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

- SARAH TRELEAVEN

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.

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.