Notorious Nashville Fraudster & Diamond Thief Keegan Higginbotham surrenders on felony warrants

At 18-years-old, Keegan Higginbotham thought he found the path to easy cash money – defrauding banks, defrauding unemployment, and stealing diamonds from department stores, while displaying it all for the world to see on his social media and OnlyFans. Months later, his world is now crashing down around him with warrants popping up in jurisdiction after jurisdiction, and new investigations opening daily – and they’re proving to be easy cases when he does things like pawn the stolen diamonds using his own ID.

Nashville was first introduced to the teen most known as ‘PlayBoiKeegan’ in 2020 when he dated fashion model/teen influencer ‘Kailaaa’, who introduced him to her audience of a few hundred-thousand fans across all her platforms, including Instagram (kailaaax_), Youtube (kailaaa), and he even made quite a few appearances in adult scenes on her OnlyFans before creating his own after they broke up.

Once introduced to the limelight, Keegan Higginbotham embraced the instant reactions and found a world where he could not only thrive but further his lifestyle. On his Instagram (playboikeegan/lulkeegan), he would often display the ways he made cash with fraudulent checks/bank deposits, and withdrawing the cash before they cleared. He would then use his social media reach to find other ‘interested’ people with established bank accounts and split the profits, yet leaving them with the repercussions once the fraud settled, leaving him the only one profiting in the end.

In addition to fraudulent bank schemes, Higginbotham would often advertise social security numbers, credit card numbers, and bank account details for sale, which he would retrieve from known vendors on the dark web.

More recently, Keegan would also show screenshots of how he had accounts defrauding TN unemployment and other government services. He would also advertise the sale of these ‘methods’, and charge to teach others how to locate the info, and assist them in how to complete the fraud, and provide them with PDFs and other information, for a fee.

All of his fraud wasn’t just electronic or via online methods. In January, he and others went on a physical crime spree across multiple jurisdictions in Middle Tennessee, as far north as Sumner and Montgomery Counties, and southward to Rutherford.

Smyrna, TN police tell Scoop: Nashville that on January 4th and January 10th, Higginbotham and others, including Ebenezer Bedasso, were identified as the individuals responsible for at least $15,000 worth of diamond thefts from a Kohl’s department store on two days. Higginbotham was “clearly identified” via surveillance video, and a vehicle registered to him was used as the getaway car in the heists. In one of the incidents, a pair of diamond earrings worth $5,000 was stolen from the retailer and then pawned a week later by Higginbotham at Kwik Kash Pawn using his own photo identification.

A week after the Smyrna heists in January, Higginbotham was located in Wilson County, where he was found to have an outstanding theft warrant in Sumner County and was transported there, where he bonded out and will appear in court in April.

Most recently, on March 1st, 2021, Higginbotham appeared at the Smyrna Police Department lobby to turn himself in on the two outstanding warrants for the felony theft warrants on the diamonds. He was booked, processed, and transferred to the Rutherford County Jail, where he posted a $10,000 bond. Investigators confirm Higginbotham is the subject of multiple other pending investigations across the mid-state.

Scoop: Nashville spoke with Keegan on Saturday via IG Chat and then on an IG live video. Higginbotham stated he didn’t know anything about any of the arrests or other allegations and had no idea about why he was arrested, or why he turned himself into police on felony theft warrants. However, in an earlier conversation on the day he got out of jail, he stated in a chat “aw hell ya ian wanna be on da run”. Once we brought up the allegation of other investigations, Higginbotham abruptly removed us from the live video, then appeared rather stunned and in shock for several minutes before deleting all stories and posts on his social media accounts, and ‘going dark’. The video is below, audio starts several seconds in, after live video, which was using our phone’s microphone until it ended:

This is a developing story, and we will provide more updates as they become available.