Exposed: The big fraud of the Rainbow Youth Project founder
- by Robin Dorner
Editor in Chief
Phony stories, fake calls, fake statistics, and actors playing roles as youth, helped by the Rainbow Youth Project USA (RYPU). All after a man calling himself Lance Preston came to Oklahoma City as head of RYPU. But there were allegedly many aliases, and now a team of volunteers is out to expose the truth.
Preston claimed to have graduated from the University of Michigan and Tulane Law School, and to have 28 years of legal experience. However, a record search of both Universities shows no record of his having completed any degree.
These RYPU volunteers said they “didn’t have a life” due to the constant texts, emails, and calls from the organization’s director, Preston. “There was always some drama going on.”
And they collectively say it was all a fraud; a front to gain access to information and collect money from unknowing donors wanting to help youth. All from a man with outstanding warrants in multiple states.
They all began to realize the truth about eight months ago. They say they ended up being stalked, lied to, embezzled from, and more.
The Gayly found the financials from Candid (formerly Guidestar), the world’s largest online database of U.S. nonprofit organizations, for RYPU’s fiscal year 2024. Total assets listed were $23,006, total revenue $371,505, total expenses $358,620, and total giving $290,110. Preston alleges in this legal tax document that the organization gave $290,110 to help youth in crisis, but who exactly was helped? The 2025 data is not online at this time.
“It’s very personal,” said Teegan Mauter, who volunteered at RYPU as a Youth Outreach Advocate since 2024. “I feel like he mind fucked me for four years or more. It’s more than just him stealing money from people. He controlled every bit of our lives. It was very intense, and it basically shut our lives down for all that time.”
Chris Sederburg, who served as a volunteer for RYPU as an Event Coordinator since 2022, said, “He is like a wrecking ball. He has been doing this for a long time, and he is not going to stop. What hurt the most is that we thought we were friends, and to be betrayed like that.”
“I was quieter in the beginning, for the safety of my child,” said Debby Sadok, who served RYPU as an Outreach Coordinator since 2024. “I realized I needed to be more vocal after he got a big grant, because he was taking money from organizations that really needed it.”
The three key volunteers collectively agreed that the lies and manipulation were never-ending! Preston played off their feelings and was very good with his words. Very smooth. He knew exactly how and what to say to get anything he wanted. From lying about “the board” to donations… it was constant.
“He outed me to my work and publicized all our dead names,” Mauter said.
The emotional damage is deep for these key volunteers, but the alleged fraud affects the entire community.
The group said, according to their tracking, that Preston was once working for a safety company as a plant manager. Then he set up an IT firm and a law firm, contracted with his own companies, and pocketed millions of dollars from the safety company for his own gain. That was in the 90s.
As for RYPU, “We understand that other people are involved in this, and we want that to stop,” said Sadok. “Many still don’t know about it, and they need to know. It’s hard to talk about, because we keep remembering new things. These things hurt—all different kinds of emotions. I feel like I am going through the stages of grief. There is an emptiness there.”
The group believes Preston is still watching their every move, but with them, he has “lost all of his power.”
“When he first realized I was coming after him, he came after me,” Sederburg said. “I put the second camera up at my house. He was already following us. We were scared of what he was capable of. We thought he was more powerful than he is. He is running from the law, so we worry less about him doing much now.”
“We are very much a unit,” said Sadok. “It has bonded us in ways I wish it hadn’t, but we are here today. We still talk every day, and it’s a good, healthy conversation.”
The volunteers believe Preston skipped town the day a video [online] they did on January 21, outing the fake names Preston used, was released, and a walk-through of the Indiana office was shown (via Google). Apparently, Preston had rented a virtual office with an address and a place to get mail. No board was there, no crisis team, nothing.
The following information from Teegan Mauter, Chris Sederburg and Debby Sadok is from a Facebook page they created on March 1 called “The truth about Rainbow Youth Project,” which you can find at www.facebook.com/groups/26181513031480354.
Teegan Mauter said, “I had just begun my journey in December 2021. It was the beginning of 2022 when I met Chris [Sederburg] through the incident he was going through at work. I was new to social media and was new to sharing my journey. It was also during that time [that] I was approached to have a meeting with ‘Lance.’”
Mauter said at the time he had no idea who “Lance” was and knew very little about the organization he founded, Rainbow Youth Project USA.
“He had me, Chris, and another trans person on the phone, and we discussed how we felt about being a part of something that, at the time, seemed perfect. I was going to have the opportunity to be the support that I desperately needed when I was growing up. I was going to be able to support, stand with, and be a voice for all of our youth, especially our trans youth.
“He spoke about starting a group that would later be known as TAC- Transgender Action Committee. Fast forward to August 2022, when that plan was put into motion. At that time, only Chris and I were on this Committee. I was given the opportunity to attend events, fundraise, and advocate for our youth. He would call me and had so many incredible ideas and so many promises of what would come and how many youth we would reach.”
Mauter said at that time he showed up wherever and whenever he was needed, in Florida, Virginia, and OKC; and at that time, it felt like he was really making a difference. That carried on for over two years.
“In April of 2025, I decided to move to OKC. I had just lost my mom, which brought my relationship with ‘Lance’ even closer. He would talk to me all day, every single day, for hours on end, telling me how much I was needed in OKC, how I needed to move, and how much my help was needed. So I packed up and moved.”
Once Mauter got to OKC, he would spend every single day with Preston.
“He would always call, and there was always a reason I needed to come meet him, yet every time I showed up, it was never doing anything he claimed we needed to do,” Mauter said. “When I first moved, I had two jobs, one full-time and one part-time. For my part-time job, I rarely got to go because I was always calling out, made to feel like I was needed at the office, for a group, for a meeting, or a call; there was always a reason.
But this youth said they never did anything they set out to do when he was called into the office. Instead, they sat at the office, talked, and looked at each other day after day.
“If I did have to work, I was told my heart wasn’t in it or made to feel like I wasn’t doing enough,” Mauter explained. “I was always told ‘I had too much going on,’ when the reality was RYPU was all I had going on! And, if I weren’t there to be at his beck and call, or dare I miss a phone call, I would be belittled or made to feel horrible. It was always those calls I missed that he needed me at the hospital, or a child requested to speak with me, yet never when I answered were those requests needed.
“I offered to go to funerals, yet those funerals never came. I would go with ‘Lance’ to buy $18,000 watches, new cars, shoes, etc., then have to deal with his attitude about fundraising. Slowly, as time went by, I started trying to distance myself, because I knew something was off. He always kept the other volunteers and me apart.
“There was one time I went to help a friend of mine, of course, I couldn’t tell ‘Lance,’ or he would have an ‘emergency’ that would pull me away. He always knew the minute I left the house, and this time was no different. When he realized where [I was] and who I was with, he went crazy on me, belittled me, and spoke horribly to me.
Mauter said no one would have believed the way he was being treated, but someone else actually heard the conversation.
By this point, Mauter said he was “miserable” tolerating this kind of treatment.
“It had now gotten to where I was miserable, I hated myself, everyone could see it, yet he [Lance] kept on and on and on. When I was finally getting ready to quit, I knew he sensed it; he knew something was up with me. He would go to my job and send me pics of the sign outside my job, he followed me to people’s houses, he called and outted me to my job, and told me if I dared speak a word to another fellow volunteer about events that were going on, they would ‘take me down.’”
Mauter said at this point, the entire team was onto the fact that something was “just not right.” But they knew without proof that they had to keep their mouths shut. “Lance” had proven time and time again that he most definitely was petty, and he had no problem smearing someone’s name and reputation.
“So we dug, we dug and dug and dug and then bam, there it was! ‘Lance Preston’ was, in fact, someone named Scotty Howard.”
They realized this “Scotty Howard” was impersonating every board member, every voice, every email; it was all him.
“It was game on after that,” exclaimed Mauter. “Now it is my personal mission to make sure this never happens to anyone else. He preys on those whom he feels are weak and who he feels have nobody in their corner to stand up for them. For months, more and more information was being uncovered. There is so much more I could say, and this is the shortest version of my introduction to ‘Lance.’ It goes deeper than I can explain in this introduction, and the mental and emotional abuse was intense. Now, my only mission is to right this wrong.”
Chris Sederburg explains his introduction to “Lance Preston,” how they met and the relationship.
“I was being harassed pretty severely at my job back towards the beginning of 2022,” Sederburg said he was on social media, feeling desperate, searching for legal help. He had heard of ‘Lance,’ who had sent Sederburg a message, and it went from there.
“Since their entire board, including him, was made up of ‘attorneys,’ they took on the case and got a settlement of $10,000 from it, along with a direct donation to them of $2,500.”
Sederburg said ‘Lance’ and the other attorneys claimed the settlement was paid to the main attorney who was working on it. That attorney claimed to have deposited it into Sederburg’s Cash App, and allegedly, Cash App kept it. This attorney was supposed to fight Cash App for the money when she suddenly found out she had breast cancer and, pretty quickly, ended up in hospice and passed.
“Needless to say, it’s a long, drawn-out story, and I never received any funds,” Sederburg said, but that is how he initially got involved with RYPU.
“From the beginning, ‘Lance’ and I hit it off, and the calls were long and often,” Sederburg explained. “Pretty much from the beginning of the Rainbow Youth Project, we were friends, and he brought me in to be part of something that mattered, something that our youth needed.”
From there, the Trans Action Committee at RYPU was formed.
“He would bounce ideas off me all day long! I attended events and was at their beck and call, basically any free time I got away from work. Eventually, I moved to OKC to help open a local office, because Oklahoma was rising above every other state when it came to crisis calls after the death of Nex Benedict.”
At least, it was rising in Oklahoma according to “Lance.”
“Once we got the office going, there was never anything to do there,” Sederburg said. “We were promised training throughout the years, and nothing ever came. Every time we went to the office, we’d sit and just talk. We did get a trans closet going that eventually got shut down.
“We were never able to see anyone at the hospital, never able to go to memorials, nothing. We’d attend events, and because we didn’t have time to spare when we did get time off work, we would just sit in the office and stare at the wall for no reason.”
They were told RYPU only wanted to do public events.
“There was constantly a reason, a tragedy, an urgency for fundraising pushed by these traumatic stories of unaliving. There was one time I went out of town to visit a friend, and, of course, a crisis happened while I was away because I wasn’t available to him,” Sederburg continued. “Anytime someone wasn’t available to him, he’d find a way to make sure they became available.”
The team began to overlook some of the ways “Lance” was because they thought that was part of who he was, and they still loved him. After all, he was doing so much for so many who needed help.
“‘Lance’ had a way; he was a talker, and he could make anything, no matter how unbelievable, sound believable! His extravagant stories about his life, which we were told daily, his experiences…of course, everyone was drawn in. His ideas were filled with greatness, just very often not followed through on.”
Sederburg said they were constantly hanging onto empty promises.
“When we got towards the downfall, it got to a point where I knew if I even tried to get out, it would be a problem. It all just became too much.”
Sederburg finally quit, but wanted to address the settlement he never received one last time to try to get what was rightfully his.
“That ended in him lying and just doing very strange things, so I started digging deeper into him. We already had an idea that something was way off before I quit. It got to the point where I couldn’t sit in one more meeting with another organization and be his yes man, nodding at his stories as if I were there to witness what he was saying was true, because I no longer believed him.
“I knew when he was acting very strangely after I brought up the settlement again and basically found out he wasn’t the friend I thought he was. Either something was definitely wrong here, and I was digging a constant rabbit hole till I finally found his real name. ‘Scotty.’ After that, all bets were off. The things we have uncovered since then sound straight out of an intense TV show about greed and fraud.”
Debby Sadok said she met “Lance” in February of 2024, shortly after the death of Nex Benedict.
“Right off the bat, I was captivated by his stories and victories with his organization, and I knew I wanted to be part of it to help queer youth. ‘Be the person you wish you had growing up’ is what I always told myself.
She began volunteering with the organization and met Chris Sederburg and Teegan Nicholas Mauter, all part of the Transcend group, formally known as the Trans Action Committee.
“Our deep friendship and working relationship with ‘Lance’ involved dozens of phone calls a day, endless text messages, horrific stories of bomb threats, FBI security updates, heart-wrenching stories of suicides, self-harm and bullying by children, a heroic crisis team, a fearless board and one mission: to save our youth.
“Needless to say, as of one month ago, we all came to find out that all of this was a fantasy, a scam, and a grift created in the mind of a con man named ‘Scott Howard.’
“So many of us have fallen victim to ‘Scott Howard/Lance Preston’ on so many levels, whether emotionally or financially,” said Debby Sadok. “We hope to bring justice to all of you and to the hundreds of people he has taken advantage of over the last 30-plus years. No matter how many times he is charged, convicted, and incarcerated, he continues to walk down a path of destruction and preys on the vulnerable and kind-hearted.”
“Lance” has deleted the RYPU TikTok and Instagram accounts, wiping away any physical evidence of the Oklahoma outreach program and its postings.
“Unfortunately for him, Google does not forget, and screenshots last forever, and [there are] the countless interviews and videos that continue to circulate on the internet,” Sadok said. “He has also revamped the website, which can only mean one thing: he is still using Rainbow Youth Project as a way to keep his cash flow going.”
The group said that every bit of information about Oklahoma has been erased from the RPYU website, including information about the volunteers and the office address.
“He has also reworded things, removing ‘National’ nonprofit and instead of offering free mental health services, he writes, ‘low cost with third party providers.’ He is sharpening his game, and we must stay vigilant, especially since he just received a grant from another organization [National Black Justice Coalition Benevolence Group].
“He must be held accountable,” Sadok added.
“During my time as a volunteer with RYPU, I had spoken to only one board member (RYPU “board” listed below) on the phone, Megan Denan,” Sadok continues. “On many occasions, I was supposed to meet her while she was in town, but something always came up.”
Sadok said Denan claimed to have met a couple of people in the community, but no one in the OKC queer community has confirmed that any such meeting occurred. Denan was listed on the RYPU website as the Vice President/Treasurer.
“No one has ever met her. As for the other board members, there were always emails going back and forth, but no phone calls and no photos provided.”
Sadok also said that upon finding a website archive, they could see all edited versions of the official Rainbow Youth Project website. In June 2022, before the organization was legally established, pictures and bios were provided for each board member.
“Due to unwilling participants in this situation, I will not be posting names or social media handles. All of this is public information and can be found with free facial recognition websites.”
Listed as board members are S. L. Howard, President (picture provided was found on a Swedish photography/real estate website).
S L Howard is the registered name for the organization. The name that was given was Steven. In reality, S L Howard is Scott Lance Howard or as we know him, Lance Preston. His book [Preston wrote a book about the first year of RYPU] says Lance and Steven met in college. There is no record of him on either school’s public alumni list.
Lance Preston - Founder/Executive Director (picture provided was of himself).
Lance Preston is an alias and holds no legal capacity. Upon research and based on the details in his book, available for purchase on Amazon, he is not a registered attorney. Claims that he graduated from the University of Michigan and Tulane Law School. There is no alum record of him using either of his names.
Megan Denan - Vice President/Treasurer (picture was found from a still shot belonging to a content creator on TikTok).
Megan’s name has been used on tax documents and in communication with many people over the years. We believe (not proven) that Lance had been using a voice changer on the phone to mimic a very thick New York accent. Megan Denan is also the name of his niece, who has just recently reached legal age. Megan is said to have graduated from the University of Texas; however, there is no alumni record of her attendance. Her background stories have also changed - she worked for the ACLU, worked at an international law firm, and owned her own law firm providing legal assistance for high-profile divorces. It has also been said by Lance and Megan that they worked together in the courtroom for many years. Lance has never been an attorney, and neither has Megan.
Stephen Nutile – Secretary (image found on a website for a professional dating expert in New York City).
All information regarding Stephen has also been fabricated.
Michael Garret - Digital Media (picture from a still shot by a TikTok content creator).
Michael was said to be in charge of all Social Media accounts, including setting up media releases, monitoring and setting up emails and so on. On his bio, it stated that he has not yet graduated from Southern New Hampshire University. There is no record of him on the alumni list. It was also said that he was one of the campaign leaders for Obama, Biden, and then Kamala.
The remaining board member, Rebecca, has not yet had her identity confirmed, but her photo matches an Asian media group.
There have been many other people named as part of this organization, all with conflicting back stories and no solid proof of their existence. By law, if no board exists, the organization has no legal grounds for existence.
(The above board information was found on “The truth about Rainbow Youth Project” FB page).
“Building that Facebook group was a big accomplishment,” said Sederburg. “We were worried that kids were going to call that number in crisis and not get the help he needed. When we went live with the page, he took all that down, and we were glad for that.”
In their interview with The Gayly, the group said they questioned the validity of the testimonial videos, success stories, and out-of-state volunteers. A number of these people have been identified on a single website. It is a website called Backstage where you can hire actors, and that is where these videos came from. We have confirmed facial and voice recognition.
“This has got to be one of the hardest finds for us, as it is what legitimized so much of the organization in our eyes. How could something not be real if there are real-life stories out there and hearing them directly from their mouths?” the group asked.
But they were all actors; paid actors. All the youth who claimed to have been assisted by RYPU were all paid to do so.
The volunteers interviewed by The Gayly said they had some conversations at times with the board.
“I actually had a fairly close relationship with ‘Megan’,” said Sadok. “We spoke or texted weekly. Sadok believes Preston was the person she was actually talking to. “He used a call changer when I spoke to ‘her,’ and it was always difficult to hear her.”
Sederburg said he spoke to Megan, Kristen, Andrea, Tori, and they were always all in the same dialect and tone! “That was one of the red flags. ‘Lance’ would always know the conversation and what was spoken.”
These are the names/aliases allegedly used by the man who the Oklahoma City and surrounding communities know as Lance Preston are Scotty Lance Howard, SL Howard, Scotty L. Howard, Scotty Lane Howard, Scotty Howard, Lance Peterson, Lance Howardsmith, Joseph M. Mcintire, Ernest Boyd, CW Kennedy, Lance Howard, Lance S. Howard, Lance L. Howard, S. Lance Howard, Scott Howard, Scott Howard Smith, Scott Howardsmith, Scott Howard-Smith, Scott L. Howard, Scott L. Howardsmith, Scott L. Howard-Smith, Scott Lance Howard, Scott Lance Howard Smith, Scott Lance Howardsmith, Scott Lance Smith, Scotty L. Howardsmith, Scotty Lance Howard, Scotty Lance Howard Smith, Scotty Lance Howard-Smith, Smith Scott Howard, and Smith Scotty Lance Howard.
The information here is not made up. All of these names/aliases were pulled from sites where “Lance Preston” was found to have warrants, and all were related to the search. The volunteers interviewed by The Gayly say there are many more names the alleged imposter has used.
If you do a Google search of a news Article from New York arrest in 1992 titled, “Con artist pulled scams coast-to-coast,” by Andrew Smith, you will find an interesting article about how a “Scott Lance Howard” was using the credit information for Michael J. Fox and Dolly Parton, claiming to be a relative. They hired a private investigator to keep tabs on him.
“The things we have uncovered since then sound straight out of an intense TV show about greed and fraud,” Sadok said.
The Gayly called the number we have for Lance Preston, but no one answered, and we were unable to leave a message.
The Gayly online. 4/1/26 @ 6:43 p.m. CST.