What to know about the innocent people romance scammers use as bait

TUPELO, Miss. (AP) — By now, most Westerners have heard about the victims of romance scams: the people conned out of their money after falling in love with fake online personas created by scammers.

Much less is known about the other victims of romance scams: the innocent people whose images are stolen and used to create those fake personas in the first place.

For more than eight years, romance scammers have stolen Hunter Bigham’s photos to create hundreds of fake online profiles that have been used to trick lovesick men and women out of their money. When many victims realize they’ve been duped, they dig -- eventually finding Bigham. The losses he’s tallied just from victims who have contacted him have reached roughly $1.4 million.

Some victims, wrongly believing that Bigham is the scammer, threaten to hurt him, his family and themselves, injecting a thread of dread into his daily life.

As the face of scammers’ schemes, people like Bigham are highly visible. As victims of identity theft, they are virtually unseen, left to handle the fallout alone.

The Associated Press has documented the largely invisible impact on these victims. Here’s what to know from AP’s story :

The men and women conned by scammers using Bigham’s photos have come from across the world: the United States, Spain, Venezuela, Hong Kong. They have been cancer survivors, a retired cop, a CEO. They knew him not as Hunter, but as Vince, Roberto, and — perhaps most prolifically — Henry Clerk. Under that name alone (sometimes spelled Clark), the AP found 177 accounts on Facebook using Bigham’s photos as their profile pictures.

The scammers have claimed he is a widowed petroleum geologist in Houston. A Spanish secret agent named John. Frequently — and conveniently — they claim he is an oil rig worker, stuck at sea while the landlocked lovelorn pine for him ... or, rather, the person they think is him.

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. It is from these social media posts that scammers have stolen Bigham’s photos to create their fraudulent profiles.

Dealing with the torrent of messages from victims who hunt him down and demand answers has become all-consuming. At its peak, Bigham says, up to 15 victims a day contacted him. He feels compelled to respond to each one, partly to protect himself and his family from angry victims who think he is the one who conned them.

One man, who lost $600,000 to a scammer and believed Bigham was the one who scammed him, threatened to derail Bigham’s son’s career, told Bigham he knew where he lived, and said he wanted to kill himself.

One woman in Switzerland who was conned by a scammer using Bigham’s photos flew to France, where Bigham was vacationing with his family, to meet him in person so she could assure herself that he was real.

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 erase himself from the internet to starve the scammers of his image. Beyond his belief that the scammers would just continue using old photos of him, vanishing from public view feels like being forced back into the closet, he says.

He tried to shut the scammers down by reporting the fake profiles to Facebook. But the platform repeatedly told him the profiles didn’t violate community standards, removing only a handful of them. (Meta told the AP it removed four accounts Bigham recently reported and that it continues to investigate his case.)

He tried watermarking his photos; the scammers stripped them off.

He filed a report with the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center and called the local FBI office. But apart from advising him to share the agency’s contact details with victims, he says, the FBI staffer told him there was little they could do. The FBI told the AP that it couldn’t comment on individual complaints.

Bigham says platforms like Meta could stop the creation of fraudulent profiles by requiring people to provide identification before creating an account.

“I hold the most responsibility for the platforms,” he says. “They could stop this today.”

Few in the Western world are untouched by scams. Ninety-eight percent of Americans suspect they have been targeted with scam messages, according to a poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

Little is known about those whose images make such scams possible. But Bigham’s experience is not unique, says Bryan Denny, a retired U.S. Army colonel whose pictures have been used by romance scammers for the past decade.

Denny believes there are thousands of people used as scammers’ bait. His life, too, has been upended by victims who have harassed him and his family. In response, he co-founded the group Advocating Against Romance Scammers, which he says has reported more than 3,000 fraudulent profiles of Denny to Facebook.

In a statement to the AP, Meta said in the first half of 2026, it removed over 179 million accounts, pages and groups for misrepresenting identity — the vast majority before anyone reported them — and that new advanced AI tests cut reports of the most impersonated celebrities by over 80%.

“We fight impersonation on our platforms because it’s not good for us or the people and businesses that rely on our services,” a Meta spokesperson said.