Romance Scammers Turned a Texas Man Into an Unwitting Money Mule

TYLER, Texas—Garrick Stafford had been texting all summer with a woman he met online, a redheaded makeup artist named Sarah Williams. Then she asked for $150 to pay her cellphone bill.Romance Scammers Turned a Texas Man Into an Unwitting Money Mule“Oh, crap,” thought Stafford, a quality inspector at a machine shop in this East Texas city known as the Rose Capital of America. “Someone’s asking for money right off the bat.”So he blocked her for months. “My mistake,” he said later, “was unblocking her.”Once he let her back in, they spent nearly two years texting about movies and making plans to meet—though it never seemed to work out. And she kept asking for money.Then one day last October, as he and his siblings were at a funeral home choosing an urn for their father’s ashes, Stafford, 49, got an unexpected message. Markus Johnson, an investigator with the Richland County Sheriff’s Department, about 900 miles away in Columbia, S.C., wanted to talk.Johnson had been working a case involving someone scamming a company out of about $21,000. Why, Johnson wanted to know, had that money ended up in Stafford’s account?“That was for my girlfriend,” Stafford replied, then caught himself. All his nagging doubts suddenly rushed to the surface.As scams surge nationwide, the “lonely hearts” ruse remains a classic: Con artists, who could be prisoners on contraband cellphones or overseas syndicates, prey on vulnerable people seeking companionship.Increasingly, though, thieves do more than drain the victim’s savings; they use them as a foot in the door to the U.S. financial system and turn them into conduits to launder money for other plots.“They’re looking for a U.S. citizen with a pulse,” Johnson said. “If that person happens to have some money they can steal in the process, that’s an added bonus.”Romance scams also help U.S. criminals avoid attention from banking regulators by spreading ill-gotten gains across more accounts, said John Breyault, vice president of the National Consumers League. “Romantic interest is a very strong emotion,” he said. “Scammers recognize this and devote a lot of time to develop the trust needed to exploit the victim.”‘Please baby’Stafford, a soft-spoken churchgoer, loves motorcycles, camping and fishing. He lives in a bus-size motor home—a remnant of his time on the road as a welding inspector for large construction projects.When “Sarah” first sent him a friend invitation in May 2023, the come-on was so casual it didn’t raise alarms. “She started off, ‘just tell me about yourself,’ ” he recalled. “She wasn’t, like, overly flattering or anything.”Stafford said he knows he’s not the best-looking guy or wealthy enough to attract attention from someone as glamorous as Sarah, whose pictures included fashion and bikini shots. “Why would you want to be with an overweight, broke dude?” he texted at one point. “I’m struggling as it is…I couldn’t afford a family right now if I wanted to.”Still, the attention felt good. Typically around 11 each night, they would text about what they had for dinner or their future. Phone calls were rare, he said, “like pulling teeth.”Stafford still isn’t sure why he didn’t cut her off for good after that first request for money, but by Christmas that year, he realized he missed her. Once they reconnected, though, the asks only grew. Several thousand dollars for a seminar in digital design. Seed money for an antiques business. Medical costs for her sick mother.Over nearly two years, Stafford drained $15,000 of his savings and ran up another $15,000 in credit-card debt. He even applied for a $55,000 loan. “I have good credit, but thank God they only approved $35,000,” he said. His late father helped clear the credit-card balance, but he is still chipping away at the loan.Meanwhile, Sarah also had another use for him: collecting payments for her antiques business.In February last year, when she asked for his bank account and routing information so she could direct $2,000 into the account, he tried to draw a line in the sand.The next day, he sent his account details.From there, things got worse. Whenever a payment arrived in Stafford’s account, Sarah would frantically press him to move the money into various crypto wallets—sometimes requiring him to leave work. He briefly set up other accounts, but banks, suspecting illegal activity, would soon freeze them.Still, Sarah always had a reason why she couldn’t open her own accounts or make the transfers herself—citing bad credit or a move to London from Miami. In all, Stafford said, about $50,000 moved through his account or others she had him set up, while another $100,000 in bad checks she sent him bounced.Stafford’s experience follows a pattern. Victims or other accomplices typically shift money from their own accounts into crypto wallets controlled by the scammers, who then might split the money into smaller batches and move them through other accounts to complicate the trail. In Stafford’s case, the money ended up in overseas bank accounts, where Johnson’s warrants couldn’t reach them. That helps explain why scam victims often have little chance of recovering their losses.Some unwitting accomplices become criminals. In 2021, an 81-year-old Missouri woman pleaded guilty to identity theft after helping a man she considered her long-term love interest, despite never meeting him and getting repeated warnings from banks and law enforcement that he was using her for his rip-offs.Gut feelingBack in Columbia, Investigator Johnson, an army veteran turned trenchcoat-wearing gumshoe, had been looking into the case of a local home builder scammed out of about $21,000 by a fraudster using an email address just slightly different from a brick supplier. The increasingly common ruse has ensnared businesses and even local governments.When Johnson traced the calls and emails behind the rip-off, the trail led to scammers in Nigeria. When he followed the money, it led to Garrick Stafford in Texas.“Sarah,” it turns out, wasn’t a Miami makeup artist. “She” was a married couple in Nigeria, who had taken turns playing his love interest—sometimes letting AI answer his texts, Johnson’s investigation found. And the antiques business was just another front in a web of deceit that used dozens of lonely people like Stafford as unknowing money launderers.When Johnson’s call came, Stafford felt anger and betrayal, but also something else.“It was actually a big relief,” Stafford said. “I’d had this gut feeling for a long time. It wasn’t love toward the end. I was being used like a mule.”After connecting with Stafford, Johnson kept digging. Through warrants, he mapped the scammers’ myriad emails, phone numbers and crypto accounts, and messaged the fraudsters to let them know he was on their trail—insinuating he would sit back and see who would crack first to make a deal.Panicked, one scammer drafted a formal letter, denying any knowledge of illegal activity and pledging to help the investigator any way he could.The swindler also recorded all his calls, which gave Johnson transcripts of the group trying to get their stories straight and scrambling to remember which phones or computers they used for various ploys, and debating which devices to destroy.“They start calling each other, turning on each other, freaking out,” he said.Johnson contacted officials in Nigeria to try to hand the case to someone who could actually prosecute it, but got no response. He also tried to get the U.S. State Department Office of Special Investigations in Nigeria to help. He forwarded his findings but never heard what happened with the case.The State Department didn’t respond to requests for comment. Earlier this month, the Justice Department announced the arrest of dozens of people and elimination of 3.7 million social-media accounts in an operation targeting West African scammers, with the help of international law enforcement and tech companies.Nothing she can doFinally, Johnson reached the redheaded woman whose photo led Stafford to dream of a less-lonely life.“She’s got a normal office job, but previously had done some modeling. Somehow they got ahold of the photos,” Johnson said. “When I was trying to track down who she was, there was just site after site after site of these classified or dating ads that were all people using her photos to try to scam more people.”The woman, who declined a request for an interview, told Johnson she had sympathy for the victims—members of her own family had been scammed in the past—but said there’s nothing she can do now to regain control of her image.Write to Joe Barrett at Joseph.Barrett@wsj.com