Scammers stole his face to steal $1.4m. Now heartbroken victims are hunting him down

ملخص مفصل

For eight years, romance scammers have stolen one Mississippi man's photos to create hundreds of fake online profiles that have been used to trick lovesick men and women out of their money

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Hunter Bigham has been credited with roughly $1.4 million in losses among the romance scam victims who have tracked him down.

For more than eight years, fraudsters have lifted his photographs to build hundreds of fake online profiles, using them to extract money from lovesick men and women. When victims finally discover the deception, many go digging, and the trail leads them to Hunter. People like Hunter are the highly visible front of the scammers' schemes.

As victims of identity theft, they are almost entirely unseen, and they are left to deal with the consequences by themselves. The Palm Springs evening was quiet until a woman's scream cut through it, as piercing as if she had seen a ghost. Her shriek flew across the sidewalk and startled Hunter Bigham, who was waiting with his husband to cross the street.

He glanced over his shoulder and tried to work out who the woman, now beelining toward him, was screaming at. “I TOLD her you weren’t real!” she shouted, eyes locked on Hunter. “I TOLD her you weren’t real!” In that moment, Hunter understood: he was the ghost, the source of the chaos.

And he understood why. By this point, the woman's story was grimly familiar to him. Her friend had fallen in love with a stranger online who was passing off Hunter's photos as his own. The woman had been trying to convince her friend that the romance, and Hunter's supposed online persona as her romancer, were not real.

Hunter told the woman he did not know her friend. He told her he was a happily married gay man. And he told her that he, too, was a victim of romance scammers: not as their financial target, but as their unwilling bait. Some victims, wrongly convinced that Hunter is the scammer, threaten to hurt him, his family and themselves, threading dread through his daily life.

One victim cursed furiously at Hunter, said he knew where he lived and vowed to…

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