Bob Hunter ran a Springfield retirement shop called The Summit Group of Missouri. For years, his clients got statements showing their money was right where it should be. On June 11, he pleaded guilty to wire fraud and money laundering. The statements were the crime.
Troy Murray operated under the name Steve Dixon and ran a database of seven million elderly Americans, selling their names by the hundred to lottery scammers in Jamaica. On May 28, a federal judge gave him 121 months.
Samuel Ugberaese was extradited from Nigeria and arrested by the FBI this month on charges tied to a romance scam network that operated from 2014 to 2018. The indictment is the record. The widow at the kitchen table is the cost.
A Coral Springs man is accused of using rideshare drivers as unwitting cash couriers in a senior scam that turned a 77-year-old's bank account into an envelope on a stranger's passenger seat. The driver thought it was a package pickup. The woman thought she was helping the FBI.
Four men were arrested in India last week over a romance scam police say drained one victim of roughly $81,500. The pitch was love. The closer was a customs officer who did not exist.
Federal prosecutors in Ohio unsealed an indictment this week against two Ghanaian brothers and a Virginia woman accused of running a romance fraud ring that fed on lonely Americans for nearly two years. The script is older than the internet. The pipes are new.