Meet 'Crying Girl,' California's Celebrity Grifter  Jill Johnson
is UC Davis' hipster grifter. (Instead of hip, though, she's a
beauty queen.) Local blogs hunted down the "prolific and
notorious scammer" with "heavy, tear-smeared makeup." The
internet used to be for porn. Now it's for outing grifters.
Crying girl first appeared on DavisWiki, the college town's
community website, in March of 2010. Residents described a girl
who would approach them with tears streaming from her eyes,
weeping that she had either had a fight with her boyfriend or
lost her mother. She'd then ask for $40 for a train ticket,
"give or take a few dollars to lend legitimacy." Dozens of
Davis-dwellers testified to the scam, leading bloggers and local
media to crowdsource a manhunt on the mysterious girl. Jill
Johnson was eventually outed; DavisWiki users provided links to
her MySpace and now-pseudonymous Facebook profiles. (The latter
of which shows her posing with beauty pageant trophies.)
Internet users documented crying girl's frien