How I got scammed by Indiana politics' biggest con artist

Almost everyone in Indiana politics has a Megan Stoner story. Here's mine.

My Lyft driver wasn’t who she claimed to be — though I wouldn’t realize that until a few weeks later when I started to report out her alleged felonies. For now, all I knew was that I was the passenger of a person who called herself “Abbi,” and that I was a captive audience engaged in a friendly conversation about my work as a journalist. Abbi, as she identified herself, was driving me to a local watering hole a few miles from my house where I planned to finish up a late deadline and have a drink before returning home (my car was in the shop).

Abbi picked me up in a black late model Cadillac Xt6. She seemed knowledgeable about the Indiana political scene as I told her I covered Mike Pence and other politicians in my day job. She was having a rough day, she told me. I wished her well as she dropped me off.

Every political journalist has an anecdote about a revelatory taxi or rideshare trip, jotting it into their notebook or tweeting out a telling observation about an upcoming election. The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has made a career out of including searing bits of hard-won wisdom from his drivers, what the Columbia Journalism Review termed his “go-to reporting move.” In 2016, ABC ran a reporter’s notebook column headlined “What My Uber Drivers Say About the Presidential Candidates.” I am no exception. POLITICO Magazine dispatched me to an Indianapolis mall back in 2015 to see if anyone I crossed paths with could find Iran on a map. I mostly struck out, until my Uber driver on the way home correctly identified the nation, citing his enjoyment of Friedman’s book The World Is Flat.

But my encounter with Abbi, and this story of a Lyft ride gone wrong, leads down a weirder path. Because Abbi picked me up again on my way home that night. From that moment, the ride would ultimately lead me to the realization that scammers like former Rep. George Santos aren’t just at the top layer of politics, but at the bottom, too — all the way down to low level-volunteers.  Abbi, I would soon learn, was once both. In modern American politics, it seems, it’s grifters all the way down. 

That night, Abbi was taking me for a ride, quite literally, yes, and soon in a looser sense of the term, when she would leave me $150 poorer ] in just a few minutes — just as she had scammed countless other marks — and for tens of thousands of dollars before me. And soon enough, she’d meet her match in a Pence ally turned talk radio show host turned county prosecutor, the lawyer who helped convict boxer Mike Tyson of rape in Indiana in 1992.

What I didn’t tell Abbi was that I was in the early stages of reporting a story about one such notorious scammer. And what Abbi didn’t tell me was that she already knew who I was, would soon block me on X (back when it was still known as Twitter), and that the walls were closing in on her after years of living a double identity.  In a little more than a week, she would be arrested and charged with eight felonies. Months later, authorities would revoke her bail and she’d be a fugitive on the lam. And then, she would get catfished by social media followers who lured her into public by posing as a tantric massage therapist.

What neither of us knew at that very moment: The scammer I was tracking would turn out to be her. 

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Megan Stoner’s political origin story began with a seemingly earnest desire to get involved as a political volunteer. At age 10, she’s told at least one reporter, she volunteered for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, the last time a Democrat won Indiana in a presidential election. At 11, she was walking in parades for mayoral candidates. 

A former Republican official, granted anonymity to share recollections and protect this person’s current job, met Stoner at an event in 2013, back when she was 15. “You don't ever turn those people away in politics on either side,” the former Republican official told me. “You're looking for anyone and everyone that will be involved to help you knock doors and make calls and whatever else.” 

For much of her teens, Stoner drifted around Indiana politics, volunteering for various campaigns and becoming something of a gadfly at the statehouse. She served on then-Rep. Susan Brooks’ youth advisory council. Ahead of the 2016 campaign, she got involved knocking on doors for then-Rep. Todd Young, who was running for U.S. Senate. She proved to be exceptional at the task — a little too exceptional. Through the tracking software, she noted knocking on something like 30 doors in the space of five minutes, data uncovered later by a volunteer coordinator, who raised concerns about her through the chain of command at the Republican state party operation. 

In 2015, Chloe Anagnos, a longtime political volunteer in Indiana’s 5th congressional district, met Stoner at a parade in Hamilton County, where she was tasked with helping hold political signs and tossing out candy. A year later, she enlisted Stoner’s help making calls ahead of a convention battle for the then Indiana attorney general candidate Curtis Hill. She had told people she worked at the state party, but she had no such job. Stoner returned the call sheet with a “not home” scribbled next to every name on the page. “And we're like, ‘alright, you're done,’” Anagnos recalled. 

But by April of 2016, at 18, Stoner was basking in positive press. She had scored her first political profile — the basis of every great political career. “Elwood teen'’s involvement in politics spans nearly half her life,” gushed a piece by Indianapolis NBC affiliate WTHR. “To say that this teen eats, breathes, and lives politics would be an understatement. She also sleeps it, thanks to her blanket that is made solely out of campaign tee shirts.”

The piece noted that she had helped draft a bill lowering the age to run for a Senate office in Indiana from age 25 to age 21; and from age 21 to age 18 in the Indiana House. A copy of the bill hung on her bulletin board in the background of a photo of her childhood bedroom. The reporter asked her if she would run for governor one day: “I might,” she said. “I don't know.”

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Not long after the glowing profile, in the spring of 2016, Stoner’s political exploits took a darker turn. Indiana had become a pivotal state in the Republican presidential primary. The entire remaining field — Donald Trump, Carly Fiorina, John Kasich and Ted Cruz — blitzed the state ahead of the consequential May primary that delivered Trump his party’s nomination. To take her political obsession to the next level, the then-18-year-old would write checks worth hundreds of dollars to get into political fundraisers and press the flesh of her political heroes. Nothing out of the ordinary.

But when the finance directors would go to cash the checks, they would bounce. The campaign would call the Indiana Republican Party and explain what happened with incredulity, but nothing ever happened. She would sidestep sending a check in well before the event like most donors. “She would bring the check to the event,” said the former Republican official, who was working as an aide at state party at the time. All told, two sources familiar say she bilked Trump, Fiorina and Cruz for an unknown amount of money. “No one had time to chase a $1,000 check,” the former official said.

By July, her reputation as something of a fabulist was well established in the upper echelons of Indiana Republican politics. Stoner became persona non-grata at party events because of the general. But that didn’t stop her from showing up. At a Fourth of July parade in Noblesville as the veepstakes swirled around their boss, Mike Pence staffers had special instructions from his political advisers to not allow Stoner near him. (A selfie with a congresswoman or statewide elected official had become her well known calling card , and she had signed up to volunteer at the parade). A field staffer was assigned to keep Stoner away from Pence, who did not yet have secret service protection as Trump hadn’t officially selected him as his running mate. This staffer’s boss told him, half jokingly: “If you let her get a picture with Mike Pence, we’re going to fire you. You’ve got to keep her away.” 

“I’m at this fucking parade at 4 p.m. in the afternoon on the Fourth of July. I just want to go home and drink beer,” the staffer, granted anonymity by IMPORTANTVILLE to not interfere with his current employment, told me. Somebody near the parade said hello to the staffer. This person said hello, too. Stoner saw her moment. “She absolutely beelined it right to Pence and got a picture, and I’m like, ‘I’m fucked.’” In the photo, which for a time she displayed prominently as her Twitter header, Stoner wears glasses, smiling along with Pence and his wife Karen. 

“The running joke is that she is kind of the most famous person in Indiana politics,” Anagnos told me.

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Around the same time I took the Lyft ride, Stoner’s life had begun to unravel. At 25, her last known official involvement in Indiana political circles happened when she worked as a state Senate intern in 2019 for just a matter of days before quitting. From that moment on, her life seemed to have been occupied by becoming a substitute teacher. She would create Amazon wishlists for her classrooms including odd items that seemed unrelated to teaching, like a futon mattress. “I’m Meg! I’m a first year teacher,” read the introduction to her list. “I had to switch where I worked because I was bullied by students. Yes, you read that right. I now work in a high school where kids come to us from the department of corrections as a way of adapting to life after living in jail or juvenile detention.” She also posted a CashApp username. Stoner seemed to be doing well financially: She populated her Facebook and then Twitter profiles with photos of her Tesla Model X.

All of this was brewing in the background as my Lyft driver Abbi both picked me up and dropped me off that April night. When I arrived home after an eventless 10-minute ride, an alert popped up on my phone letting me know I’d be assessed a $150 damage fee, alongside grainy photos of what appeared to be vomit in the backseat. Perplexed, I chatted a customer support specialist who told me the matter had been investigated and that there was nothing more that I could do. Surely, I thought, Abbi must've mixed me up with another passenger. But as I would soon learn, Abbi wasn’t Abbi, but Stoner, and this was just another one of her scams — and I’d soon come face to face with her myself. 

Six days after my Lyft ride, Fishers police arrested Stoner on a warrant for an ongoing rental scheme, where she would put up for lease her rented house in the town, collecting a deposit and first month’s rent and then never giving renters the keys. Fishers Police Department wanted her on six felony counts for theft and fraud, a felony count of corporate business influence and two misdemeanors. She turned herself in the following day.

A few weeks later, I found myself on another deadline at a Fishers area Starbucks, waiting on a call from a national politician. As I waited, I found myself listening to the conversation of a person sitting just across the coffee shop who was on a telephone call. Her voice, for whatever reason, caught my ear. I began to study her closely. Where did I know this person from? She sounded and looked vaguely familiar. 

And then it struck me: She sounded a lot like my Lyft driver. I thought back to our conversation about my work as a reporter covering Mike Pence. But I couldn’t see my Lyft driver in the driver’s seat that night weeks earlier, and the person before me looked like another person I’d seen and heard of before in Indiana political circles. I had heard tales about Megan Stoner and had contemplated a profile of her alleged political scams for weeks, even doing some digging of my own. I opened my Lyft app and compared the profile photo of my driver Abbi and the person sitting before me; it was her. 

I surreptitiously took out my phone and snapped a photo of Stoner as she was sitting across from me, and sent to a Republican source of mine: Is this Megan Stoner, I asked? A few minutes later, the source confirmed my intuition. 

I walked outside of the noisy Starbucks to take his call, and as I paced around on the patio, I noticed what seemed to a Tesla Model X  in the front row of the parking lot. Was it Stoner’s?

A few minutes passed on my phonecall. I walked back into the coffee shop, only to see Stoner gone. I looked over in the direction of the Tesla, only to see her closing the door and then speed away. 

My mind filled with questions: Who was Abbi? And how could a supposedly security-focused company like Lyft allow someone to have a fake identity? How many victims did Stoner actually have, and how many different scams was she running? Why would someone live a life like this? What had happened to someone who once seemed to have so much promise?

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Answers to many of these questions proved fleeting, or when they materialized at all, they were less satisfying. That night, I went to confront Stoner through a direct message on Twitter, only to notice she had blocked me. Had she recognized me all along? 

A Republican source sent me her cell phone number. I called her, and explained that I was at work on a story about her for IMPORTANTVILLE. In a more-than-20 minute interview, she proved evasive. I asked whether she had ever written a bad check to get into a political fundraiser. A long pause. “I’ve never been contacted about one,” she finally responded. 

“You can figure that out,” she told me.

“I can figure that out?” I responded, confused.

“You’re the journalist,” she said. “Why should I do your work for you.”

Did she attend a Carly Fiorina fundraiser?

“I did. I have a picture there,” she told me.

Before we talked, I had found a Facebook group of some 1,500 members who had been following the scams and chronicles of Stoner. Meanwhile, a Twitter account tweeted out her escapades at @MegStonerChronicles. What was it like to have this kind of reputation in politics, I asked.

“Regardless of what someone has done, it's a shame that it's turned into the social media campaign against me,” Stoner said. She added: “And it's really sad to me that this has turned into cyber bullying. There is no other way to describe it.”

I asked her if she’d ever driven for Lyft before. She told me she didn’t see how that was relevant to my story. I told her about the $150 charge and Abbi. She told me someone must have used her image in their Lyft profile. 

“You would have to take that up with Lyft,” she said. I asked her about how she could afford to own a Tesla, about her political career, and why she thought so many people believed her to be a con artist if she was, in fact, innocent. She told me to call her lawyer. 

I contacted the vice president of public affairs for Lyft. I learned that Stoner had assumed at least three different identities, including that of her onetime former roommate, Abbi Espe and that of her dead father.

In a statement, a Lyft spokesperson told me: “We take fraudulent activity and damage disputes very seriously. This driver has been permanently deactivated.”

My $150 was refunded. 

But other Stoner victims haven’t been so lucky. According to documents from the Hamilton County Prosecutor, Greg Garrison, a horse riding buddy of Pence’s and the special prosecutor in the Mike Tyson rape case, has been pursuing multiple cases against Stoner that total more than $100,000 in fraud. (Garrison declined an interview for this article.)

In October, I tracked down the real Abbi, and told her about what her old roommate had been up to. She sounded exasperated. “She is a fraud. She is a thief. She will stop at nothing,” Espe, a public relations professional who had met Stoner through an apartment listing, told me. “She will stop at nothing. I mean, she puts people homeless. She leases Tesla's for heaven's sake.”

For months after turning herself in and posting bail, Stoner continued to walk free, but eventually violated terms of her parole by writing a bad check to a moving company.

Stoner had written intimately about her proclivity for sex therapists on social media. A group of Indiana Republicans and former victims created a fake Instagram account for a Bloomington-based sex therapist who healed through sexual touch, enlisting the help of a graphic designer. They followed Stoner, and began to catfish her, pretending to be a therapist who was going to launch his new sex therapy business by the Fall Equinox. They coaxed Stoner, who had been eluding authorities by checking into AirBnBS, into meeting. Stoner and the fake therapist planned a meeting for 7 p.m. one night, at the address she volunteered at. Her catfishers learned that she would evade arrest by listening to the police scanner. This time, they moved fast, alerting authorities of her address. The Marion County Sheriff's office arrested her on her open warrant. 

In November, Stoner reached a plea agreement ahead of a trial, including restitution and six months in a halfway house. She is expected to be released from the Hamilton County Jail in a matter of days. Her story is currently being documented in this season of the “Something Was Wrong” podcast by Tiffany Reese.

“There’s someone like her in politics in every single state,” Anagnos, the political volunteer who first encountered Stoner as a teenager. “I’ve had friends that have said like, 'oh my gosh, we have someone exactly like this in Texas; 'we have someone totally like this in Florida.'"