Another Sports Comedy Network recruit, a college student who had created a popular Facebook page called NBA Memes, handed over administration rights to his creation to the Prasads after a song-and-dance about the site's use of copyrighted images and the need to shore up legal protections should they be sued. Phillips was plucked from the message boards on Covers.com last year to become a star columnist on the sports gambling site, then hired shortly thereafter to write for ESPN.com's Playbook sub-site, formerly known as Page 2. Photos she used for her Covers.com columns seemed to show different women identified as Phillips, and at least one appeared to have been lifted from the Hot Chicks with Douchebags blog, Deadspin reported. Phillips revealed some biographical details in her columns: She said she was a college student, in her 20s, a big Jersey Shore fan, a rabid Oregon Ducks fan. She was young and attractive, if any of the photos of her were to be believed, and she wrote fluently about sports gambling, a subject ESPN has always struggled to address, even obliquely. She claimed that because of my actions (contacting another member of Covers who was betting against her) that her life was threatened and she lost thousands of dollars in business from other bettors. Instead, the NBA Memes Facebook page was deleted and the contact addresses the student had been using to communicate with the Sports Comedy Network team were deleted. Nilesh sent him $2,100 to prove they had a real business. The Prasadswho were purportedly unrelatedwere supposedly employed by ESPN, but Deadspin reported that no such individuals work at the company. The kid who built NBA Memes soon found himself shut out of his own page. As Deadspin reports, over the last few months Phillips and a couple of mysterious individuals began approaching various people with offers to fold their popular online creations and social media profiles into a new sports humor portal with the working name of FauxESPN.com (it would later be officially named the Sports Comedy Network). The solicitations were generally set up by Phillips (or sometimes through an apparent sock puppet who would push a recruit towards Phillips) and then brokered by her "business partners" Nilesh Prasad and Navin Prasad. "Today was a good day," Phillips tweeted late on Tuesday. NBA Memes was essentially turned into a referral service to a different Facebook page promoting the as-yet-unbuilt Sports Comedy Network, siphoning away the audience the student had built himself.
– ESPN has fired a writer who went from being a poster on the message boards at gambling site Covers.com to being a star columnist at ESPN.com without anybody checking her real identity. Sarah Phillips was sacked soon after Deadspin ran a lengthy expose questioning her identity and accusing her of involvement in a fraud and extortion scheme involving social media. Phillips, who said she was a 22-year-old West Coast university student and a hardcore gambler, never met anybody at ESPN in person and used photographs of several different people to accompany her writings at Covers. Phillips and accomplices approached people with popular Facebook and Twitter pages, offered to make them part of a lucrative new venture, and then shut them out of their own sites, according to Deadspin. After her firing by ESPN—which says it is reviewing its hiring practices—she issued a series of tweets saying she had made "poor choices" but not admitting wrongdoing, PC Magazine reports. " I was able to evaluate everything and move away from sports media," she wrote. "You live and learn. I'm just a fan now ."