The first time he asked for money, a small alarm went off inside me. For two years we had never fought, never even argued. He was a widower, just like I was a widow, and that shared grief made it easy to talk to him. I thought online dating would be safe.
My mother had friends who met wonderful men that way, so I dipped my toe into a faith-based dating website, thinking someone there might share the same values I did. When he contacted me, I thought it was kind of neat. We chatted for hours, and the excitement brought back those teenage feelings I thought I’d never feel again. He sent me songs, I sent him songs.
He wrote poems. We had long spiritual discussions. It was exhilarating, and I kept a record of all of it. I have 4,000 pages of journal chronicling our conversations.
I cut and pasted every message into my online journal and even printed five books, thinking this would be family history one day. We had a lot of ups and downs, but there was so much joy. He would tell me he loved me, that he adored me, that he wanted to be with me, that we were going to live our lives together. He couldn’t wait for his son to meet me.
He made plans for us. And I, like so many lonely people, was so grateful for that attention and that dream of sharing my life with someone again that I fell for it completely. The first ask for money came as a request for power of attorney money, to be sent through Western Union. As a former banker, I had a bad feeling about Western Union.
I’d never used it. But he insisted, and he gave me the name of the person to send it to. I went to the grocery store to make the transfer, and the clerk questioned me a little. “Do you know this guy?
Do you know where it’s going? ” Of course I knew him. He was my friend, and I was willing to do this as a loan because he always assured me I’d be paid back with interest, quickly. He said it was to help us get together.
I didn’t have a lot of money sitting in the bank. I had retirement accounts. But I felt like he was family, and if I needed to find the money, I would find it. And so it went, little by little, over two years.
I sold investments I had. I sold coins I had. I pawned rings. I sold jewelry.
The total amount ended up being $1,080,762. The story he told me was that he was a soldier serving overseas. He was out with his unit and they found a box of gold. They were going to get it back to the states and split it.
The gold in the box was worth $12 million. I couldn’t tell anybody about it, he said. It was a big secret. If I told, we could get in trouble.
We need money to pay the lawyers, to pay the excise taxes, to pay for the gold to get back. And he always promised that when he got his share, we would spend our lives together. He’d pay me back, and we’d use that money to finance our lives. Then the love interest introduced a third party.
A lawyer, or a diplomat, who was assigned to help get the gold into the country. It was a brilliant scheme, because it freed the “boyfriend” from having to pester me for money. Instead of him asking where the $20,000 was, someone posing as a diplomat would email me. Hello, Miss Victim.
We need that $20,000. You need to wire money into Reuben Sarpong’s account. Oh, your $20,000 was perfect. That pays for the transportation, but it doesn’t pay for the excise taxes.
Oh no, we ran into another snag. Now we need a lawyer. Please send another $15,000. Tariffs, duties, transportation fees, shipping fees.
They would create any reason, any narrative, any excuse to solicit more money. The gold bars were both a promise of the love and the good life to come, and an incentive to ask for more money. We could build a house on a lake. We could retire and walk our dogs.
Our grandkids would come visit us. And while the diplomats and lawyers were conning me out of my savings, my love interest was still wooing me, assuring me everything was okay, that we were still going to be together and live this great life. This went on for years. And I know now I wasn’t the only one.
The FBI started investigating because one victim in New Jersey reported it. They followed the money and found that the funds were coming into accounts owned by a man named Reuben Sarpong. Sarpong grew up in Ghana and came to this country when he was about 18. He was a legal permanent resident living in Millville, New Jersey, a small town surrounded by farmland.
He had two sets of twins with two different women. He didn’t have a visible job, but he didn’t need one. He was enjoying food stamps and social programs as though he was poor, while in reality he was making millions off romance scams. The conspirators in Ghana were the ones having these daily interactions with the victims, making those connections, wooing them.
They were the heads of the fraud. Sarpong was the person who funneled the money. He had thirteen bank accounts in his name. He borrowed the identities of relatives and people he knew to launder the money.
He collected more than half of what the group took in. He kept a fair bit for himself, and he wired the rest to Ghana, to China, to Turkey, to shell companies where the money would disappear. He bought property in Ghana. He posted pictures on social media of himself holding big stacks of cash, referring to it as “bloody money,” and saying, “God’s been good to me.
”
The ring ultimately snared about 88 known victims. But almost always the expectation is that there are more who haven’t come forward. These are older, lonely people. You don’t know how many took this to the grave.
There was one woman who gave about $90,000. She asked how she could be sure she was talking to a soldier, so they sent her an ID. At one point she asked why she was sending money to South Jersey if he was in Syria, and they made up excuses. She tried to find out what was going on.
She went to the airport in Washington D. C. to greet the man who was going to be carrying her gold bars. He never showed up.
The next day she was found dead of a suicide. Another woman went to the airport to get the box of gold bars, realized it wasn’t coming, and went home and overdosed on pills. Her son found her. He testified at Sarpong’s sentencing.
He said his mother was a choir director, a musician, she played the organ, she was very active in her community. But whenever he thinks about her, he still sees that image of her lying on her bed. As the stories piled up, investigators saw trends. All roads pointed back to Sarpong.
They followed the money from victims in New Jersey, California, Florida, Texas, Switzerland, Guam, Canada, Italy. Dentists, accountants, truck drivers, people from all walks of life. Every stone they turned over revealed another dozen victims. Some didn’t believe they were victims.
Some had been victims for years. Some still questioned whether the person they were conversing with even existed. Sarpong was arrested in September 2019. At first he denied everything.
He said any money he sent to Africa was for a friend’s business. Investigators had a reverse proffer session where they showed his attorney the evidence against him. They had his guidebook for conversing on the internet—hundreds of pre-written paragraphs on love, family, children, sports, nature, spirituality. It was like they raided the Hallmark shop.
Eventually, with overwhelming evidence against him, he agreed to a plea bargain. He pleaded guilty to conspiring to commit wire fraud, conspiring to commit money laundering, and tax evasion. He was convicted on all counts. The judge found he lacked remorse.
He was completely and utterly unremorseful. He called what he did a “mistake. ” One of the victims seized on that word. This wasn’t a mistake.
It was a deliberate campaign to steal money from innocent people and send it abroad. The judge gave him a more severe sentence than the plea agreement suggested. He was sentenced to 14 years for the wire fraud and money laundering conspiracies, and the max of 5 years for tax evasion, all to run concurrently. Over $3 million in restitution was ordered.
His appeal was denied. He’s coming out in 2030, and then he will be deported back to Ghana. I have very little hope he will change. The victims blame themselves.
They say, “How could I be so gullible? I was so stupid. I was taken in. I knew better.
” Some lost hundreds of thousands of dollars, their entire retirement, their life savings, their 401ks were wiped out completely, and now they’re forced to live on social security. And they’re ashamed. Somebody in 2016 lost all her money and didn’t say anything. Then more people lost their money and didn’t say anything.
2017, 2018, the money just kept disappearing. The fact that these men ran this scam for almost three years shows a lot of people weren’t reporting it because they were too embarrassed. I had to go to my kids and tell them there’s no inheritance because I was stupid. I owe, and the money’s not there because I fell in love with a stranger.
Over two years, I gave a million dollars away to a man I never saw in person. I would never give a million dollars to a man sitting on the ground as I walked past him in Philadelphia. But over two years, I gave a million dollars away to someone I never met face to face. Any woman who has been involved in a military scam like this is going to have a distrust for that uniform.
They might even have a distrust for law enforcement, because when you go to report it and get laughed at, you begin to distrust anybody wearing a uniform. You don’t know who to trust because you don’t know if they’re going to be able to help you or not. It really adds a tragic dimension to the phrase, “Love hurts. ”
The FBI saw more than 19,000 romance fraud complaints representing losses of about $740 million.
Last year, reported losses were $12. 5 billion, and that number is probably up to 40 times underreported. This is big business. The same criminal organizations that do romance scams also do sextortion scams, malware scams, business email compromise.
It’s all just one of their revenue streams. Until we dry up their food supply, the finances dry up, they’re not going away. I look back at the pictures I saw of the dog and the son and the sister and the Christmas trees. They created a profile.
They created a family. It was all fiction. But it felt so real, and that’s the worst part. The victims get caught up in this, and they feel like it’s a real relationship.
And to them, it is very real.
:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc():focal(705x379:707x381):format(webp)/dominic-russo-mackenzie-shirilla-the-crash-051226-2c60a800cfbf4b4c9df0e98e939a4a5e.jpg)
