Romance Scam Kingpin Brought to Justice

By AARP   Published April 04, 2025

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When Debbie's mother passes away suddenly, she is not prepared for what she finds. While sorting through financial records and paperwork, she discovers correspondence with the US Postal

Inspection Service and letters to a victim's advocate. Debbie learns that her mother was hiding the painful secret that she was the victim of a romance scam that had stolen over $400,000

from her. But a US Postal Inspector is putting together the pieces to catch the ringleader of the elaborate, wide-ranging romance scam empire that is stealing millions of dollars from dozens

of victims. Will Debbie get justice for her mom?

(MUSIC INTRO)

[00:00:01] Bob: This week on The Perfect Scam.

[00:00:03] Cory McManus: He would say, "What, what high school did you go to? How many kids went there? Who was your best friend there? Oh, what was the name of your mascot? What was it,

what sports did you play?" Those are the, you know, the questions that you see when you log into Bank of America or whoever you bank with. They all, you know a series of challenge questions.

He would eventually get around to asking her those questions. So I, my only guess from this investigation that he was trying to engineer his way into her bank accounts through these

conversations.

(MUSIC SEGUE)

[00:00:35] Bob: Welcome back to The Perfect Scam. I'm your host, Bob Sullivan.

(MUSIC SEGUE)

[00:00:40] Bob: Romance scam stories are among the most painful. Victims not only deal with financial fallout, they usually end up with a broken heart too. Often the criminals simply

vaporize when the crime is finally over slipping back into whatever dark corner of the internet they came from. But once in a while, justice hunts them down in that dark place. But today's

story begins in a different kind of dark place, in an empty home in North Carolina where Debbie Crisp's mom, Donna, has died just a few days earlier, probably a heart attack Debbie was told.

It's all still so raw she can't bear to begin the task of picking through Mom's affairs, so Debbie's daughter, Sarah steps in and while sorting through financial records and paperwork, she

makes a shocking discovery. Debbie's mom had a painful secret.

[00:01:37] Debbi Crisp: My daughter and my husband went over to her house. I just physically couldn't go back over there, um, because she died at home by herself, and I just couldn't go. It

just devastated me to go over there. And um, they went to look for her will, so we could make sure we had everything done and what was going to be done. And looking through a drawer they

found an envelope, and on that envelope, it said, "Loans to my children" or something like that. And then as Sarah opened it up, my daughter, it showed withdrawals from wherever and then it

showed taking it to another bank and showing with a handwritten note of what the routing number was, what the account number was, what name it was supposed to be going to and her doing that.

You know so she uh, she was very methodical about it.

[00:02:34] Bob: Loans to my children? Bank accounts? Routing numbers? And that's not all. The more Sarah looks through the papers, the more she finds. There's evidence Donna had taken out

title loans on a car she purchased. None of it makes any sense until Sarah finds the letters.

[00:02:52] Debbi Crisp: They kept looking, and then they found the letters from Tara, the victim advocate, saying that we know you've been involved in this. This is what's going on. That's

when Sarah picked it together and came home. She brought all the letters home that she had. She came home, she was like, you know, "I know you don't want to hear this, but this is what's

happened."

[00:03:17] Bob: You don't want to hear this, but this is what happened. What did Tara's letters reveal? We'll get to that in a moment, but first, I want you to get to know Debbi and her mom

just a little bit to understand why the secret revealed in Tara's letters is so painful for both of them.

[00:03:35] Debbi Crisp: Oh gosh. My mom was a fabulous person. My mom was a strong mighty, little force of a lady. Um, she was stood um, actually about a month, two months before she passed

away, she had gone for a bone density scan and she told them, they said, "Oh, well you're 4'11½" and she said, "Can't you just give me the half inch so I'm 5 foot tall? Please." You know she

was a; she was a fireball. She grew up in a little town called Marco, Indiana. And Marco, Indiana, is literally in the middle of nowhere. It is true Indiana basketball, you know they uh,

French Lick where Larry Bird grew up is about 30 minutes from where she is.

[00:04:19] Bob: Donna's family moved to North Carolina when she was in high school, and not too long after that she had the good fortune to end up in a ditch.

[00:04:28] Debbi Crisp: They met, my mom and dad met the winter of 1962. My dad came and fished her and her daddy out of a ditch from a snowstorm, and that was in January and they were

married in July.

[00:04:40] Bob: So you're, your dad rescued them basically, right?

[00:04:42] Debbi Crisp: Yep, potentially, yeah, my dad had, my dad had just been out of the Navy about 8 months, and um, so yeah, so he pulled them out of the snow and sort of rescued them.

[00:04:53] Bob: And that led to a 50-year plus marriage, and Mom's career in the neighborhood school.

[00:04:59] Debbi Crisp: She worked in the school system for 30 years and every kid was her did. I can remember we had kids coming home all the time with her. She's like, oh well, you know

Johnny didn't have anywhere to go for, you know, the weekend, so we just decided to bring him home. I'm like, well okay.

[00:05:13] Bob: Ah.

[00:05:13] Debbi Crisp: Welcome Johnny to the house.

[00:05:14] Bob: What did she do in the school system?

[00:05:16] Debbi Crisp: Um, she actually was in, when she first started, she was a teacher assistant in the elementary ages, and once I graduated high school, she moved into the high school

level. And so she'd done like all of the data stuff. She was the person who did um, report cards and you know all the testings and all that kind of stuff, all the testing data. So uh, but

she did...

[00:05:38] Bob: So really all the kids were her kids, yeah.

[00:05:40] Debbi Crisp: They all were her kids and I still get, from people, from young, younger people than me that I have, I don't know these people. They were her kids, you know, and

they'll send me messages and say, "I just don't, I don't think you know how much your mom really shaped my life, and how much your mom really cared for me." And my mom was the cheerleading

coach at the high school, and she'd been I think for 14 or 15 years, and you know there's girls that'll say, you know, "You just, your mom saved my life. Your mom really talked me off the

ledge," you know or whatever, and you know and I'm thinking, you know, God's had her here for a reason. And um, I'm thankful for that every day, you know I'm thankful she was mine. And so,

uh, but I do, I thank God for her every single day and for my dad and the life that they had for us. You know they were, they were wonderful people. And so I miss them every day.

[00:06:31] Bob: The couple were getting ready to celebrate their 54th wedding anniversary back in 2017 when Dad came down with what they first thought was a bad sinus infection, and after a

set of fast-moving medical complications, 6 weeks later, Dad was gone.

[00:06:47] Debbi Crisp: It was extremely hard on my mom because they did everything together. You know they didn't, after they both retired, they didn't really have separate lives per se.

They had their life. They went to the grocery store together, they done everything together. So that was very touch and she got very lonely even though she came to our house four days a

week. We ate out three days a week. We tried to keep her, you know, as involved in doing things as we could. But I guess her loneliness got the best of her. But we didn't know.

[00:07:25] Bob: They didn't know that after a couple of very lonely years, Donna went online looking for a new connection, maybe more, and that's how Donna's name and bank account

information ended up on Cory McManus' desk. Cory is an investigator with the US Postal Inspection Service in Rhode Island. He had just begun investigating the theft of $1.4 million from a

retired psychologist.

[00:07:52] Cory McManus: Yeah, in the, in the fall of 2018, a prominent estate attorney that I was familiar with reached out. He actually went to the attorney general's office, the Division

of Elder Affairs and advised them that there was a, one of his clients was possibly involved in some type of scam. He was reviewing her bank documents and going over her records as part of

her estate planning and noticed a lot of unusual transactions being made on her bank account. So the, the Division of Elder Affairs contacted me and we start our investigation from there.

The attorney that we met with provided her bank records at his client's request, and when we started looking through it, we noticed that there were multiple high dollar checks that were

being cashed at various bank accounts, mostly in the Houston, the Atlanta area to the, the sum of about $1.4 million.

[00:08:39] Bob: So Cory decides to interview this victim, a recent widow, and brings along a victim advocate with him.

[00:08:48] Cory McManus: So myself and Tara Monez from the US Attorney's Office met with her down in southern Rhode Island and she told us this very elaborate story about how she met a

military general, his name was Matthew Weir, who was stationed in Afghanistan, through an online game called Words with Friends. And after weeks um of talking to him through email and text

and through Words with Friends, that they have a, basically a private chat you can have one-on-one conversations with somebody that you're playing a game against, the general asked if he

could mail her his belongings, which the victim reluctantly agreed to at first. Um, and then shortly after the general told her that he'd mail his belongings to her, she started getting

calls from the US Customs Officials in Atlanta, Georgia, saying that the gen--, the general didn't declare enough value on his belongings and that they were being held until they received

more money from her. At first, she was reluctant to send money, but she spoke to the general, she had a relationship with the general. This went on for weeks before he actually asked her for

money, so she trusted the general and she decided to send money. So she sent, at first a few, several thousand dollars, and she waited and the general's belongings never got released, and

she received more phone calls. And the story just got more and more elaborate, and why they needed more and more money. And within a period of about 16 to 18 months, she sent out, I believe

it was over 30 checks totaling that $1.4 million.

[00:10:07] Bob: Okay, so you interviewed her and her attorney, and at that point I know many of these stories just kind of stop cold right there, but, but this one does not. So what happens

after that?

[00:10:16] Cory McManus: We get subpoena access to subpoena bank records and phone records and, and email accounts and everything else that we generated through our investigation so far. The

victim herself allowed us to take her phone and forensically extract the information, the text conversations so we would go through thousands and thousands of conversations between her and

this general, or scammer if you want to call him, and we would extract, you know, we're not looking for the intimate conversations that these two are having. We're looking for bank account

information and mailing addresses; anything that we can help, that would help us identify who these people are and who's involved in this type of scam.

[00:10:54] Bob: Um, but it must be really painful and sad to go through text messages like that, right?

[00:10:59] Cory McManus: It is, yes. But at the same time it does provide us a lot of information. You know the, the funny thing, Bob, about this was when we spoke to her initially, you know

she would say, we'd say what, you know what attracted you to this general? And she said, you know he, he spoke about things and he asked me questions and we talked about things that I; I

haven't talked about in years, about my high school years and growing up. And just a lot of random stuff. And then when I got into her text messages and I saw those conversations, the

questions you were ask--, he was asking were her challenge questions to her bank accounts. That's what he was eventually getting down to. He would say...

[00:11:34] Bob: Oh wow.

[00:11:34] Cory McManus: Yeah, so he would say, "What, what high school did you go to? How many kids went there? Who was your best friend there? Oh, what was the name of your mascot? What

was it, what sports did you play?" Those are the, you know, the questions that you see when you log into Bank of America or whoever you bank with. They all, you know a series of challenge

questions. He would eventually get around to asking her those questions. So I, my only guess from this investigation that he was trying to engineer his way into her bank accounts through

these conversations.

[00:12:02] Bob: But even after they interview her and see these painful text dialogs, this woman can't seem to break off her connection with this online lover who is demanding all her money.

[00:12:12] Cory McManus: She said she felt like she was in a, in a romance novel. And she felt like she was a character in a romance novel, and that her husband never talked to her in the

way this guy talks to her. And they never had this kind of, this level of trust. And even after, you know, we told her she was a victim, she continued to send money, you know and we had to

go back down there multiple times and say, you've got to knock it off. You've got to stop sending these people. And she just found a way every single time. And it's tough because she didn't

have any kids, and she didn't have any close family that could help her and help us stop her from doing that to the point where she eventually moved in with her sister in Michigan and kind

of stopped the activity from there, but at that point, her money was gone. She sold her house, she refinanced her, or she sold her summer house, I should say and refinanced the home she was

living in down on the water, to, to pay for all this.

[00:13:02] Bob: Wow.

[00:13:04] Bob: The story is powerful. Who is this criminal with such a seemingly limitless ability to manipulate this victim? Cory's investigation takes on even more urgency because it

quickly becomes clear they've only scratched the surface of this crime.

[00:13:18] Cory McManus: It's these romance scams are never just one victim. They're always dozens upon dozens of victims. Once you really get into their bank accounts, and then when you see

the money going out to different bank accounts and then you look into those bank accounts where the money's being laundered to, you identify more victims. So you're, you're constantly uh,

you know chasing down new leads and identifying more victims and bank accounts to push the case farther.

[00:13:39] Bob: When you are accessing these bank accounts and you're seeing, I'm assuming you're seeing checks go in and, and you're identifying other checking accounts that probably belong

to victims who are sending money. Is that, is that how that works?

[00:13:51] Cory McManus: That's correct, yeah. So we would see the checks go in there, and mostly at this time they were doing hard copy checks, so you were able to see information on the

checks including the name and the address of the person that's sending it. Using our law enforcement tools that we have at our disposal, we were able to put two and two together and kind of

identify a person that was behind a check, the person that was mailing a check, and then based on their age and their gender, we could kind of say, okay, it's a elderly female let's, we're

going to say that she's probably going to be a victim in this case.

[00:14:20] Bob: So how many victims did you identify that way?

[00:14:22] Cory McManus: Over 30.

[00:14:23] Bob: Over 30, wow. And...

[00:14:25] Cory McManus: Yeah.

[00:14:25] Bob: And I'm going to guess not all of them had more than a million dollars stolen, but they were all large amounts of money?

[00:14:31] Cory McManus: They were, yeah, I would say most of them were well over $50,000 each.

[00:14:35] Bob: Wow. And one of those victims was a woman named Donna right?

[00:14:37] Cory McManus: Oh yes, yes.

[00:14:40] Bob: Donna, Debbi Crisp's mom.

[00:14:43] Cory McManus: Uh, it was right around the spring, I think it was around April of 2019. We saw checks that were being deposited into some of our target bank accounts with her name

associated with them. So from there we, yeah, we, we were able to identify her as a 74-year-old. We were able to get her contact information, and we made contact with her, and she was very

willing to talk to us about what was going on.

[00:15:06] Bob: Willing to talk with Cory, with law enforcement as they investigate. At this point, Donna has realized that her lover was really a criminal, but she's not willing to talk to

everyone.

[00:15:18] Cory McManus: She was aware of the activity that was going on, and you know told us that, you know, she was a widow, that she's been very lonely for the last two years, I believe

it was, that her husband passed, and she as completely embarrassed by it. She actually begged me at the time not to tell any of her children about what was going on.

[00:15:33] Bob: Hmm, that sounds so painful. Yeah.

[00:15:36] Cory McManus: Yeah.

[00:15:38] Bob: Donna had kept her secret from her children. But she had also kept detailed records of everything that happened to her.

[00:15:45] Cory McManus: She actually met this individual through a dating site called Christian Mingle. At that time he identified himself, I believe it was Paul Pelligrino was the name

that he used, and he was involved overseas in a construction business, and they, they spoke for, once again, you know, weeks, months, being groomed, building that trust up, and then

eventually she got asked for money, and it was money to help pay some of his employees overseas so he could pay them, and then move in with her back in the US.

[00:16:13] Bob: But at the time that you talked to her, she was completely convinced that it was, it was a scam. She was no longer in love with this person.

[00:16:19] Cory McManus: No, yeah, she ended the relationship, uh just prior, I believe. She, just a few months prior she kind of knew that it was going sour and that she was probably not

going to get her money back, and she just decided to move on from there.

[00:16:31] Bob: Donna was incredibly helpful, a caring person and that was used against her.

[00:16:39] Cory McManus: Most of the victims I speak to are, they're very just nice heart people. These people are, they send their money out of love, right, they, they, they respond out of

love. They're working out of love to build a relationship and trust and, and you know most of these people are very forthcoming with providing information to me, um, which is a little scary

at the same time because they don't know who I am, you know, but I think once they realize that I'm trying to help them, and that we're trying to bring these people to justice for what they

did and possibly try to recover some of their money, um, they're more willing to help us out.

[00:17:09] Bob: But they're um, they're generous spirits, right?

[00:17:12] Cory McManus: They are. They are, yes.

[00:17:14] Bob: So Cory and all the investigators who speak with Donna, agree to keep her secret, and that's why the paperwork Debbi's daughter finds in the house is such a shock, but that's

how Debbi finds herself on the phone with federal law enforcement agents only a few days after her mom's death.

[00:17:31] Debbi Crisp: There was a name on there, I think it was Cory's, I can't remember if we talked to Tara first or to Cory with the US Postal Inspections. Cory had talked to my mom,

and my mom told him that you know she was ashamed, she was embarrassed, she never wanted us to know, she was mortified of what had happened. And um, you know she told him, she said

essentially this is something I'll take to my grave with me because they'll never find out.

[00:18:00] Bob: And she did take it to the grave with her. But as Cory explains everything her mom had gone through, the checks, angry texts, pain, the shame, over the course of two years

this man ultimately stole about $400,000 from Donna. Well Debbi can't imagine her mom was going through all that all alone.

[00:18:21] Bob: But you guys talked daily, sometimes multiple times a day, right?

[00:18:24] Debbi Crisp: Oh my gosh, as I said, you know, the hardest thing for me even now is that... I'm sorry...

[00:18:30] Bob: No, take your time. Take all the time you need.

[00:18:33] Debbi Crisp: She was my first call of the day and typically my last. You know 'cause the one thing I promised my dad the day he was dying was that I would take care of her. And I

tried my hardest. I really and truly did. I tried my hardest. It's not, you know, I tried, we had a suspicion, you know she told us she was talking to people, but never in a million years

did I think it was to this extent. You know she would always say, well, you know, well I'm going to have, you know, one of these days I'm going to have somebody come meet you all because I'm

going to find somebody, you know that, that's going to like our family and all this kind of stuff. I knew, I knew she was struggling because of being at home alone, and...

[00:19:12] Bob: She was, she was lonely.

[00:19:13] Debbi Crisp: She was very lonely. And you know, and then my husband and I, (inaudible) so wild, she died January 16th of '21, and my husband and I talked about just straight

before, right before that Christmas. I said, you know what, I said if it comes down to it, I said, and it makes life easier, I said, "We can have mom move in..." because we had one bedroom

on our main floor and then all four of our other ones were up on the other floor. I said, "Mom can move in. We'll sleep upstairs and you know she can stay in our room until, you know, until

time comes for whatever." And it wasn't, I don't even think that had been three weeks when she passed away. I don't even think it was three weeks when she passed away. So, you know.

[00:19:53] Bob: Debbi still deals with feelings of guilt about it all.

[00:19:59] Debbi Crisp: Um, I think it's hard to describe because you know my first thought process, you know everybody kept telling me you did nothing wrong; you did nothing wrong. I

thought, oh my God, I didn't protect her, you know. Somebody took advantage of her and so I did not protect her. But I was so angry. I mean beyond angry at, at these people. And you know I

am a very type A personality kind of person, and I think that's why it's ate away at me for so long is the fact that I really just want to go toe-to-toe with him and let him, not on a

computer screen, but go toe-to-toe and look at him and say this is a face, you destroyed her, but in the same aspect you've destroyed me because she was my mom. And I am a huge protector of

family. I will protect my family to the end of this world at any cost. And I didn't sleep for three days. I didn't, I didn't sleep for three days. I was so devastated. Um, but to be honest

with you, I was, I was angry at her in ways, 'cause I'm like, why didn't you just tell me? I wouldn't have cared. I would not have cared. I would have done whatever I could to help her. But

you know I understand her need, what she wanted her privacy. Her mother was that way. Her mother grew up in a very abusive home. And um, her mother, my great-grandmother died when my

grandmother was very young, and my great-grand--, or my grandmother ran away from home when she was 13 years old, and she would never tell anybody about it. And we didn't find out a lot of

stuff until after she died. And so my mom has that ability to keep quiet just as much as my grandmother.

[00:21:56] Bob: In fact, Debbi thinks, privacy, keeping family secrets is sometimes typical of her mom's generation.

[00:22:04] Debbi Crisp: And I will say that I compare this to when at a time when people used to have miscarriages, you know, oh, we never talked about it. And now people will talk about it,

and I have had, I've had a miscarriage, and it was like, oh gosh, you don't even want to talk about it, but things have to be talked about. There, this is a huge thing that needs to be

talked about.

[00:22:26] Bob: As we often say on The Perfect Scam, shame and silence are tools that criminals use against us, but these kinds of requests for privacy after a romance scam are actually

quite common, Cory says.

[00:22:39] Bob: I mean it sounds like Donna, Donna's wish came true in that Debbi didn't know anything until after her mom died, and then she found these records of her mom talking with you,

working with you and being very fastidious working with you which is kind of amazing, but also, these stories are all sad, but there's something incredibly sad to me about her keeping the

secret from her children.

[00:22:58] Cory McManus: I know. And that's, I'll be honest, Bob, it's like probably the hardest part of my job is really getting in touch with some of these victims and making them trust

me. You know sometimes I'm the first person that tells them that they're being scammed. I've had incidents, not in this case specifically, but in another case where I called this woman, she

was down in Arizona, and I said, "I believe you're being scammed. I'm looking at bank account information and I, it doesn't look right to me. Can you," and she starts talking about this

story, and I said, "This isn't adding up. You're being scammed." And she started hysterically crying, and she said, "I'm going to go kill myself."

[00:23:31] Bob: Oh god.

[00:23:31] Cory McManus: And, I said, "Well," I said, "Where do you live?" And we started going, and we talked and talked and talked, and I got that information from her. And I said, I said,

"Listen, I know you're very upset." And she lost $300,000 as part of a, a romance scam similar to this. And I said, I'm, I said, "Let's talk tomorrow again after things calm down," like let

me, you know, get your bearings straight a little bit and you know let it all sink in. And I got off the phone, and I called the sheriff's department immediately, and they went to her house

and they had her committed just based on the threat she was making towards herself and to self-harm. So it's, it's a, it's a difficult job just because with these victims, you know, a lot

of them don't want to talk about this because they're embarrassed by it, or they're in denial, and it, or they just don't believe that I am who I say I am after they've been just talking to

somebody overseas. And then a lot of times we have to, you know get lo--, like local law enforcement involved to go out there and make an introduction to us, and say, hey, you know Cory's a

federal agent. He's with the US government. He's here to help you out. Please give him a call at this number. He's trying to get in touch with you. Usually the last you know resort for me is

to, to get their kids involved, and I think that was the same issue with Donna, she begged me not to get her kids involved and I, I'm going to grant that wish to her, because sometimes you

think the kids would be helpful, but sometimes when they find out how much money that is lost, sometimes their response isn't what you're looking for to help with the case, you know, and

say, "Mom, how can you be so stupid," isn't, doesn't help our investigation, it doesn't help the situation. So you know yeah at that point you almost have another victim with their kids, and

you have to explain to them this is a very elaborate scam, you know that your mother was speaking to these folks for weeks or months at a time, you know, sometimes for hours on end each

day. And that these, this is what happened. So you've got to kind of brace them for the financial impact and the emotional impact that goes along with that.

[00:25:20] Bob: As Debbi speaks with Cory and picks through all those receipts, it becomes clear that these criminals not only stole basically every penny Donna had, they stole money she

didn't have.

[00:25:31] Bob: When your dad passed away, your mom had more than $300,000 in a retirement account, and she only had a few thousand dollars left by the end of this, right? Is that about

right?

[00:25:38] Debbi Crisp: Yep.

[00:25:39] Bob: And of course, she'd taken out title loans on the cars and everything over that, right?

[00:25:42] Debbi Crisp: Oh, and then all the money that she had just regular in a, she had just regular cash in a checking account.

[00:25:47] Bob: Oh my God.

[00:25:48] Debbi Crisp: She took out credit cards.

[00:25:50] Bob: Oh...

[00:25:50] Debbi Crisp: She um, she had credit cards, you know, which they tried now to come back on me for. And I'm like, listen, I wasn't on them. I wasn't on her account. There ain't

nothing you can do.

[00:26:00] Bob: Debbi is convinced that this entire experience, the financial stress, broken heart, well it might have killed her mom.

[00:26:09] Debbi Crisp: Um, because we believe she died of a massive heart attack, we don't know for sure. I mean my uncle's a cardiologist and he believes truly by the way we found her that

that's what happened. But I am not going to say that my mom was not in a grief-full place of not understanding where she was, she was worried about where she was going to live. She said

everything's getting so expensive. I don't know if I'm going to survive. So I know that issue with money was on her mind.

[00:26:36] Bob: Oh how could that not have contributed to her, I'm, I'm one who fully believes that people die of broken hearts all the time.

[00:26:41] Debbi Crisp: Oh, I totally believe that. And so with that, my daughter got married that year. She was so excited, my mom was, to see you know to go to, for Sarah's wedding and now

we have a grandbaby. And she carries on my mom's middle name. And those things I look at and think this is what those people robbed her of. They robbed her of that. Because I truly believe

that the stress of what happened played a huge part in her death. And nobody will ever convince me otherwise. I do believe that that played a huge part.

[00:27:18] Bob: But as Debbi digests everything that's been stolen by this criminal, she makes a vow to do anything and everything she can to bring people responsible for this horrible crime

to justice. So however painful the conversations are with Cory, it's also clear that Donna's records and willingness to work with law enforcement has helped to push along the investigation.

There are plenty of digital bread crumbs to follow.

[00:27:41] Cory McManus: So from the bank accounts we subpoenaed um, we were able to identify you know both targets and potential victims based on the activity that was inside the bank

account. So we could see from their target bank account that we were looking at, that our victim in Rhode Island's money went into, that victim's money was also dispersed into that account,

and what the money was actually being used for. And that kind of helped pushed us along. The banks also having a subpoena issued to them, we were able to acquire video and photos from the

banks showing our target depositing the victims checks and withdrawing the victims money from their bank accounts. And even more importantly is we were able to get IP information. A lot of

times with the victims' money, they're aud--, their tracking the, the movement of the victim's money. They want to make sure it hits the bank account. They want to make sure it's going

through the mail stream, that it's being you know sent as the victim is telling them it's being sent. So they're constantly tracking it. So the IP information is obviously very important to

help identify where these people are operating out of, whether it's overseas or whether it's domestic.

[00:28:39] Bob: With the pictures, the phones, the IP addresses, investigators find suspect targets pretty quickly. Together with the Department of Justice, they decide it's time to move on

co-conspirators in the Houston area.

[00:28:54] Bob: So that must be a difficult decision for you because you know the more you're observing the more you're learning, right, and when you finally make an arrest, you're worried

about the rats scattering, right? So how do you make the decision to pull the trigger on those arrests?

[00:29:05] Cory McManus: At one point you're, you're worried about the rats scattering, but at the same point you, you realize that the longer you wait with these cases, the more victims are

losing their money and their life savings. So at some point you've got to cut it and say, we've just got to start grabbing some people and making some arrests and taking some enforcement

action. And that's what we did. Myself and agents from my office along with the FBI and Department of Labor executed a search warrant at her residence in Houston. You know we wound up

recovering var-, you know various watches, jewelry, firearms, we received a Bentley SUV, and also a Mercedes, and I believe we recovered over 20 burner phones with various aliases that were

associated with each burner phone.

[00:29:43] Bob: How long from the first you heard about the case till this search warrant was executed, how long did that take about?

[00:29:50] Cory McManus: Just, probably just under a year.

[00:29:53] Bob: So 20 burner phones suggest to me that, that they were running at least some of these scam phone calls from this location or nearby, right?

[00:29:59] Cory McManus: That's correct.

[00:30:00] Bob: Yeah, I mean we normally think about people overseas running these kinds of scams, but I guess they're not all overseas.

[00:30:07] Cory McManus: No, they need people here in the US to facilitate that. You know that operation. A lot of the money did go overseas but a lot of it was domestic. You had West

Africans that were living in Atlanta and Houston involved in this that were operating domestically uh through this scam.

[00:30:24] Bob: They arrest two women, Sadae Mills and Dominique Golden, and alleged that the two of them are collecting and cashing checks for, for who? For whoever is the mastermind of

this elaborate romance scam empire.

[00:30:38] Bob: Okay, so arrest these two. Do they cooperate or do they not cooperate?

[00:30:42] Cory McManus: So that was probably the biggest thing that, that came out of this was, were the interviews of Sadae Mills and Dominique Golden, because both gave us very detailed

interviews regarding their activities. Both knew exactly what they were doing was wrong, but we knew and then knew that they weren't the ringleaders for the whole operation. So they wound up

telling us who their ringleader was, an individual who was living in Atlanta by the name of Wisdom Onyobeno.

[00:31:08] Bob: Bingo. They have a name, Wisdom Onyobeno. He's the ringleader, the kingpin. Wisdom has created an elaborate, wide-ranging romance scam empire that stole millions of dollars

from dozens of victims. Authorities believe he does some of the romancing himself, and at this point they know he even finds co-conspirators by romancing them. Dominique Golden was just one

of his real-life lovers turned criminal operatives. But most important, he's in the US, at least for now. So Cory and other federal agents turn their attention to finding him before Wisdom

gets wise to their investigation. Does Debbi eventually get justice for her mom? How many other victims of this massive romance scam are there? Well, that's next week on The Perfect Scam.

(MUSIC SEGUE)

[00:32:08] Bob: If you have been targeted by a scam or fraud, you are not alone. Call the AARP Fraud Watch Network Helpline at 877-908-3360. Their trained fraud specialists can provide you

with free support and guidance on what to do next. Our email address at The Perfect Scam is: [email protected], and we want to hear from you. If you've been the victim of a scam

or you know someone who has, and you'd like us to tell their story, write to us. That address again is: [email protected]. Thank you to our team of scambusters; Associate

Producer, Annalea Embree; Researcher, Becky Dodson; Executive Producer, Julie Getz; and our Audio Engineer and Sound Designer, Julio Gonzalez. Be sure to find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify,

or wherever you listen to podcasts. For AARP's The Perfect Scam, I'm Bob Sullivan.

(MUSIC OUTRO)

END OF TRANSCRIPT

The Perfect ScamSM is a project of the AARP Fraud Watch Network, which equips consumers like you with the knowledge to give you power over scams.

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