In an article published earlier this week, Chandler Fowles, 25, told of being scammed last spring by a man she met on SeekingArrangement.com, a dating website dedicated to connecting “sugar daddies” and “sugar babies.” He had promised her and a female friend $2,500 for sex and to cover the cost of a hotel room, pretended to pay them through a phony PayPal transaction and then fled after he got what he wanted.
Ms. Fowles said she wished to alert women, especially the ones still in college targeted by the site, to the perils of monetized dating, an increasingly common practice with little recourse should agreements go awry.
Less than a day after publication, The Times was contacted by two other women who said that they too were cheated out of promised payment by the same man.
“I want to corroborate the story of Chandler Fowles,” wrote one woman, who asked not to be identified. “I also had the exact same experience with this man, down to the fake story, fake name, place of meeting, and the lost money/PayPal denial that happened to her. I don’t know if telling you this will bring any justice to this situation or make it at all possible for someone to press charges against him, but I had to write to you and tell you that this is true.”
The man is Imran U. Khan, 36, of Brooklyn. Mr. Khan told The Times he “met” five women in this manner but denies promising them payment.
Mr. Khan is currently enrolled as a graduate student working toward a master’s degree in applied urban science and informatics at New York University’s Center for Urban Science and Progress. Mr. Khan urged women to book hotel rooms for liaisons, near the Jay Street MetroTech subway station, which is close to the school.
His tuition is paid in part by N.Y.U., through the Mayor’s Graduate Scholarship Program, through which universities offer partial or full scholarships to employees of city agencies. Mr. Khan worked in the office of operations for Mayor Bill de Blasio from June 2016 through October 2017. “Nobody senior knew the guy and he had no access to the policy-making process” said Eric Phillips, a spokesman for the mayor.
A second woman who contacted The Times agreed to be interviewed about her experience on the condition of anonymity. In November 2016, she was a fourth-year undergraduate student in New York and was stuck in an intractable financial crisis. She was a foreign student; when her native country, which she asked not be named, went into financial default, her parents could no longer help pay her rent and expenses.
She was in the U.S. on a student visa but did not qualify for a work visa. She was $5000 in debt and had been served with eviction notices when she signed up for SeekingArrangement. “Most girls who go on that website are desperate,” said the woman. “I was desperate.”
On Saturday, November 12, 2016, she was contacted on SeekingArrangement by a man who identified himself as Jay before later telling her his real name was Ron. If she met with him that very night in a hotel near the Jay Street-Metro Tech subway stop in Brooklyn, Ron said, he would pay her $1,000. The fee would reduce her debt by twenty percent. She reluctantly agreed.
Ron asked her to wear heavy makeup. She said no. He wanted her to have her hair blown out so she looked like “the girl next door.” She said no. But she capitulated to his insistence that she book and pay for a hotel room; she found one at the Aloft, charging nearly $500 to her credit card.
There, she said, Ron forwarded her an email showing that he had paid her $1,700 via PayPal — the $1,000 fee, $500 for the hotel and $200 for additional expenses. She had sex with him, took a shower and left. As she neared the subway, she realized that the PayPal request had been ignored and the email confirmation that he sent her was doctored. She called him for weeks after, begging him in voice mail messages to reimburse her for the hotel expenses. He never replied to her calls or texts.
When she saw the article detailing Ms. Fowles’s experience, the woman said, “My stomach dropped. I remembered how angry, devastated and hopeless I felt, standing around the corner from the hotel by the Jay Street MetroTech subway station, and hysterically crying into my phone to the one friend who knew about me deciding to go the ‘sugar daddy’ route.”
She said she reported Jay/Ron to SeekingArrangement repeatedly — about ten times in total, she said — but never heard back from a representative of the website.
Alexis Germany, a spokeswoman for SeekingArrangement, said that any sex-for-money arrangement made through the site’s texting service violates the terms of service. But she is not sure why no customer service representative responded to this woman’s reports.
She said Mr. Khan is now banned from using SeekingArrangement, and that the support team is aware of the IP addresses from which he has accessed the site, as well as his user names, which included “SweetAndTreats007.”
