Military Romantic Scams – The Theory and Practice

The US Army Captain Doctor who Broke my Heart

Romantic scams a la Casanova style have been around forever, but the Military Romantic scam variant has only taken off since the advent of social media and on-line dating. According to a 2018 BBB Online Romance Scams study, since 2015 this form of cybercrime has become a 1 billion dollar industry in the US alone. The lifecycle of this scam is well documented and understood, but the low-level details and logistics have never been made public. Little is known about their operations, networks, organizational structure, payment collection and clearance methods, the technologies they use, and their relationship with their domestic financial institutions, law enforcement, and politicians. The public’s perception of cyber scammers is that of modern day pirates; an amorphous buccaneer entity shrouded in mystery that operates from somewhere overseas with what appears to be complete impunity from prosecution and justice.

The Victims
Two victims of military romance scams (L-R) Kate Roberts and Esther Ortiz-Rodeghero.

The impact of military romantic scams on the victims who are typically older women living on a fixed income is devastating. Some end up going into debt to pay the scammers; others lose their entire life savings. To add insult to injury, many of the victims continue to be blackmailed and forced into committing crimes like trafficking counterbid long after they discover that they have been defrauded. This can happen even if they try to terminate their communications with the scammer. Due to the international nature of these scams and the social stigma they carry, most victims have no legal recourse nor a chance of ever recovering their losses.

So in the spirit of Proverbs 31:8-9 “Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves…”  I’ll try to pull the curtain back on one military romantic scam and do a deep dive into its inner workings and its perpetrators.

Military Romantic Scams 101
At its bare bones, the military romance scam has several variants, all of which revolve around repurposing images of some serviceman or woman and using them to create a fake profile on a social media or a dating site, then reaching out to a victim and defrauding them.

As can be seen from Image 1 and Table 1, a single set of stolen images can become a source of dozens of fake identities and over 900 concurrently running scams. 

The Many Faces of Richard Canon  Military Personal Identity Theft
Image 1: (L-R) The 49 personalities of Richard Canon and 12 other stolen identities used in concurrent romantic scams.


Fake Name

Running Scam Count


Richard Williams



Burks Richard



Richard Tonsom



Canon Hendryx



Jimmy Bernett



Richard Canon Miller



Johnson Smith



Richard Canon



Canon Richard



Thomas Lavallee (Richard)



Richard Thomas



Thomas Rick



Jeff Mathew



Thomas Hunter Richard



Charles Richard



Seth Berman



Romos Johnson



Mark Brandon



Richard Wilson



Mata James



Thierry Pienaar



Sherman Massingale



Brain Kobi



Elijah Grayson



Richard Canon Martin



Richard Chocktoot Kenneth



Mark Richard



Richard Smiff



Ballantyne Richard



Burks Richardws



Richards Jack Hanan



Richard Billy



Randy Moore



Richard Steven Nelly



William David Mark



Larry Brent Richards



Cannon Richard



Richie Arrow



Sivewright Richard



Richard Thorpe



Richard E Garlock



Richard Clark



Froylan Richard



Canon J Richard



Richard C Brain



Canon M Richard



Ryann Camryn



Cannoon Richard


           Total scams for image


Table1: One of the hundreds of concurrent scams using the same image with different name variations

Once the fake on-line profile is created, the scammer will then pursue certain victim demographics and concentrate their efforts on a previously proven cross-section of susceptible individuals—for example, a divorced or widowed woman over 50.

After the initial contact is established with a victim, the scammer will then engage in a trust-building campaign that can take weeks or months. As part of this process, the scammers will transmit to the victim a wide range of collateral that can include a fake military ID, service photographs, additional social network images, and even address and property information about their fake residence.

The emails, text messages, and step-by-step logic used in these exploits are all based on hundreds of previously tested and successful scams. This makes their decision trees robust and the playbooks plausible and effective. Also, because the operator doesn’t have to waste any time on trial and error approaches, improvisation, or real-time content creation, they can effectively run dozens of concurrent scams by just selecting some template-based material, such as handwritten love letters, and minimally customize them to the specific victim.

Fake Love Signs
Raymond Ward Fake ID
Image 2: An example of template based collateral ready for customization and a fake military ID with typical errors that include: wrong service branch, rank mismatch, capitalization errors, mixed font use, inconsistent letter bolding, a mixture of imperial and metric units, and reuse of DOG TAG numbers from other fake IDs.

Any compromising information such as sexually explicit material, family, legal, or medical information the victim shares about themselves will be used subsequently by the scammer to continue to exercise leverage on the victim through blackmail.

The Psychology
Two major contributing factors that make romantic military scams so effective are the link between our perception of authority (people in uniform) and the sense of affinity and closeness we attribute to written communications. In a paper titled An Attributional Extension of the Hyperpersonal Model that analyzes the relationship between computer-based communications and the willingness to disclose intimate information, the authors conclude that:

“…In the experiment participants were randomly assigned to a face‐to‐face or computer‐mediated interaction with a confederate who made either high‐ or low‐intimacy self‐disclosures. Results indicated that computer‐mediated interactions intensified the association between disclosure and intimacy relative to face‐to‐face interactions, and this intensification effect was fully mediated by increased interpersonal (relationship) attributions observed in the computer‐mediated condition.”

The reason why we trust people in uniform is obvious but paradoxically, it seems that we are willing to disclose more intimate details about ourselves via electronic communications than in person. The written nature of these exchanges also adds a level of conviction and earnestness that verbal communications lack. In the case of romantic scams, this results in the victim developing a higher degree of confidence in what the other party says because they view the ‘physical’ text messages, emails, and letters in their possession as proof of sincerity.

The Scam Lifecycle
Regardless of the specific instance, all scams are formulaic and follow a pre-defined lifecycle. Every successful romantic scam has these five sequential phases:

  1. Establish an online profile and make contact with a vulnerable victim
  2. Develop a trust relationship with the victim, by exploiting some of their weakness, isolate them, and groom them
  3. Learn as much as possible about the victim’s family, background, desires, and assets
  4. Gain access to the victim’s money or resources
  5. Use the victim as a money mole or contraband mover to support other scams

The Law Enforcement Challenge
Traditional crime or terror network analysis is expensive, time-consuming, and resource intensive. It requires dedicated task forces, access to fused HUMINT, GEOINT, MASINT, SIGINT, TECHINT, INT/DNINT, real-time surveillance data, and the support of many subject matter experts. Trying to reconstruct a modern criminal or terror network is not a straightforward matter because these networks do not follow the classical organized crime models and rigid hierarchical structures.

Cybercrime networks and operators are loosely coupled and are assembled from among a tightknit group of ethnically related individuals. They lack central organization, command hierarchy, official communications channels, and consistent geographical location. They are shielded by local politicians and have the full support and cooperation of senior law enforcement officials. These organizations also utilize a brutal code of loyalty and enforcement that can result in violent punishment for any member that deviates from their assigned responsibilities.

To complicate things further, most of the individuals involved in cybercrime networks are non-US nationals that operate overseas in multiple international jurisdictions. They also effectively utilize countermeasures such as data anonymization techniques, burner phones, and non-traceable payment methods to evade detection and tracking.

So the upshot is that traditional law enforcement and prosecution techniques like the use of informants, bank accounts or assets seizure, and search warrants are mostly ineffective and practically useless.

The Analysis
The ultimate goal of this research wasn’t to locate specific individuals but rather to discover the patterns of life, flora, fauna and lay of the land in this mysterious Kingdom of Scam-Land.  I personally have no interest in the individuals identified at all but I do believe that the information and analytics framework used here would be useful in educating the general public and Western LEA in trying to develop an automated and more effective real-time scam fighting strategies and programs. You can find more details about some of the system components and solution architecture that I’ve used in Illustration 1 and a similar project in a post titled the Mechanics of Deception.

The Architecture
Illustration 1: The system components and solution architecture

The Analytics Framework
To generate the synthetic imagery, interactive dialogs, and wide-scale video and image searches, I’ve utilized the following software tools and machine learning frameworks:

In the machine learning and detection components I’ve utilized: Convolutional Neural, Support Vector Machine, Multi-Task Network Cascade, CAFFE Framework, Haar Cascades, Ensemble of Regression Trees and Learning, P-N and Supervised Learning.

The Process
For the video analytics, I’ve trained the ML engine to detect known scammer characteristics such as certain car makes, fashion brands, accessories, and hand signs. The training of the model included the extraction of known objects (Image 3) as well as seeding the engine with new insight matches that were confirmed to be related to some relevant search topics. So, for example, the results from a search of a person wearing a Gucci belt buckle yields new insight that these individuals also carried certain pattered style bags. So moving forward, new searches incorporated the patterned bags into the query criteria, etc.

Object Search Criteria
Image 3: A sample of graphic objects used to train the ML-based search engine used to identify fashion and other accessories with known scammer associations.

The object of interest database contained about 6K classified samples. When fully operational, the system was delivering an object match true detection rate of about 86% accuracy. The total number of objects found and confirmed as relevant was over 17K (Image 4). The total runtime for all object detection and re-classification was about 9 hours.

Golden Watches
Image 4: A sampling of a results set for video and image searches using a combination of “dark skin shade” + “golden watch” objects.

Another type of object classification was used in combination with the BigData engine to locate certain keywords like “prepaid” and identify fashion trends like clothing styles. This included a combinations of more than 23K stop words and graphic object like shoes, shirts, pants, bags, and various accessories. The stop words were scraped from both OCR images, text, and speech to text conversion.

Distressed Jeans
Image 5: An example trend detection involving “distressed Jeans”.
   Scammer Shoes
Image 6: An example of a trend detection involving “visible toes” footwear.

Car Keys
Image 7: An example of a trend detection involving car keys suspended from the belt loops.

The Fashion of Yõüñg Blãck Amëricäñ
Image 8: An example of trend detection involving daily wardrobe arrangements and custom made designer outfits and shoes belonging to the scammer “Yõüñg Blãck Amëricäñ”.

The Fashion of Theophilus Adugyamfi
Image 9: An example of video cataloging and identification of a fashion trend of T. Adugyamfi aka “Billion$King”.

The Scammer Models
Image 10: An example of a trend detection of a “modeling” pose that is characterized by the subject facing the ground.

Hand Signals
Image 11: An example of a trend detection of over 40 types of “hand signal” gestures.

The system flagged the matches, anomalies, and trends and then converted them into insight that was used in more complex queries. This resulted in the identification of several hundred trends such as haircuts, hand signs, body poses, footwear, clothing styles, and color palettes. One interesting anomaly turned out to be a fashion ritual that was practiced by some of the scammers where they would once a week arrange their wardrobe in coordinated outfits (Image 8) for every day of the week and post them on internal chat boards.

A key component of the searching and linkage strategy was based on face recognition and face indexing. In total, I’ve indexed about 19K unique faces that constituted the POIs, their friends, families, and associates. The face recognition ran on multiple image sources such as CCTV cameras, phone cameras, laptop cameras, off-line video files, images stored in files, and social media albums and libraries.

Face Recognition KVNG DD
Image 12:
Usage of Face Recognition to identify an individual in a large collection of images and reconstruct their social and professional network. Featured in the image is “Play Bowy” and his “KVNG DD” team.

All image captures in real-time from CCTV cameras, phones, and laptops were indexed and processed for object and face matches and linkage analysis. The indexed images were then used for geospatial analysis to identify the place and time of individuals and group linkage.

Objects Database

Object Type



Facial Images


Used for Person of Interest (POI) searches

IP Addresses


Computer and other device IP addresses

Emails & Text Messages 38,145 Individual and group communications


Total number of individuals in the network



Make, model, and color

License Plates 156

License plate numbers

Image Patterns


Used for entity searches

Phone Numbers


Mobile and computer phone numbers

Financial Records


Account numbers and details

Voice Recordings


Phone and conference calls

Video Files


Video sessions

General Objects 17,209 General graphic objects like logos and graphics

Note on Speech to Text Conversions
Even though I captured several hours of conversation via open microphones and active chats sessions, I couldn’t accurately translate large parts of the content due to a limitation in Amazon’s, and Google’s transcribe and translation support for Nigerian and Gahanna dialects. In an operational deployment, this problem can be easily solved if a native language resource was available to review and translate the materials.

3 Way Conferance 
Image 13: Capturing a 3-way tech support Conference

Love is in the Air
It was time to get scammed. The first step was to create a fictitious person named Olga Schmatova and use her as bait.  I didn’t want to use stock photographs because of their easy tractability or utilize a real person for obvious reasons, so, I resorted to creating her images synthetically. I generated several deepfake photograph versions of Olga that accounted for age and weight variation. I then created the background information that supported her cover, such as a resume, biography, diplomas, online shopping profiles, employment history, as well as several other artifacts that would ensure that even an in-depth background search would yield valid results.

Olga-3 Olga-1 
Image 14: AI generated images of Olga Schmatova

Next, I created several social media, email, and dating site profiles and waited for the search engines to index her content. As soon as Olga started showing up in general internet searches, I was ready to go.

Olga Match
Image 15: One of Olga’s dating site profiles

Olga’s Dating Profile
My name is Olga. I am friendly, fun-loving, easy-going, and kind. My friends say that I bring a smile to the people around me. I consider myself to be balanced and a calm person at the same time I am very energetic, active and purposeful. I am full of positive energy and I project it to others.

I work as an emergency room nurse, I am family oriented and soft spoken, and at the same time I am a passionate and sensual woman, with oceans of love in my heart where we can swim together.

I like handmade art, visiting museums, cooking, and music is a big relief in my life.

Ideal Match Description
I want to find a man who is ready to accept my love and love me in return. I need stable and firm relations, I do not want to play with feelings or any drama. I would like to find a mature and wise man who is a doctor or a dentist who knows what he wants and can share with me some of his wisdom.

I didn’t have to wait long, within a several days I got the following hit:

Subject: Hello My 110% Match

Message: Wow was the first thing I said when I went through your pictures/ profile and I wonder why a woman like you is still single. Perhaps, all the men around you are blind (lol)…

We can hook up and hopefully, be wonderful soul mates… A little about myself. Hmmm, I am easy going and kind. When people meet me, they sense it before long. I am a military doctor with the US Army, I love epic movies cos I love adventure, stories from ancient history and anything related to real life.  I love the great outdoors, hiking, swimming, and travel.

I love family a lot! My favorite saying is “never look back”.  Well, the only thing lagging in my life now is that lovely woman that will follow me to my dream land. I believe ‘ONLY THOSE WHO SEEK, FIND’, and that is why I want to get to know you. I prefer direct email contact because of my deployment I don’t have access to this site at all times. Kindly email me on my gmail at the account at or leave your email address. Sometimes, we are dumbfounded answering love related matters cos love is beyond human comprehension. I Hope to hear from u soon. Cheers!


Just to make sure that this wasn’t a legitimate dating ping, I responded by asking Brandon for more personal details to which after several more emails and text exchanges he eventually sent me an image of his fake military ID (image 16). From the recycled verbiage in his responses (matches for which the search spider found online), the poor grammar, typos, and the fake ID, I knew that I found my scammer;

Subject: Dearest Olga,

Message:  I’m just a normal guy who is searching for real love and wants to enjoy life to the fullest, I’m an american soldier.I come from a family of 4 which is me, dad, mum and my sister.I have my own house in Florida.We were living happily until my wife was diagnose of Cancer, it was a bad experience for me and my family it shattered us, my wife leaved with it for good 6 yrs before she gave up. It was a terrible experience but i just have to move on and hoping for the best. I have a daughter who I love dearly. My favorite color is blue (sky blue), Sunday is one of the day i don’t like , I lost my wife on Sunday so i don’t feel so much happiness on that day or maybe you can help me through that.

Been in the US Army for 5 years now as a surgeon. I enjoy my job but on deployment life is hard because you are restricted to do some things but I’m used to it. I love my job and I really need a family at the moment because I think we all deserve happiness in this life, My personality is outgoing and I have a good sense of humor. I am a kind and very tender hearted person. I am loving, in fact I sometimes think that I love too deeply when I love someone. I am a very honest person. I am too trusting at times and I am loyal to my companion and friends. i have a romantic heart and I like that. I want to be respected for being a man. I like to act, dress and look like a guy. i’m looking for a nice, honest,kind and caring woman, a woman that will love and be with me for the rest of my life. I’m not looking for someone to date but someone to spend the rest of my life with. All i need from her is just being sincere to me,make me feel secured,appreciate,love,care and being understanding. My recent life has been engulfed with misery and loneliness.

Everything in life happen for a reason, my being lonely for a very long time makes me want a companion and a woman to share my feelings with, I’m in search of a soul mate to spend the rest of our life together. No one is perfect and we could only give it a trial. Though it is right for us to learn from our mistakes. Which makes us resisting and having hard time trusting again in your life. A relationship is all about TRUST, SINCERITY and HONESTY, all this Paramount fact must exist in a relationship before anything can work out of it. Faith is the substance of things not seen, but the evidence of things being hoped for, lets strengthen our faith and see where this will lead us to. You are a beautiful woman and I want to get closer to you and see maybe this will work out for us.

Yours truly,


Fake Militery ID
Image 16: Brandon’s fake military ID with scraped internet image of the Russian actor Oskar Ruchera.

Our romance lasted for about two weeks and included several exchanges of emails, voice, and text messages. I am not going to bother you with all of the details of the lengthy and steamy conversations that ensued. The skinny of it is that Brandon loved me and wanted to spend the rest of his life with me. We were going to get married in Indonesia and spend the honeymoon in Nusa Penida! All of this, of course, depended on him completing his “contract” combat deployment in Afghanistan in two years, where he served as a doctor.

Then came the con. Brandon said he could leave earlier and meet me in Indonesia, but he would have to pay the US Army an administration fee of about $20,000, which he didn’t have because all of his money was tied up in some high tech investment in Google. He promised that if I helped him with this payment, he would repay me the money with interest in no time. I then received an email from who claimed to be one Colonel William Daniels of the US Army HR team requesting that I transfer these administrative fees to him via Western Union.

I didn’t have $20K on hand, so instead, I decided to give in to Brandon’s insistent requests for some intimate pictures of me. Following Ursula’s advice to the Little Mermaid that one should “…never underestimate the power of body language!” I sent Brandon several glamor shots of Olga. I also added some extra loving payload to the images to help take our relationship to the next level.

Olga Swiming Olga in a Little Black Dress Olga Glamour Shots
Image 17: Olga in a swimming suit and in and out of her little black dress.

Olga’s AI generated voice

The payload deployed successfully and the initial probe came back indicating that most machines on Brandon’s sizable local network were running Windows 7-8 and were unpatched. That was followed by several more payloads. I mapped his network and devices and started monitoring his internet traffic and messaging activity. Interestingly, Brandon and his team were somewhat security conscious as they were using dedicated machines for scamming and separate computers for banking and business operations and logistics. They were also careful to use burner phones for business communications and other phones for voice and internet browsing.

While taking inventory of the drives and storage media, I found a directory full of images that Brandon was using to assemble his social media profiles on what appeared to be a graphics editing machine. surprisingly, it even had a licensed version of Adobe Creative Suite. As the VA spider was sifting through these images, it flagged two anomalies. The first was the OCR’d word “Verizon LTE” (Verizon doesn’t operate in Ghana), the second was a face match on two mobile phone screenshots of a FB page that contained the fake photos of Brandon and actual photos of two scammers (Image 18).

Burner Phones
Image 18: Phone screenshots capture used for the network entry point.

Now that I had actual faces, the FR took over and traversed the photograph datasets on his storage devices and on his and his network’s on-line profiles and filled-in the matching names, addresses, phone numbers, car license plate, make, and car color (image 19). Altogether, the data collection took about 24 hours and involved some man-in-the-loop operations like the verification of anomalies and the termination of dead-end searches.

One interesting insight from the face recognition mapping is that Brandon and other individuals on his network use multiple ‘legal’ names and alternate spellings in official government documents such as drivers licenses and passports. Brandon, for example, was using the names “Nana Osei Kwadwo Boakye”, “Osei Kwadwo Boakye”, and “Osei Kwadwo”.

LPR Make and Color
Image 19: Sample from over 150 license plates, car makes, and color details collected from the scammer network.

From the keystroke logs and login schedules, it was clear that multiple operators were involved as each exhibited distinctive ‘fist’ through Keystroke dynamics. Monitoring the login activity in real-time and screenshots confirmed that many of the operators shared the login details for their ‘bait’ profile.

The Scammer Enterprise and R&R
One surprising find was that the scammer operations used specialists. This makes sense because If one scammer had to carry out all of the work individually, it would take him years to develop the necessary cross-domain expertise. The substantial resource expenditure required to obtain the logistic and operational proficiency needed to support a massive scam campaign such as this would also be time consuming and intellectually prohibitive. In the scammer community, members specialize according to their interests and talents; this allows them to more rapidly reach higher levels of productivity.

The person’s roles and responsibilities in the layered scammer enterprise depend on their ranking within the organizational structure. At the lowest level, there are the ‘factory workers’ who conduct their operations in teams of 5-15 individuals in internet cafes located in the suburbs and villages surrounding Lagos and Accra. Most don’t own their equipment and pay a fee for computing resources and internet access. At the next level are the home-based operator ‘managers’ who own their equipment and manage several low-level teams. These managers are responsible for training, recruitment, mentoring, and operational support for the lower tiers.

The next level above them are the ‘supervisors’ who are responsible for maintaining proper ‘sales’ quotas, conversation rate, and logistics and the development of new scam products.

At the top of this pyramid are the kingpins who control several territories. They liaise the with senior command of law enforcement, military, media, and politicians and are considered to be the pillars of the community. They engage in wide-scale philanthropic activity such as sponsoring public works and charity.

Dr. Osei Kwame Despite Wiamoase Police Station in Ashanti Region Wiamoase Police Station donated by Osei Kwame
Image 20: The opening of the new Wiamoase Police station in the Ashanti Region. Courtesy donation by Dr. Osei Kwame.

An interesting anomaly that was later confirmed to be a wide scale trend was the frequent appearance of President Obama’s picture in many of the scammer workspace images (Image 21). Seventeen out of forty workspace images exhibited this trend. It turns out that BHO is considered to be the patron saint of the scammer industry in Nigeria and Ghana and is viewed as the ultimate scamming success story that everyone is trying to emulate.

The Office
Image 21: (L-R) Tier 3 scammers “KingKash” hard at work in the office and “Baron Osty” in a live session with a mark. Many scammers keep images of President Obama in their workspace and view him as the patron saint of the craft of the scam.

The Anatomy of a Scam
Based on the large volume of case data retrieved from the computers on Brandon’s network and the postmortem on these cases, it appears that many operators run hundreds of concurrent scams. In one example from January 2017- February 2018, a mid-level manager/supervisor named Asuaden Rich AKA “Goal Digger” (Image 22) operated over 105 simultaneous scams in the US alone with 40 of these scams paying over $630K USD. For these, “Goal Digger” assembled and used a library of over 300 stolen identities from Facebook and LinkedIn.

Between June 2018 and August 2018, Goal Digger spent on average 7 hours a day working 7 days a week, splitting his time between boarding new victims and maintaining active accounts.

The Dating Setup
Image 22: An illustration of the scam details run by a the tier 2 scammer “Goal Digger”.

Money Makes the Scam go Around
Since most victims are too embarrassed to report their ordeals, it is difficult to calculate the exact amount of money lost each year as a result of these scams. In 2013 the estimated figure was about $12.7 billion dollars. Adjusting for a modest 10% growth per year could bring it to 20 billion dollars. So, this industry makes more than the GDP of counties like Albania, Jamaica, and Afghanistan.

Just like in any other form of illegally generated revenue, the vast amounts of money that is collected from these scams must be laundered before the money can be used. In the case of the Nigerian and Ghanan networks, most of the placement, layering, and integration activity associated with money laundering took place locally via cash purchases of luxury goods, investment in large commercial and residential real estate developments, and the purchase of drugs, arms, and human trafficking. Additionally, in at least several instances, the scams were also financing Jihadi operations in Africa and overseas. 

Image 23: An example of a UK based courier services used by Brandon’s network for mailing goods and money laundering. The UK network is also affiliated with a local Stockton Jihadi mosque and recruitment center and a number of active Jihadist.

It is worthy to note that local law enforcement and financial institutions are full participants in these ventures. The scammer networks also enjoy the full support of the local media. For example, the banks and money transfer/exchange organizations that service the scammers deliberately misplace the security cameras at the branches in order to avoid capturing the faces of the scammers. They also frequently purge their VMS systems and any internal records that contain the scammer’s national identification numbers, address, or other traceable PII data.

Richard Mark Hooten AKA Nana Kwadwo Boakye EcoBank Cash Pickup
Image 24: Nana Kwadwo picking up the cash transferred via Western Union at the Ecobank branch near Medina Estate Gbagada Lagos. Camera field of view inside the teller does not capture the customer’s face.  Cameras mounted on the branch ceiling only provide a rough view of customers.

Richard Mark Hooten AKA Nana Osei Kwadwo Shows me the money The 500K Run Weekly Payment
Image 25: (L-R) Daily cash withdrawals, over $500K in freshly laundered money and weekly police and political payment bundles.

Deep Gray the Transporter
Image 26: Over a million dollars transported to Nigeria from Ghana via charted flight by a tier 1 scammer.

Scammers International
All of the Nigerian and Gahannan scammers networks examined show that they also maintain an international presence in many western countries like the US and Europe. These relationships are based on family members who either legally reside in the host country or arrive there on tourist visas. These relationships provide a home-based network with access to local organized crime for the purpose of local money laundering and goods transfer. For example, Brandon’s network included individuals in multiple cities in the US, England, Germany, Italy, Bulgaria, and France.

US Network
Image 27: One US node of the network.

Brandon’s network was also working closely with several local UN officials and aid organizations who either had their own or utilized UN and NGO trucks, planes, helicopters, and facilities to transport and store cash and drugs in and out of the country.

The International face of scamming
Image 28: Osei Kwadwo Boakye AKA Brandon Smith and his domestic and international scammer network.

The Derivative Economy
An interesting aspect of the scammer economy is its deep integration into the local marketplace.  Many of the ‘manager’ and ‘supervisor’ level scammers eventually branch out and establish a variety of legitimate businesses such as appliance and computer stores. The seed money and inventory for these ventures initially comes from the scams, but eventually as these ventures mature and develop a customer base and revenue traction they switch and operate as legitimate businesses. In one illustrative example, a scammer named “Ruona Fundz” built a small retail empire of 6 electronic stores (Image 28), all of which were managed and operated by his extended family.

The Retail Empire of Ruona Fundz
Image 29: Reselling the loot, the electronics retail empire of “Ruona Fundz”.

Network Structure and Communications
All cybercrime networks depend on the contributions of a wide cast of professionals working in concert including malware developers, scriptwriters, customer-facing operators, spammers, botnet masters, payment processors, IT, InfoSec, and, finance. These communities require efficient and reliable methods to collaborate, communicate, and coordinate by sharing tips and tricks that help them defeat security measures and evade detection.

The stratified division of labor in the scammer networks allows actors to specialize in domains for which they have natural talent. This facilitates ‘personal growth’ and the achievement of the level of expertise in their particular area of specialization beyond what could be accomplished if they were responsible for all of the elements in the scam chain. Also, the acquisition of human talent is simplified because the professional barrier of entry is lower for newcomers. As the recruits don’t have to spend significant time and money, building the capacity themselves and just have to purchase a starter kit and be productive immediately.

The traditional meeting place for cybercriminals used to be online messaging boards or web forums. There, scammers would get together, obtain support, buy technical tools like phishing kits and malware, and sell their illicit gains. Due to the effective shutdown of many of these sites by western law enforcement, this is no longer the case. This resulted in the wholesale migration of the scammer community to various peer-to-peer (P2P) messaging platforms.

The majority of the scammers on Brandon’s’ network utilized one or more of the following tools for their business communions:

  • Skype
  • Telegram
  • WhatsApp
  • Burner Phone messaging
  • Social Media messaging

Deep Grey Dead Grandma Messaging
Image 30: Bogus postings of an obituary used for email, user ID, and password exchanges.

The Scammer InfoSec
Brandon’s network had a playbook for information security that included pointers on how to secure voice and data communicators (via encrypted channels like Skype and WhatsApp) and even advice on maintaining anonymity on social media. For example, some recommendations included best practices, such as:

  • Using burner phones for all business exchanges. The burner phones are typically recycled every 3 months
  • Obfuscating their car license plate numbers in images that they share on social media
  • Always using aliases and never use their actual name in any online communication
  • Obscuring the house number and street name in images uploaded to social media
  • Recycle work computers once a year
  • Not traveling internationally especially in the US with any ‘work’ equipment
  • Disabling Geo-Tagging and GPS tracking on cellphones

Interestingly, most individuals in the network opted not to follow many of the InfoSec safeguards and precautions. In several cases, Ghana-based laptops showed up in Europe and the US. The exit nodes of these were not TOR based, and they used local hotel and residential ISPs. In two examples, laptops that belonged to “Prince Pero” and “Halid The-General” that were used for dating site scamming activity in Ghana, beaconed an IP address in Marietta, GA, and Chicago, IL. From IP address history and use, it appears that their owners came to the US, traveled there for 2-4 weeks, then headed back to Ghana, all the while continuing to scam their victims.

Burner Phones
Image 31: Extensive use of burner phones for internal communications and coordination.

car license plate obfuscation by scammers
Image 32: An example of a car license plate obfuscation by scammers in order to prevent traceability on images posted to social media.

Summary of Findings
When I started the search, I only expected to identify a handful of enterprising individuals that ran these types of scams from an internet cafe or their basement. But I was wrong. I was taken aback by the sheer scale and sophistication of these operations and the amount of revenue they generate. It also became clear that these scams are not private operations that are run by some enterprising individuals but rather a national industry that involves banking, law enforcement, the media, some UN bodies (mostly local), politicians, and local and international corporations across multiple jurisdictions.

Tracing the 1-degree operator network in the city of Madina in Ghana alone yielded over 10K individuals (total city population is about 132K) that were directly active in scamming. This represents about 7.5% of the total city population. A 2-degree linkage would triple this figure. If we account for a similar distribution across the whole of Ghana, we could potentially be looking at 15%-30% of the entire population working in or supporting scamming as a national industry. And these numbers don’t account for the impact that hundreds of millions of dollars have on the overall Ghana’s economy and political structure. It is revealing that the official 2016 -Statistical-Report-Ministry-Of-Employment-and-Labor Ghana report completely ignores this phenomenon and fails to account for this market segment/industry as a major source of national revenue.

Most of the scammers identified in the analysis fit into a specific age and socio-economic cross sections. They are between 14-30 years old, and the majority have some high school education. Many had IT training through a local network of centers called IPMC. Only a handful have college degrees, and these are mostly supervisors. The majority of the member of the network come from the surrounding villages and towns around Accra, Abuja, and Lagos.

Scamming is a family business and is based on personal relationships; this is especially the case for the low-level operators. Many of them arrive to the city in search of fame and fortune from smaller villages and live in crowded rentals with as many as 5-10 per room.

Baron Norway and the Rich Bad Boys
Image 33: “Baron Norway” and his Tier-3 “Rich Boys” team chillin’ out.

The operations have a quasi-hierarchical and fluid structure that is based on tiers. These tiers are roughly divided to the low-level teams (tier-4-5) that work in the internet cafés (which are owned by the tier-1-2 operators). They are responsible for creating the on-line profiles and generating the leads and the constant cash flow. The tier-2-3 have management responsibilities and run multiple production facilities that can range from 10-50 tier 4-5 operators. They are responsible for recruitment, training, and meeting sales quotas. The tier-1 group sits at the top of the pyramid and managers multiple tier-2-3 managers. They finance the overall operations, provide the political and security coverage, and also collect the bulk of the revenue from their territories.

The Tier System
Image 34: The scammer tier hierarchy.

This tiered structure is, to a large degree, merit based and provides for constant upward mobility. In many ways it resembles a classic sales organization: the more you sell, the higher your commission is and the faster you move up to a more lucrative tier. It is not unusual to see a tier-5 operator move to tier-2 level in just a few years. 

From rags to riches
Image 35: From rags to riches in 4 easy steps. The Cinderella success story of “Goal Digger”

The tier-1 operators only function in specific territories that are controlled by the police and politicians. They have strict “payment” responsibilities for their territory.

Fast and furious
Image 36: Examples of some of the sweet rides owned by the tier-1 and 2 scammers. The cars are exclusively Mercedes, Lexus, Land Rover, or Porsche.

The revenue collection is controlled by a strict commission structure with every individual who is involved in the supply chain taking his cut based on the following rates per transaction. 


Commission Per Transaction in Percent


~ 5

Military (if involved)

~ 7


~ 10

Political Patronage

~ 10

Tier 5


Tier 4


Tier 3


Tier 2


Tier 1


The police provides the security services to protect the carriers and money as it’s transferred to various locations in the city. The police will also provide the scammers with additional for fee ‘anti-robbery’ protection to ensure that nonaffiliated gangs won’t whack them en route from and to the bank. 

One illustrative case for this protective service (Image 36) is the altercation between the police officer Frederick Amanor Godzi and Ms. Patience Osafo at Midland bank branch in Ghana. The popular explanation for the beating she received was that she was at the bank trying to withdraw about $50 USD to buy some food for her baby grandchild and that the bank refused to give her the money. This lead to an argument with the bank manager who called the police. The policeman then proceeded to beat her up and literally kick her out of the bank. But the internal communications suggest that she was working as a lookout for an armed gang that was waiting nearby for scammers to come into the bank to withdraw large amounts of cash.

Police at the bank Pay Day
Image 37: Police beating at the Midland bank and “Crym Payys” and “Da General’s” doing the weekly cash runs.

After the initial public outcry that followed the posting of the violent video on social media, the court and the police ended up dismissing all charges against the policeman and the bank employees. The reason given was that the victim failed to appear in court to testify and cooperate with the police investigation. Ms. Osafo ended up getting a new luxury house as compensation and the bank officials even released the following statement:

“We just closed a generous offer that removes her from the ‘kiosk’ to owning a brand new house, and from the streets hawking toffees to now owning multiple bank accounts“

Ironically, Ms. Osafo’s house as well as several other developments in the Fettah Kakabra Top King estate were funded by scammer investment money.

This form of collusion between politicians, justice officials, law enforcement, and the financial institution where they ‘work things out privately’ seems to be the norm in scammer land and at least partially explains why these environments are so fertile in supporting the massive growth of the scamming industry in these countries.

Police at the Bank Beating
Image 38: The main characters of the Midland Bank police beating saga.

Law Enforcement and Scamming
The police strictly enforces ‘permits’ to operate and the payment of commissions from the scammers by partnering with the money exchanges and financial institutions. For example, the security guards employed by the electronic payment vendors are also responsible for collecting a copy of each money transfer invoice that is cashed to ensure proper accounting of all payments. As can be seen from Image 39, the failure to pay or any attempts of cheating is dealt with promptly and severely.

Protection Money
Image 39: Money collection and the payment of ‘protection money’.

The payment to the scammers varies based on KPI such as closing rate, month to month performance, and seniority. The banks, police, and other facilitators such as the UN/NGOs, and politicians typically deduct their commissions at the teller. What is left is then distributed among the hierarchy on a weekly basis. The final form of payment can take different forms including cash (in local or foreign currency), drugs, or even gold bars.

Payment Methods
Image 40: Forms of payment include pre-paid bank cards (Access Bank), gold bars, cash, pre-paid cards, drugs, electronic funds transfer, pre-paid ecommerce cards, laptops, and phones.

Real estate development
Image 41: Example of large scale money laundering operations through investment in residential development projects in Ghana. The Qyarifa development, one of dozen such projects cleared over $12 million USD through the sale of units each going for $65K-$100K USD.

International Travel
Image 42: International travel and coordination with local scammer teams. Global scammer networks are located in many major cities in the US, Europe, and Asia

Show me the money
Image 43: “Crym Payys” at home piling up the cash and bling.

There is no silver bullet solution for keeping vulnerable individuals safe online but there is a lot that we can do to strengthen our ability to disrupt and destroy the scammer networks. International cooperation is important in tackling this ever-growing form of cybercrime but ultimately it is important to remember that some UN personnel, diplomats, government policymakers, NGO’s, politicians, media, and local law enforcement officials in the host countries are the largest financial beneficiaries of this industry and are themselves part of the problem.

As the data suggest, the solution to the scammer challenge is not to use more law enforcement to post-fact persecute the perpetrators but rather to preemptively disrupt and destroy these networks before they become operational or drain them financially once they are active. This is a classic OODA loop problem that every large western intelligence organization deals with every day. Even the scope of gathering, processing, and analyzing national security information from around the world fits in squarely with the capabilities and charter of agencies like the CIA and NSA which already collect this type of intelligence and operate on it in similar environments internationally.

The public attitudes toward cyber scammers influences the way that government, law enforcement and commercial companies regard cybersecurity in general. If they think that the public does not perceive cyber scamming to be a serious threat to their personal wellbeing, then they won’t place a high priority on regulation, enforcement, and platform security.

Although history doesn’t repeat the same exact tune, it does tend to play the same scales over and over again. In 75 BCE, the 25-year-old Julius Caesar was sailing the Aegean Sea when he was kidnapped by Cilician pirates. According to Plutarch, the pirates asked for a hefty ransom for his release and Caesar sent several of his friends to Rome to gather the silver, a task that took 38 days. Caesar told the pirates that after he was set free, he would hunt them down and hang them. Once he was freed, he made good on that promise: he quickly raised a fleet in Miletus and went right back to Pergamon where he had been held captive. He captured the pirates and as he promised ordered that they be crucified.

The moral of the story is that cybercrime is the modern version of piracy and the only effective way to deal with it is with diligence and force. The pirate infestation of the cost of Somalia is a good illustration of what happens when these type of problems are not dealt with promptly. The current approach of trying to combat international on-line fraud by relying on international treaties, the Interpol, and UN resolutions amounts to little more than standing in a malaria-infested swamp and swatting at individual mosquitos.

You can rest assured that there is no need for Caesar’s brutal form of punishment to solve this problem. Following these six easy steps is guaranteed to quickly drain the international scammer swamp:

  1. Place OFAC sanctions against key cybercrime, political, UN, NGO, and law enforcement personal involved in the scamming activity.
  2. Shutdown the access of the cybercrime facilitating states to internet services like SWIFT, Airline Reservations System, etc. for several days/weeks as a warning.
  3. Start an international media campaign to inform the scammer sponsoring governments that their continues support for this industry would have severe consequences to their economy.
  4. Create and maintain a real-time database (using a framework such as demonstrated here) of all known scammers and arrest them when they attempt to travel internationally. The required bond for their release should be the total amount they scammed plus interest. That money should then be electronically transferred back to the victim’s accounts.
  5. Create a provision to allow victims to bring civil actions for negligence against dating site and social media hosters.
  6. Bring RICO, mail and wire fraud, and money laundering charges against the C-level executives/board members of the US-based money transfer companies that are the lifeblood of these scams.

Finally, If you are reading this Captain Brandon, it was fun while it lasted, but I don’t think that this relationship is going to work out, it just wasn’t meant to be chéri. 


I'm not that kind of a girl

XRVision Sentinel AI Platform: Face recognition, image reconstruction, and object detection
The Disclosure–Intimacy Link in Computer Communication: Human Communication Research
Understanding Romance Fraud: Insights From Domestic Violence Research
Generating and Tuning Realistic Artificial Faces: ML based face generation by Rani Horev
A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks: T. Karras NVIDIA
A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks: Cornell University
Generative Adversarial Networks: Cornell University

Articles and Sources About Online Romance Scams
Better Call Harry: Stolen Heart, Stolen Identity
This Army Veteran Became The Face Of Military Romance Scams. Now He’s Fighting Back
Brown County Browser: Don’t fall for veterans romance scams
Fake US Soldiers Robbing Women Online
How a billion-dollar Internet scam is breaking hearts and bank accounts
“Prince Charming” Behind Bars: Nigerian Romance Scammer Nets 27-Year Prison
Love a man in uniform? Online dating scammers hope so
Love me don’t: the West African online scam using U.S. Soldiers
Australian grandmother on drug ice charges in Malaysia: Maria Elvira Pinto Exposto may be victim of a military romance scam

Copyright 2019 Yaacov Apelbaum, All Rights Reserved.