from their Bolingbrook apartment in June. And the victim of her alleged marital malfeasance actually helped her relocate to Mishawaka, Indiana.

The Naperville man said he and Kim struck up a friendship as trainees for a company in Lisle.

“So by 2014 we were friends and she knew I was looking to get into a relationship, so she said she’d talk to her parents and look into arranging a marriage for me,” he said. “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.

The $38,700 the man says he sent over the last six months of 2014 was at first to pay for a dowry and “wedding expenses,” but “there was a story about (the fake woman) having some legal trouble and needing help” — to the tune of $7,500 — “so she wouldn’t go to jail,” and another $5,000 “for getting all the paperwork in order for the traveling and the marriage,” he said.

“After that the amounts she requested were a lot smaller for more of the same sort of lies,” he said.

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.

“Then all of sudden she was in Vietnam and needed $200 so she could leave,” he said, “and the check for the money she got back from the wedding we didn’t have was in her luggage which was stolen.”

When the man later 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.

At this point, Kim started talking about hooking her friend up with another woman, but the man wanted the money back he had already sent for the first bride.

“I get the impression that Sayannee had pretty much spent all the money she took as she got it as she was trying to borrow money from me in January (2015) to pay for her rent now that I wasn’t giving (the bride) any money,” he said. “She was pretty panicked about that at the time and said she ended up getting some money from her parents, so I think she really was out of money.”

Kim faces two counts of felony theft. Her bond has been set at $400,000 and her former friend doesn’t believe she can make bail.

“I’m at this point just trying to see if Will County will extradite her,” he said. “I don’t know how much time they plan on giving her. Even if that’s their plan, I wish somebody would say, ‘We’re giving her until this date.’”

Kim may have strung the Naperville man along for six months and taken away all of the money he had saved to buy a house, but he says he bears her no ill will.

“Obviously, I’d like to get my money back,” he said. “If she could get her life together, that’s fine with me. I don’t care.”