James Scott Geras can still remember the day he got the voicemail: If I ever catch you near my wife again, I am going to slit your throat.
It was 2015, the same year Geras had relocated to Palm Springs, California, about 480 miles south of his former home in San Francisco. He was alone in his art gallery’s office and had just started his workday by checking his messages. The male voice, tinged with a Southern-sounding accent, stopped him cold: I’m going to slit your throat.
Geras, who had never been in a fight in his life, eyed the front door of his 430-square-foot gallery. Anyone could walk in off the street. Can I get from my desk to the front door and lock it before someone comes in? he thought. There was nowhere for Geras to hide, so he darted to the door and locked it. His heart was pounding.
Geras was pretty sure he knew why the caller, who never showed up, was so angry. In 2014, he started to receive a flurry of Facebook messages from confused, mostly female strangers who thought that they knew him personally. The messages initially didn’t bother Geras; they were infrequent and it was relatively easy to clear up his mistaken identity. “I didn’t really think much of it,” Geras said. “Then it started happening more and more and more.”
By the time Geras listened to the threatening voicemail, he knew what was behind it. A number of women were convinced that they were in an online, romantic relationship with Geras, despite the fact that he is openly gay and had never been in touch with any of them before. The women claimed to have met him on a dating app, social media platform, or a less-expected online space, like an app-based word or puzzle game (Words With Friends is popular with scammers)—anything with a chat feature. What the women didn’t know was that the 50-something fellow with the goatee who smiled back at them in photograph after photograph wasn’t the same person they were speaking with. Their charming lover was a scripted character used by gangs of overseas fakers to bilk cash from unsuspecting romantics, and Geras’ stolen photos were the bait.
The messages to Geras began after the victims started to suspect something might be off about their long-distance beau—his stories didn’t line up, he asked for too much money, or one of their friends or family members expressed their suspicions. It wasn’t too hard to find the real Geras from his photos; a quick reverse image search leads right to content from his Instagram, where he posts under the handle “barnabysdaddy.” In one case, a woman told Geras that it was her daughter that uncovered the scam after hearing about her mother’s five-month, long-distance romance and doing “some researching.” Even still, it was too late. “He got everything I had except for my home,” she wrote of the scammer.
Some women thought they were corresponding with their would-be lover on a secondary social media account, while others were concerned that it was Geras who had stolen their boyfriend’s identity. But they didn’t seem dangerous—mostly, they were just rude. “The meanest messages that I get are from the religious people that I’m gonna go to hell,” he said. “One woman left this message saying, ‘I hope you die of AIDS.’” Another woman Geras spoke to confessed that, had he not been able to convince her of his innocence, she would have shown up at his door. Geras said she told him, “I was ready to get in my car with my family and come knock some sense into you.”
Geras shares his experience with a small subset of men, all of whom have been targeted by a very specific and insidious form of identity theft: Their real photos are stolen from their social media accounts and used by con artists in a ruse that began in the early days of social media. The women taken in by these schemes may be the primary targets, but the men whose images are used to lure them are the unseen collateral victims.
One of the earliest people to have his identity stolen on social media and used in a romance scam was likely 59-year-old Victor, whose last name is being withheld for privacy reasons. Like Geras, Victor has received innumerable messages from women he has never met. Most of them, Victor said, find him after eventually learning how to reverse image search. All of the women were desperate to reach the man they loved—many intending to confront him.
“If you’re the same guy that friended [me] on Facebook, I must say you are a smooth talker,” one woman’s message began. “You shattered my trust in men and now I have to repay the loans I took out to help you. I never should have done that.”
Another wrote, “Now that I found you and can expose you, you do need to ‘make things right!’ I could show up in person!”
Victor has been hearing from romance scam victims since approximately 2007, and long ago figured out that he should have a form letter at the ready. “Hello,” he responds in a copy-and-pasted message. “If this response sounds somewhat standard, it’s because it is. I have to respond to notes like yours 2-3 times per month on average… First of all…..YES, I am aware that my photos have been stolen and are being used in romance scams on Facebook and many other social media and dating apps. I have [been] dealing with this [for] close to 10 years.”
Several times, Victor has found his photos posted on women’s Facebook profiles, along with loving captions. “‘Everybody, I’d like to introduce you to my fiancé,’” Victor recalled reading on one profile. “And a multitude of comments underneath it: ‘Congratulations, you two make a beautiful couple.’” At the time, Victor was married to his first wife, who had adjusted to the weirdness of the situation. “I was beside myself,” he said. “That’s when I really get upset, when my picture is not only out there with a fake profile, but when there’s women associated saying that they’re in a relationship with me or, in this case, engaged to me. It just blew my mind.”
Victor was a familiar face to Ruth Grover, who started the Facebook group ScamHaters United in 2014, to help expose scammers. In the years that she’s been running ScamHaters United—its “About” page promises to “SAVE EVERYONE FROM ROMANCE SCAMS”—Grover has amassed a staggering archive of fake profiles, and she has noticed patterns in the photos that scammers use. She remembered seeing Victor’s face “right from the beginning,” and said he is one of “the originals”—the first group of men whose photographs were used in romance cons. “[Victor’s photos] just worked for them,” she said. “He had a look. And there is a look.”
Essential to “the look” is what Grover calls an “open” face—based on the photos, this means a genuine smile and kind eyes. The most popular men are predominantly white and slim to medium in build. Victims targeted by romance scammers are, according to the FBI, “predominantly older widowed or divorced women,” and to lure in this demographic, scammers will choose men who, like Geras and Victor, have well-groomed, salt-and-pepper hair. Once con artists find a picture set that works, they are likely to stick with it. “There’s a guy called Richard Terry, and he’s a doctor in Australia,” Grover recounted of a man whose pictures have been in use since at least 2010. “There must be about six pictures of Richard, but there’s about 106 Photoshopped pictures of Richard on other people’s heads and things like that. Poor Richard. He is everywhere—still as popular as ever.”
One man’s photos will be used to represent a vast, but predictable, array of personae. Victor’s likeness has been attached to a stable of stock characters across the scammer universe: an American working in Africa to build an orphanage, an engineer far from home on an oil rig, a deeply Christian widower. Each persona presents as charming and exceptionally attentive, showering victims with love and promises as the scammer sets them up for the payoff. “You’re so beautiful that everyman [sic] would want to hold hands with you someday,” a scammer using Victor’s photos reportedly wrote to a victim. “If I were to present your picture in heaven, most of the Angels would hide their faces in shame.”
The FBI reports that victims of romance scams are typically “computer literate and educated,” but also “emotionally vulnerable.” Seniors are popular targets because they tend to “have more cash savings and a tendency to be trusting” and “less informed about online scams,” according to the National Council on Aging. Con artists will often go after people who post personal information about themselves on dating and social media sites, the details of which they can use to exploit and manipulate.
“Beware of the perfect gentleman,” warned a user documenting the use of Victor’s photos on a forum called Scam Victims United in 2013. “He used the fact that I am a Christian woman and my love for God to rope me in. We used to discuss the Bible in depth, pray together and talk for hours.” The user, who went by the handle “truthseeker,” sent the mystery man an undisclosed sum of cash before realizing she’d been scammed. “He runs a very sophisticated web of lies,” truthseeker continued. “Although I’m out of money, I will not seek vengeance on him. I will pray for his salvation, forgive him and move on.”
Victor theorizes that scammers first downloaded the photos from his Myspace page, back when the platform dominated the then-emergent social media landscape. The first scam using his pictures that he knows of was during the height of Myspace’s reign in 2007, as reported by a victim in the forum Romance Scams.
Visual identity theft has always been a crucial part of most romance scams. Early on, scammers figured out that photos of real men like Victor and Geras were believable vehicles for giving their…
