The very made-for-Dateline saga that was Sherri Papini's 2016 hoax kidnapping and its aftermath wrapped up with her conviction on federal charges last year, and her sentence of 18 months behind bars. But she has apparently been released into some other form of custody already.

Papini, 41, whose husband filed for divorce from her in April 2022 after she entered her guilty plea, has reportedly been released into "community confinement," as KTVU reports via a statement from the Federal Bureau of Prisons. All we know is that she is in a facility managed by the Residential Reentry Management Office in Sacramento, which oversees facilities in California, Guam, Hawaii, and northern Nevada.

Her federal custody is officially scheduled to end on October 29.

Papini pleaded guilty in a plea deal in March 2022 following a 35-count federal indictment. The extensive charges found her not only faking a kidnapping and costing an enormous sum in federal and state resources for the subsequent searches and manhunt, but also fraudulently collecting $30,000 from the California Victims Compensation Board between 2017 and 2021.

As part of her plea deal, Papini agreed to pay $310,000 in restitution to the board and the Social Security Administration, as well as to the law enforcement agencies that wasted time on her case, including the FBI.

Papini, a mother of two young children, disappeared while out on a jog near Redding, California on the morning of November 2, 2016, dropping her cellphone on the side of a road. She reappeared on Thanksgiving Day, three weeks later, bearing bruises and a brand mark and telling a tale of two Hispanic women who kidnapped her and kept her bound at gunpoint.

What actually happened was Papini, perhaps feeling bored with her situation, hatched a plot with an ex-boyfriend to come pick her up and drive her 600 miles back to his home in Costa Mesa. To the ex-boyfriend, James Reyes, Papini had apparently said she was escaping an abusive marriage to her husband Keith — and federal investigators found that Papini had previously lied to other friends about being abused.

Shortly after Papini's sentencing last fall, video emerged of the August 2020 FBI interrogation in which her house of cards fell apart. With her husband present in the room, Papini could be seen squirming and continuing to lie to investigators to save face, feigning shock when they revealed they had DNA evidence linking her to ex-boyfriend's home.

Before the FBI closed in, in the months after the 2016 story had seemingly resolved itself, with Papini magically released home, local journalists uncovered stories of Papini's checkered past, including police reports called in by family members for some alleged crimes when she was 18.

A family spokesperson at the time railed against those stories, calling them "victim-blaming" and saying, "It is shameful that a media outlet would intentionally exploit Sherri and Keith Papini and their young children's trauma for the sole purpose of clickbait and selling papers."

Papini's story would ultimately make it onto Dateline in April 2022.

A year earlier, ABC News had covered the sadder and much more real tale of Denise Huskins, whose Vallejo abduction case was dismissed as a Gone Girl-esque fake in early 2015 before investigators figured out that she had been abducted and sexually assaulted by a mentally ill man with grandiose delusions about being a gentleman criminal, who had committed several other home invasions around the Bay Area. That man, Matthew Muller, has been sentenced to over 70 years in jail in separate cases.