The $4-Million Girlfriend Experience
Stephanie Sahler was a cam girl. Ralph Puglisi was a man willing to pay anything for her doting attention. It was the perfect arrangement—until she realized that every penny he sent her was stolen
Jon Generous had blown through dozens of cam girls. According to his online bio, he was 54 years old and a successful real estate developer with cash to burn but nowhere to spend it. He was single, and he’d already provided his two adult children with hefty inheritances. Nothing he was buying made him happy, and that included the cam girls on MyGirlFund, an interactive sex site similar to OnlyFans. Jon wanted more than the typical snapshot or 30-second clip, though those were not off the table. He wanted thrills, sure, but also something more enduring—emotional connection. In the fantasy market, this pretend, paid relationship with benefits has a name: the girlfriend experience. Jon had the money and the patience. He just needed to find the one.
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Then, in February of 2016, he met Amber. She was 26 and attractive in a wholesome way, with long blond hair, shapely dark brows and striking blue eyes, but it was her candour that Jon found arresting. She wrote to him about being a single mother, about how difficult it was to pull together enough money for bills, student loans and the costs of caring for a family member with cancer. Life was hard, and she was just scraping by. Jon was touched; the racy livestreams were a nice bonus. After he sent his first payment—$1,000, which worked out to some $1,400 Canadian for Amber—she thanked him for helping to give her daughter a better life. “It is a dream of mine to be with a younger woman who I connect with and is sexually uninhibited,” he wrote back. Within days of meeting her online, Jon told Amber that she was what he’d been missing in his life. His feelings were so strong, he wrote, that he wanted to send Amber money for “nothing in return,” even suggesting that they might one day raise her daughter together.
It was a perfect match: Jon had the money Amber needed, and Amber could give Jon the attention and affection he so desperately craved. They would spend the next five years creating an elaborate fictional life together. By the time they were forced to confront all the lies they’d told, millions of dollars had changed hands—all of it stolen.
Offline, Jon Generous was Ralph Puglisi, an accountant with close-cropped blond hair, a soft rounded belly and an orange tan. He worked in accounting for the University of South Florida in Tampa, which is consistently ranked one of the top 50 public institutions in the US, and his job was solid if mundane. On weekdays, he’d trek across the palm-tree-studded campus to the University Medical Service Association, the non-profit that supports the university’s medical school. Its employees handle fees incurred by faculty and oversee tens of millions of dollars of spending a year. Puglisi was well-liked by colleagues and supervisors, who praised him as a good leader and a capable problem-solver for finicky financial questions.
His personal life was more tumultuous. He had grown up with an alcoholic father, and his parents divorced just after he graduated high school. As an adult, Puglisi struggled to break free from their patterns. By 2014, he’d been married twice and had two adult children. When he met Donna McCoy, a fellow divorcée in her 40s with three children, blond hair and a deep tan, Puglisi was smitten, and he became determined to make their relationship work. He wanted to impress her, to lavish her with travel and gifts, but he had expenses on all sides: two exes, a daughter who was about to get married, an aging mother with financial problems and deteriorating health, and a brother on disability. The luxuries Puglisi wanted were simply not in his budget.
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It helped when he was promoted to accounting manager in 2014, a gig that came with new perks. Puglisi began overseeing multiple financial departments and became the sole administrator of corporate credit cards. He was also given complete oversight of two cards issued in his name—and their companion ledgers. Every day, he tracked, logged and filed away legitimate charges. It wouldn’t have taken him long to realize that no one was double-checking his work. If he were to use his new resources to buy a few nice things for himself, who would even notice?
He started small, using company money to buy a plane ticket here, some jewellery there. Sometimes he charged purchases directly to the university’s cards, then buried the expenses by creating a false log entry. Other times, he bought prepaid Visa cards, which the university supplied to certain vendors, and used those for his personal spending. Emboldened by his initial purchases, he took McCoy on vacation and gave his mother rent money. He charged the cards $3,318 for catering and $1,334 for a DJ when his daughter got married in 2014. And when a backup administrator at the university, someone who might have provided oversight on Puglisi’s spending, left in August of 2015 and wasn’t replaced, Puglisi seized the opportunity. He started using the company cards for thousands of personal charges. He and McCoy spent $33,576 renovating their bungalow in Palm Harbor, installing a saltwater pool and a hot tub. And then there were the treats that were just for him, including a luxury Audi A8 sedan.
By 2016, Puglisi had spent more than $2 million of his employer’s money. He’d provided handsomely for his family, but he wasn’t getting the acknowledgement he yearned for. He looked for companionship on various adult sites like Chemistry.com and Adultfriendfinder.com—with the university paying the requisite fees—but to no avail. So, on February 5, 2016, he sat down at his computer, opened up MyGirlFund and invented Jon Generous.
Stephanie Sahler was quintessentially suburban: she’d been with her partner, a project manager named Tyler Malott, since 2006, and they were raising their young daughter together in Kitchener. Sahler was a university drop-out and a stay-at-home mom, and though she was interested in nature photography, she didn’t have much success monetizing her hobby. So, in 2013, she signed up for the newest iteration of the world’s oldest profession: she created profiles on a handful of cam girl websites, including ManyVids, iWantClips and MyGirlFund, and started calling herself Amber.
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In an earlier era, Sahler would have needed to meet clients in hotel rooms or go into their homes to pursue sex work, but interactive sex sites like MyGirlFund, Chaturbate and the now-ubiquitous OnlyFans have dramatically lowered the barriers to entry. While some sex sites have been used to lure women into sex trafficking rings, on the whole they’re considerably safer than IRL sex work. Performers can be their own bosses and work of their own volition. Sahler was able to log in from anywhere, and there was no need for physical contact. The sites provide a centralized marketplace with built-in promotion, where workers can sell pictures, videos and livestreams that cater to any number of niche predilections—generally, the more niche, the more lucrative. One OnlyFans creator claims to make some $45,000 a month selling photos of her feet.
Typically, clients buy credits on their platform of choice and use those credits to pay performers, who can then cash out. (OnlyFans offers a subscription model in addition to pay per use.) Most sites are notorious for extracting aggressive commissions: OnlyFans takes a 20 per cent fee, and Chaturbate charges 50 per cent. MyGirlFund, which is run out of San Diego, retains a 10 to 35 per cent cut, with the highest earners paying the lowest commissions. Rates range dramatically, but webcam performers can charge some $5 a minute for live performances and $10 to $20 per picture or pre-recorded video. For an elite group of full-time performers, yearly earnings can be as high as $600,000.
Part of the reason performers command such high fees is because they’re offering more than just sex. The days of the static Playboy centrefold have given way to personalized, interactive online content. Workers make themselves available for direct messages and other forms of contact, providing a sympathetic ear to users who are often as lonely as they are horny. Clients log on for immediate gratification, but it’s the companionship and intimacy that make them stay. Sometimes, these connections develop into intense years-long relationships that can have devastating results. In 2019, a Florida man named Grant Amato fell for a Bulgarian cam girl and sent her payments totalling $200,000. When his family found out and demanded he cut off the relationship, he murdered his parents and brother.
Ben Bernick, a webcam performer who films videos with female partners, says that a lot of the men on MyGirlFund aren’t looking for anything sexual; they just want someone to be nice to them, someone they can take care of. “Some guys even pay girls to stay off the site, because they think they’re better than that,” says Bernick. One client offered a woman $5,000 a week not to post online and said he’d cover the cost of her tuition if she went back to school.
Sahler’s career as a cam girl started off slowly. She declared just $16,000 in income on her tax return in 2015. It wasn’t until Ralph Puglisi clicked on her MyGirlFund profile that her earnings became life-altering.
Puglisi wasted no time proving he would be a lucrative client: after his first $1,000 payment, he sent Sahler an additional $5,500 before the end of the week. He was soon emailing Sahler multiple times a day, though his come-ons were decidedly trite. “Princess, my feelings for you are getting stronger and stronger,” he wrote. “I want to passionately make love to you. Stare in your eyes and see the passion in your eyes. And yes when 2 lovers orgasm together it is a beautiful intimate feeling. I want you!!!!” Sahler’s responses were complimentary, but she seldom lost sight of the bottom line: “I think you would be a good lover in bed hehe,” she wrote. “Did you ever figure out paypal love or did you prefer to stick with MGF for now?” By March, just weeks after their first transaction, they’d exchanged phone numbers, email addresses and even their real names.
That month, Sahler suggested that Puglisi send her money through another cam girl platform, iWantClips, which took a lower commission. But, after a few transactions, she received a message from the site: Puglisi’s payments had been flagged as potentially fraudulent. He was the principal user of the credit card, the site said, but it appeared to belong to a university. Sahler reached out to Puglisi for an explanation. “They are just asking me how long I have known you and if you have sent me large transactions before,” she wrote. “They also asked me if I know your real name and if you have ever shared your address with me. I don’t know why.”
Puglisi assured her that there was nothing to worry about, offering to send a statement showing that the payments had been processed. He insisted that he’d settled things with the site and verified everything with his bank, and he explained that he simply preferred to use his corporate card for large transactions because he could earn reward points. Sahler seemed to believe him, but they reverted back to MyGirlFund to circumvent the scrutiny. Within a month of their first exchange, Sahler had cashed out more than $47,000.
The vast majority of their correspondence was quotidian. “I am going to grill some chicken,” Puglisi wrote on March 21. “One for dinner and one for lunch tomorrow. Prolly a small salad and some green beans.” Sahler quickly perfected her approach: one beat to stroke Puglisi’s ego, one beat to confirm her compensation and a short burst of laughter to lighten the mood. “I love hearing from you. I think I am going to watch some netflix,” she responded to the green beans email. “I do have one question though...if you ever do decide to stop supporting me financially or sending money, will you promise to let me know and not leave me hanging? You are an amazing guy and I know you would never do anything like that but I guess I need your reassurance on that too haha.”
Puglisi enjoyed dispensing advice, positioning himself as Sahler’s mentor. He nudged Sahler to file her taxes on time, and he often urged her to better herself and build a new career. When he suggested that she go back to school for web design, she gamely played along. “It is time to think about my future and where I want to be at several years from now,” she wrote. “I need to sit down and write a list of goals and possible opportunities, schools and what they offer, etc. I may need your advice with some things haha.”
Puglisi lavished Sahler with gifts, including floor seats to an Elton John concert, Blue Jays playoff tickets, a spa gift certificate and even a down payment for an Audi of her own. At one point, he jokingly suggested meeting Sahler at Pearson airport with a bag of cash. Sahler navigated his overtures expertly, always emphasizing her affection for him while gently bringing him around to the topic of her fee. “I feel weird talking about money with you,” she wrote. “I don’t want it to sound like i am asking for it haha.” But Puglisi seemed to derive a genuine thrill from bankrolling Sahler’s life. After going through dozens of women, he had found his perfect companion, a woman who made him feel not only appreciated but needed. A little over a month after he and Sahler first connected, he made a staggering offer: to keep up their relationship, he guaranteed Sahler between $10,000 and $12,000 (US) a week.
Still, Puglisi remained cagey about the specifics of his finances. He demurred on sending money directly through PayPal, which would have had lower fees but more stringent oversight—something that, after the iWantClips incident, he would have been keen to avoid. He divulged that he used prepaid Visa cards for much of his personal spending, and despite supposedly being a rich real estate developer, he spoke with Sahler about a day job at a university. It must have been clear that Puglisi had secrets, but Sahler was apparently content not to ask.
Puglisi didn’t know about Sahler’s partner, but Tyler Malott knew a few things about Puglisi. He knew that Puglisi was rich and needy, that Sahler had something he wanted, and that he was willing to pay a lot of money for it—though it’s difficult to believe that Sahler’s new income wouldn’t have prompted further questions. Some of their windfall went toward luxuries: they took their extended family on a nearly $60,000 Disney vacation. They also did put some money toward helping a family member with cancer. But they didn’t want to just fritter it away. They now had a mountain of cash, and they decided to funnel it into real estate.
Malott called on an old friend, Jamie Montag, for help. He and Montag had met in college in 2006, and Montag had gone on to start a renovations and custom home building company called Caliber. Malott and Montag had lost touch, but in 2017, Malott asked to meet for coffee. He now had a steady stream of capital, he said, and was interested in investing in real estate. Montag brought in his partner at Caliber, a tradesman named Matt Morningstar. Visually, the pair were opposites: Morningstar trim and clean cut, Montag a bit dishevelled with a shaggy beard.
Morningstar would handle the day-to-day business, Montag the trades, and Malott and Sahler would provide the funds. (Sahler, perhaps taking Puglisi’s career advice to heart, also consulted on design.) Together, the four of them incorporated a company called Urbe Developments, each taking a 25 per cent ownership stake. Malott and Sahler also created a numbered company where they stashed Puglisi’s funds and could draw upon them as needed, most often in the form of loans to Urbe.
They started small, purchasing a handful of single-family homes to flip in southwestern Ontario, some on the edge of Kitchener’s downtown and others on the outskirts of Cambridge. Over time, they also purchased large tracts of land, hoping they might one day build townhomes in Cambridge and a condo complex in Kitchener-Waterloo. Through Urbe, the group acquired a total of seven properties, a mix of houses and empty lots, and converted them into mostly generic-looking single-family homes. Each project was meticulously documented on social media: empty lots converted into building sites or ramshackle houses decked out with subway tiles, farmhouse sinks and gas ranges. The group had lofty dreams of growing Urbe into a developer of subdivisions.
While Montag and Morningstar were generous bosses who paid decent wages and hosted barbecues in their backyards, at least one employee wondered where all the cash was coming from. Montag and Morningstar drove souped-up new trucks and were constantly acquiring new properties. “I just figured they were really good at money,” the former employee told me. Malott’s and Sahler’s names came up from time to time, and some crew members knew they were part of the funding structure, but the couple operated at arm’s length. The Caliber crews knew Urbe well, though—they frequently had more Urbe assignments than they could handle. One such project was a $2-million luxury home in Deer Ridge, an affluent Kitchener suburb. The house was 4,800 square feet, with 10-foot ceilings and an in-ground saltwater pool out back. When it was complete, Sahler and Malott moved in.
In February of 2017, Puglisi told Sahler he wanted her to have $5 million in the bank, after taxes. “So you can make your life as amazing as you want it to be,” he wrote. Sahler had, accordingly, started telling Puglisi that she loved him, and she alluded to launching her own business, a new life path afforded by Puglisi’s generosity. They even discussed Puglisi visiting Sahler in Toronto, where they would meet over a glass of wine and Puglisi could try poutine. Sahler vowed to one day get out of sex work so they could build a life together, though it was hard to see exactly what was holding them back. The Tampa-Kitchener barrier was hardly insurmountable, but neither of them ever pushed for anything concrete. Maintaining the fantasy—the pretence of their eventual meeting—was part of the experience for which Puglisi was paying generously.
Meanwhile, the financial oddities of their arrangement were becoming more conspicuous. The money had always flowed in one direction, but now Puglisi was asking for some of it back. Once, he pitched Sahler on an investment opportunity, promising her high returns. All she had to do was send back some money for him to invest. Another time, he told her that he was working on investments of his own and that there were tax implications. He wanted to send her money through MyGirlFund and have her return it via cheque. It seemed strange, but she did as he asked both times, sending him cheques in October of 2018 and March of 2019 totalling a few hundred thousand dollars. Each time, the money started coming back her way soon afterward.
During the years Puglisi was talking to Sahler online, his corporate credit card accounted for more than 80 per cent of MyGirlFund’s total profits
By paying Sahler and having her cut cheques back to him, Puglisi was effectively laundering his stolen funds, obfuscating the paper trail and turning his employer’s credit cards into relatively clean cash for himself. He wasn’t the only person with this idea: it was becoming a family business. In 2018, Donna McCoy’s son, Tyler Ruth, and his fiancée, Francisca Roman Ruth, approached Puglisi. They knew he had an illicit source of income and a cam girl habit, so they struck a deal: Francisca would create her own profile on MyGirlFund, as “Yourgirl94,” and Puglisi would send her money. She and Tyler would keep 40 per cent of the payments and mail Puglisi a cheque for the remainder. Francisca received $1.3 million from Puglisi, not including the cut taken by MyGirlFund, and sent him one cheque, for $18,953.28, that he cashed. All of her other cheques bounced.
McCoy also saw a business opportunity. As a registered real estate agent, she worked with Puglisi to set up a company called Tropical Famiglia Inc. They claimed to specialize in Caribbean real estate—though there’s no evidence that they ever had any listings. They funnelled $647,882 from the University of South Florida into their new business’s bank accounts, gave themselves salaries, and even paid off the $230,000 remaining on their home mortgage. Next up was a $345,000 plot of forested land in the US Virgin Islands, with a 150-metre elevation overlooking the azure waters and bobbing white sailboats of Rendezvous Bay. It was a “home to retire to,” Puglisi wrote in an email to a colleague, “hopefully in a few years.” In 2018, Puglisi and McCoy got married, and the next year they spent $52,000 on a rental villa in St. Thomas.
Even as Puglisi was setting up a Caribbean getaway with his wife, he was talking almost daily to Sahler. MyGirlFund had taken note of their interactions and made moves to secure an even larger share of Puglisi’s seemingly endless resources. The site sets limits on maximum contributions, but Puglisi had repeatedly leaned on MyGirlFund to waive them. At first, he’d asked if he could increase his daily contribution limit to $800, and MyGirlFund had offered to raise it to $1,000. Later, the site changed his maximum without prompting, eventually increasing it to $10,000. Puglisi was such a good customer, they told him in their emails, that they wanted to keep him happy. During the years he was talking to Sahler, Puglisi’s corporate credit card accounted for more than 80 per cent of MyGirlFund’s total profits.
In July of 2020, Puglisi’s supervisor realized that he’d made an error. He had instructed one of the department’s accountants—someone who reported to Puglisi—to log an expense, but it had been incorrect. In search of a way to rectify it, the supervisor opened the books on the 2018/19 and 2019/20 fiscal years, but when he reviewed the accounts, he found something else: what looked like millions of dollars of overspending. The department scrambled to order an internal audit, and by November they’d come to a conclusion: the unusual transactions were likely fraud. Puglisi was put on administrative leave on December 1, and just three days later, he was fired. The University of South Florida police confiscated his desktop computer and laptop and changed the locks on his office door.
What the University Medical Services Association found when it reviewed Puglisi’s accounting was shocking. Some 20 employees had access to corporate credit cards, and from January 2014 to January 2021, they’d spent a collective $17.4 million; of that, Puglisi was responsible for $16.4 million—a whopping 94 per cent. Less than a quarter of Puglisi’s spending was legitimate, and he’d misappropriated at least $12.9 million. One report commissioned by the university detailed how Puglisi had disbursed the stolen funds, noting that he’d spent more than $11 million on adult content providers and $16,494 on his wedding. The university shared its findings with the FBI.
Puglisi contacted Sahler in a panic, telling her that he was under investigation and needed some funds back immediately. By this point, Sahler had financial problems of her own. Urbe had launched with gusto, submitting a site plan to the city of Cambridge proposing nine homes on one of their lots, but then the pandemic struck, disrupting supply chains and shutting down construction projects. So, for the first time in more than four years, Sahler didn’t answer Puglisi with flattery. Now that the cash had dried up, she responded with a shrug. Since she and her money were in Canada, she believed that neither he nor the FBI could force her to give it back. In other words: this sounded like a Ralph problem.
On August 11, 2021, Puglisi was charged criminally with one count of mail fraud related to the cheques Francisca had sent him. McCoy left him, and while his case made its way through the system, Puglisi was ordered to wear an ankle monitor and had to move into an apartment with his mother and brother. Puglisi was a wreck, and he attempted suicide before being involuntarily committed to a mental health facility. Once released, he looked for a new job. His first gig was at Dollar General, where he earned $10 an hour. Later he would move on to Walmart, where he made roughly $2,000 a month.
He pleaded guilty in late August. Facing up to 20 years, he scrambled to pay the university back before his sentencing hearing. He sold the plot of land in the Virgin Islands for $425,000 and the home in Palm Harbor for $600,000, plus jewellery, memorabilia and his Audi. He emptied his bank accounts, investment funds and retirement savings and set aside half of every cheque he got from his gig at Walmart. But, in the end, he was able to return only around $1.2 million. Everything else was gone.
In his sentencing submission, Puglisi’s lawyer said his client was ashamed and apologetic and that he would continue making restitution. He claimed that Puglisi’s impulsivity and poor decision-making capacity were the result of an injury sustained during a car accident two decades before his theft began. The lawyer presented brain scans from the Amen Clinic in Atlanta, a controversial facility popular with celebrities and skeptics of conventional medicine, that purported to show injuries to several parts of Puglisi’s brain. His lawyer also referenced a laundry list of long-standing mental afflictions: anxiety, depression, panic attacks, ADHD, PTSD, neurocognitive problems and bipolar disorder. For good measure, he also threw in osteoarthritis, calloused feet and hammer toe. He pleaded for compassion. Puglisi, if put in jail without the regular care of a podiatrist, he insisted, wouldn’t even be able to walk.
While Puglisi awaited his criminal sentencing, the University of South Florida went after its money in a series of civil suits. In 2022, a court deemed Puglisi liable for a staggering $38.7 million in punitive and compensatory damages—though, of course, he’d already demonstrated that he couldn’t pay. In order to claw back some cash, the university’s lawyers would need to prove that other individuals were culpable—that they knew, or should reasonably have known, the money they were accepting from Puglisi was ill-gotten. First up was his family: one of Puglisi’s ex-wives was ordered to pay $35,000 in restitution for rent Puglisi had paid on her behalf, and his mother and brother were collectively dinged for $85,000 in rent money and other expenses also paid by Puglisi. McCoy was told to pay back $25,000, and Puglisi received an additional judgment for restitution of the $648,000 he had provided to Tropical Famiglia. They all should have known, a Tampa judge ruled, that it was improbable the money they were being handed was from a legitimate source.
Puglisi, eschewing the generosity of his former online persona, pointed a finger at Sahler, who then became a target for the university’s civil litigation. After MyGirlFund had taken its cut, she’d received a total of $4.1 million (or roughly $5.6 million Canadian). Puglisi now claimed that their relationship wasn’t emotionally intimate but coolly calculating. He didn’t care about her and her daughter—he had been “playing a game with her,” building up trust before asking her outright to help him embezzle funds. Sahler had actively helped him launder money, he insisted, with the promise of sending back half of everything he paid her. He was unable to provide any correspondence that corroborated his allegations, but he attempted to explain away the fact that Sahler had returned money on only a handful of occasions by claiming that she was taking advantage of his litany of health problems. As for MyGirlFund, Puglisi suggested that the company must have known the transactions were suspicious but had decided to look the other way.
On their face, Puglisi’s accusations against Sahler made little sense. The exact timeline of his payments to Sahler is unclear, but it’s hard to understand why he would keep sending her millions over a period of years if, as he claimed, she wasn’t holding up her end of the bargain by sending him back clean cash. If they were both in on it, how much of the money Puglisi paid Sahler was for companionship and how much was the fee for laundering? And if Sahler and Puglisi’s relationship quickly became a vehicle for fraud, why would Puglisi bore her with the mundane details of his life, tying her up with emails, texts and calls about green beans?
When Sahler was called upon to defend herself in the civil case, she argued that she had spent years of her life providing Puglisi with “the girlfriend experience,” pretending that he was funny, smart and charming—and it wasn’t her fault that the money he’d used to lavishly compensate her just happened to be stolen. If sex work is indeed work, wasn’t the money rightfully hers? Besides, Puglisi paid his money to MyGirlFund, and MyGirlFund paid Sahler. The website either hadn’t detected fraud or hadn’t cared to intervene. Why would she have been suspicious of Puglisi using the website in the exact way it was intended? Transactional relationships were a feature of MyGirlFund, not a bug.
Puglisi’s lawyers claimed that his impulsivity was the result of a brain injury that had occurred two decades before his theft began
In the end, Sahler reached an out-of-court settlement with the university. In return for having the case against her dismissed and being shielded from all future litigation, she agreed to pay $100,000 and direct all future profits from her share of Urbe and the numbered company to the university.
Over the next year, though, Sahler failed to make any additional payments. The university, still smarting over the loss of millions and the optics of failing to detect the fraud for years, now faced a quandary. It knew that a significant amount of the money stolen by Puglisi had ended up in Sahler’s hands, but it was barred by the terms of the settlement from suing her a second time. So it came up with another plan to recoup its money. On August 6, 2024, the university filed a civil suit in Kitchener against Tyler Malott, seeking damages in the amount of $4.1 million for perpetrating “fraud, deceit, conspiracy, unjust enrichment, fraudulent conveyance and conversion.” The case has not yet been tried, but in order to be successful, the university will have to convince a judge that Sahler and Malott knew that Puglisi’s money was stolen when they used it to build their business. Montag and Morningstar were also named by way of companies they own. The university is seeking an additional $500,000 in punitive damages from each defendant.
In their statements of defence, lawyers representing Malott, Montag and Morningstar claim their clients had no awareness that the money Sahler earned through MyGirlFund was stolen—and point out that the Florida court that tried Sahler hadn’t even proven that she had known. As for any dividends Urbe owed to the university, almost all profits had been reinvested into the business. By August of 2021, Malott had left Urbe, which appears to have largely wound down operations, and gotten a job as a project manager with a robotics company. Montag and Morningstar continue to operate Caliber—though with a much smaller group of employees than during the Urbe-funded boom years.
On September 22, 2022, Puglisi was sentenced to 10 years—half the maximum he was facing—at FCI Coleman, a federal prison not far from Orlando. The judge offered him a “downward adjustment” of his sentence to reflect his acceptance of responsibility, though he failed to self-surrender and forced the court to issue an arrest warrant when his prison term started. Now 63, he is slated for release in 2030.
As the Kitchener case wends its way through the system, the University of South Florida has made some progress recouping its money. It launched a civil case against MyGirlFund, and in November of 2024, a Tampa judge bypassed the jury and issued a directed verdict, ruling that the site was liable for $4,717,006 in damages. “They did not do anything at all to verify where this money was coming from despite the really incredible amounts that were being paid on a daily and weekly basis to them,” the judge said. “It was obvious to me that they viewed him as a cash cow, that they were purposely turning a blind eye and not conducting their due diligence to determine whether or not this gentleman was using a card fraudulently or how he was paying for these matters.”
It’s unclear whether MyGirlFund has made any restitution. The site has been largely frozen for almost two years, and webcam performers have taken to social media to complain about being unable to cash out their hard-earned money: $500 here, $1,000 there and sometimes far more. Most of the victims and beneficiaries of Puglisi’s fraud have also gone silent. The University of South Florida sent me their internal reports but would not answer further questions. I reached out to Puglisi, McCoy, Tyler and Francisca Ruth, Sahler, Malott, Montag, Morningstar, and MyGirlFund, but they all declined an interview or did not respond.
Sahler, it seems, has little left to show for her MyGirlFund windfall. She and Malott, who have broken up, sold their Deer Ridge home. Now, Sahler rents a modest townhouse—though she keeps her Audi A6 in the driveway.
This story appears in the July 2025 issue of Toronto Life magazine. To subscribe, click here. To purchase single issues, click here.
