PHOTO ESSAY: How being used as romance scammers' bait upended one man's world

TUPELO, Miss. (AP) — The victims knew him as a widowed petroleum geologist in Houston. An oil rig worker in Scotland. A Spanish secret agent named John.

Each online persona was fake, concocted by romance scammers to trick the lovesick out of their money. And each bore the face of one man: Hunter Bigham .

For more than eight years, romance scammers have stolen Hunter’s photos to create hundreds of fake online profiles. When many victims realize they’ve been duped, they dig — eventually finding Hunter. The losses he’s tallied just from victims who have contacted him have reached roughly $1.4 million.

As the face of scammers’ schemes, people like Hunter are highly visible. As victims of identity theft, they are virtually unseen, left to handle the fallout alone: Hunter’s requests to internet platforms to remove the fake profiles have been largely rejected, and his complaints to the FBI have gotten him nowhere.

Some victims, wrongly believing that Hunter is the scammer, threaten to hurt him, his family and themselves, injecting a thread of dread into his daily life. One victim from Switzerland flew to France where Hunter was vacationing with his family just to see that he was real.

The real Hunter Bigham is a father of three who lives with his husband, Johnny, in Elvis Presley’s hometown of Tupelo, Mississippi. He spends his time not on oil rigs, but on the phone as a sales executive for a furniture manufacturer. He also spends his time on social media posting photos of himself and his family — and promoting his side hustle, as he calls it, in the adult entertainment industry.

For a gay man in the American South who fought to live his true identity, the theft of it has been particularly agonizing — as has the suggestion that he try to stop the scammers by erasing himself from the internet. Vanishing from public view, he says, feels like being forced back into the closet.

At its peak, he says, up to 15 victims a day contacted him. He feels compelled to reply to every victim, reassuring the heartbroken they are worthy of love.

His message-checking became a protective mechanism against aggressive victims he sought to calm before things escalated. Vicious or depressing messages could tank his mood for the day.

He stopped talking about it much, even to Johnny. Silence felt simpler than trying to explain an experience so alien to most.

Johnny absorbed his partner’s emotional shrapnel. Soft-spoken and nurturing, he is a worrier who became even more so amid his husband’s fixation on the pain of strangers.

Each morning, Johnny wakes to the glow of Hunter’s phone as Hunter begins his ritualistic message-checking from bed. Until recently, Johnny didn’t understand what was really happening inside his husband’s mind.

What’s happening is this: Are any of the victims about to kill themselves? Are any coming after my family? How can I defuse the ticking time bombs in my inbox?

One recent night, sitting amid thousands of fans at a Mississippi State football game, thoughts about the scammers invade Hunter’s mind, cutting through the chaos of the crowd’s clanging cowbells, the Dolly Parton tributes, the thumping of the marching band’s bass drums. He tries to check his messages, but the network is overloaded.

He knows he can’t continue like this. But he's at a loss for how to stop the scammers from scamming, and how to stop himself from caring.

Beyond his sense of responsibility to the victims is his feeling of kinship toward them, over their shared shame and longing for love. Raised as a Southern Baptist to believe that homosexuality is a sin, finding true love had long seemed unattainable to him.

“I understand after coming out, thinking that I will never have it myself, what it is like to finally find it — or think you found it,” he says, of love, ”... and that you will do anything in the world to protect it.”

This is a documentary photo story curated by AP photo editors.