Scammers stole his image to lure the lovesick. Then the lovesick came looking for him

TUPELO, Miss. (AP) — The peace of the Palm Springs evening was shattered by the woman’s scream, as piercing as if she’d seen a ghost.

Her shriek tore across the sidewalk, startling Hunter Bigham, who’d been waiting with his husband to cross the street. Glancing over his shoulder, he tried to work out who the woman — now beelining toward him — could possibly be screaming at.

“I TOLD her you weren’t real!” she shouted, eyes locked on Hunter. “I TOLD her you weren’t real!”

It was then that Hunter knew: He was the ghost, the cause of the chaos. And he knew why.

The woman’s story was, by this point, grimly familiar to him: Her friend had fallen in love with a stranger online who was using Hunter’s photos as his own. The woman had been trying to persuade her friend that the romance — and Hunter’s supposed online persona as her romancer — were not real.

Hunter assured the woman that he didn’t know her friend, that he was a happily married gay man, and that he, too, was a victim of romance scammers: not as their financial target, but as their unwilling bait.

For more than eight years, romance scammers have stolen Hunter’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 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.

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 furiously cursed at Hunter, said he knew where he lived and vowed to destroy his son’s career.

At its peak, Hunter says, up to 15 victims a day contacted him. They have come from 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 Associated Press found 177 accounts on Facebook using Hunter’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.

In the days after the Palm Springs incident, the enormity of the fraud associated with his face began to sink in, as did the futility of his attempts to stop it. His requests to internet platforms to remove the fake profiles have been largely rejected, and his complaints to the FBI have gotten him nowhere.

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.

“I worked so hard to get where I am and to accept myself for who I am,” he says, his voice breaking. “It nearly killed me. And I just — I just can’t go back there again.”

—

The rainbow flag adorning the back porch of Hunter and Johnny’s home flaps in a breeze that’s losing its battle against Mississippi’s sticky summer heat. The couple put it there as a symbol of gay pride.

That pride was hard-won after Hunter’s long struggle to shed the shame he felt over being gay. Those feelings of shame have resurfaced amid the knowledge that his image is being used to con the vulnerable.

“People just don’t understand the depth of it and the breadth of it,” he says. “It goes really, really deep, but it also goes really wide because it takes in so many people’s lives.”

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 Hunter’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.

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. The group backed a recently enacted law that requires dating apps to warn users when they are talking to someone who has been banned for suspected fraud.

Denny, who believes there are thousands of people used as scammers’ bait, understands Hunter’s guilt: It is his image, Denny says, being used to defraud people. Beyond guilt is anger.

“I spent 26 years in a uniform to fight bullies, to fight people who took advantage of other people — only at the end of that to have my pictures in my uniform used to do the very thing that I detested,” he says.

Not even those who investigate scammers are safe. Rebecca Keithley, who retired in July from her role as an assistant section chief in the FBI’s Financial Crimes Section, says she was impersonated twice online this year, on Instagram and Facebook. Though the Facebook account used her name and photos, Keithley says Meta repeatedly determined the account did not violate its community standards; it was removed only after FBI leadership contacted the company.

Around a week later, the same fraudulent account was restored. Meta again initially declined to remove it, she says, and it took another intervention to get it taken down.

“I’m at a loss for what to do,” Keithley says. “I have no confidence in Meta’s security’s ability to do anything.”

While such scams also plague other platforms, Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, is the largest social media company in the world. 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. It also said new 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.

In Keithley’s case, Meta said its systems initially detected and disabled the impostor account but it was reinstated in error. As for Denny, Meta said it is continually improving detection and enforcement with fake accounts.

LinkedIn — another platform used by Hunter’s impersonators — told the AP that 99.7% of the fake accounts it removes are shut down before a report is made.

Hunter has some compassion for the scammers; he recognizes that many are trafficking victims forced to work in prisonlike compounds. But he has no patience for internet platforms like Meta, which he says could prevent fraudulent profiles by requiring people to provide identification. (Meta told the AP it aims to limit the amount of sensitive information it collects.)

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

But they haven’t. And so Hunter became committed to dealing with it himself — one victim at a time.

—

The chaos began in 2018, with the arrival of a string of mysterious online messages: Was he in London? Berlin? Sydney? the strangers asked. He wasn’t. But accounts featuring his face were posting from far-flung locations.

Hunter was initially flattered, assuming the impersonators thought he was handsome and were emulating him to gain followers.

But soon, the people contacting him said they were losing money. He realized this was something more sinister: He was being used by scammers. And he suspected they were using him for reasons far less flattering than he first thought.

“I realized it’s not because I’m so good looking,” he says. “It’s just because I am so average that I look attainable.”

Indeed, while some victims said they’d been drawn to Hunter’s looks, many were drawn more to the attention the posers provided.

“Hunter, I fell in love. And I was a fool. You are now the only one who knows the extent of it,” wrote one woman in 2019, a cancer survivor who lost $75,000 to a scammer who had insisted he was Hunter’s (nonexistent) identical twin. “I am retired and have no way to replenish this money.”

His agony is clear in his response: “I’m just at a complete loss. … My heart is just breaking. I wish I could help somehow,” he wrote. “I feel partly responsible.”

That responsibility compelled him to reply to every victim. He reassured the heartbroken that they were worthy of love.

He felt kinship in their longing for real love; for so long, it had seemed unattainable. Raised as a Southern Baptist to believe that homosexuality is a sin, he’d spent decades denying who he was. He married his childhood sweetheart, and they had three children. When she found out about his sexuality, she was crushed. He wondered whether it would be easier on his family if he was dead.

At her urging, he met with staff at a “conversion therapy” program; the discredited practice attempts to suppress a person’s sexuality and has been widely condemned as dangerous by mainstream medical associations.

Unnerved, he saw a Christian counselor instead, then spent six weeks in a treatment facility for sex addiction.

When it became clear therapy couldn’t turn him straight, he and his wife divorced. He let go of his self-hatred, dabbled in modeling and moved across the street from his ex to be near his children.

He knew who Johnny was long before they met online. At the time, Johnny was one of the most prominent adult film actors in the industry. Like Hunter, he had once been married to a woman. His first gay relationship was with his divorce attorney – and the attorney’s boyfriend – as part of a throuple.

Hunter knew within 30 minutes of meeting Johnny in person that he was the one. Johnny moved in with him three months later.

The duo started producing adult content together. Shirtless photos of Hunter became a staple of his social media, along with more typical proud dad posts about his kids.

The scammers seemed to favor him fully clothed, using photos of him on business trips and alongside his children. “The gayer my posts got, the less they used of it,” he says. So he minimized photos featuring his family and maximized those featuring his flexed abs.

But the victims kept rolling in, some of whom found the humor in their situations.

After realizing the face — and body — of the man she loved belonged to an adult film actor, one great-grandmother congratulated Hunter on his nude physique.

“Not as notable as my first husband,” she wrote, “but deserves an applause.”

Others, though, were devastated by all they had lost.

“I am not beautiful and I felt you were out of my league,” one woman wrote. “Just for a short time I felt like Cinderella and your photo was my Prince, midnight is past and I will treasure my memories of being loved.”

His response is gentle. “You seem to have a kind, trusting heart, so I hope that doesn’t change despite bad people taking advantage of you,” he wrote. “You are indeed beautiful!”

Yet alongside his sympathy was a burgeoning unease. One woman told Hunter that he was coincidentally near her home on a business trip when she realized she was being scammed. She would have fainted if she’d bumped into him, she wrote.

“I think it’s going to happen one day,” he told her. “That I cross paths with a victim who thinks I should know them or that somebody is going to unload a gun through my window.”

At the heart of his anxiety were the victims who refused to believe he was a pawn rather than a perpetrator. His stomach knotted at the arrival of each new message, some of which snowballed into weekslong exchanges in which he tried to persuade the victim he was not the enemy.

He wondered how far this could possibly go.

—

As the losses deepened, of money and of hope, Hunter grew desperate to shut it all down.

He reported the fake profiles to Facebook, he said, but the platform repeatedly told him they didn’t violate community standards and removed only a handful. (Meta told the AP it removed four accounts Hunter recently reported and is investigating his case.)

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

He asked victims for the scammers’ phone numbers and tried tracking them down. After Hunter posed as a potential victim, one scammer, “Kyle,” promised to pay off his debt if Hunter sent him credit card details.

He baited Kyle by asking: “What do you look like?” Kyle responded with a series of photos – of Hunter.

Enraged, Hunter 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 it couldn’t comment on individual complaints.)

He debated whether to shutter his social media accounts. But then the scammers could just keep using the photos they already had, and victims would have virtually no way of finding the real Hunter.

He acknowledges a less benevolent motivation: He uses social media to promote his work in the adult content industry. Beyond that, he says, vanishing from public view felt like being forced back into the closet.

“It’s the shame, or the resistance of it, that has kept me from disappearing off of social media,” he says, voice cracking as he begins to cry. “Because if I disappear, then it’s admitting the shame.”

By 2020, the scammers had become more sophisticated. Victims told Hunter they’d had video calls with people who looked like him. They sent him pictures of passports bearing his image but strangers’ names.

The scammers’ net grew so wide that seven people Hunter knew told him they’d been approached online by his impersonators.

One day, his boss at the furniture manufacturer told him that someone had contacted the company insisting that Hunter owed them money. Worried the job he loved was at risk, Hunter explained that the person was a scam victim.

He stopped talking about it much, even to Johnny. In a rare moment, one victim acknowledged Hunter’s suffering alongside her own.

“I feel as bad for you guys having your identity stolen as I do for all of us having our hearts and money stolen,” she wrote.

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.

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.

Those worries escalated sharply when, in 2022, Hunter came to him with a request: A victim in Switzerland had asked to meet him in France during their upcoming family vacation. Was that OK with Johnny?

It was not. This has gone too far, Johnny replied.

But Hunter assured him the meeting would be quick. And maybe it could answer some of his questions — about who these victims really were, and why they kept falling for his image over and over again.

—

She was waiting for Hunter in the dark, standing outside the holiday apartment he’d rented in Nice, France.

Hunter, flanked by his 25-year-old daughter, her three friends and Johnny, was carrying a cup of gelato as he approached — a deliberate choice to make the meeting appear more casual, less consequential.

For a year, the woman had believed Hunter’s face belonged to the man she loved. For another year, she’d tried to reconcile the two versions through her correspondence with the real Hunter.

But as soon as she saw Hunter’s smile, her anxiety melted. “This beautiful man really does exist,” she thought.

Hunter’s nerves calmed, too. “She’s not crazy,” he thought as he looked at her. “She’s just sad.”

He invited the woman up to their apartment. Johnny rolled his eyes; The couple had agreed beforehand that the meeting would happen in public.

But the woman seemed harmless, and Hunter didn’t want to have an emotional conversation on the street. So they gathered in the living room. She gave them chocolates from her village and shared her story.

She was a mother of two in a rocky marriage when she was approached on LinkedIn by a geologist from Florida named Bryce Kane. Staring at his photo, she was struck by the warmth in his eyes — Hunter’s eyes.

“It all felt kind of like a fairy tale,” she told the AP on the condition that her name be withheld to protect her children’s privacy. She fell in love.

“I’m so ashamed of it,” she says now. “But that’s how it was.”

She is a finance professional who has taken courses on internet fraud and warned her own clients against making questionable payments. But Bryce seemed genuine. He sent her a picture of his passport, and had a video call with her. She received a call from a woman who said she was Bryce’s daughter, urging her to help her father.

Bryce said he was leaving for Venezuela to work aboard a ship. He needed money to pay his employee’s wages. She was eventually drained of 48,000 euros ($54,000).

It unraveled when she noticed Bryce was also communicating with another woman online. She began digging and found three more profiles bearing Bryce’s photos. “Bryce” eventually admitted he was a scammer from Nigeria.

In the French apartment, Hunter sought to assuage her shame. “You’re not alone in this,” he told her.

Next to him, Johnny’s worries had given way to empathy and a sense of the surreal. How odd, he thought, to be talking to someone who once believed she was in love with my husband.

Their meeting ended in an embrace. She walked away in tears, relieved.

“They’re both so great,” she says now of Hunter and Johnny. “I love them to pieces.”

Hunter, too, was relieved. He felt like he finally understood the who and the why behind the strangers who contacted him. But he had no desire to meet any others.

“I’m not the person they fell in love with,” he says. “And I don’t want to be.”

—

Yet where there has been love, there has also been hate.

The first venomous messages from the American man arrived as Hunter was preparing to depart for France. He’d lost $600,000 to a scammer who had groomed him for more than three years. And he was certain that scammer was Hunter.

The man assailed him with insults and threatened to turn him into the FBI. He mentioned Hunter’s oldest son by name and said he was going to ruin the young man’s career. He sent a photo of Hunter and his son that had been altered to align with the scammer’s backstory. Hunter sent him the original image, explained that the photo had been manipulated. Yet the man continued to rage before dissolving into despair.

“I (fell) in love with you,” he wrote. “Now I want to kill my self.”

Despite the abuse, Hunter’s reply was sympathetic. “I’m sorry for that. I can put you in contact with plenty of others in your situation. You’re not alone in this.”

The man again threatened suicide. Hunter suggested a paper trail might help investigators track the money.

“It all went by bitcoin,” the man wrote. “Goodbye”

One day, while on a business trip, Hunter noticed he had a voicemail. He pressed play.

“After what you put me through … you don’t think I’m gonna let this slide?” the man’s voice sneered into his ear. “There’s no way in hell I’m gonna let this slide.”

For three minutes the man ranted, threatening to report Hunter to his boss and issuing expletives about Hunter’s sexuality.

“You, my funny friend, better come up with the 600,000, and get it to me, in cash,” he said, voice rising into a shout: “You got it? YOU GOT IT?”

Hunter felt panic swelling. He was away from home. Was his family safe?

He sent the voicemail to a lawyer. But the man’s messages continued to poison his inbox.

“I’m contacting your work place,” he warned. “do they know your a scammer”

Hunter begged him to contact the FBI and to save all his conversations and documents. The man’s reply chilled him.

“Does the police know where you live in MS,” he wrote. “I do.”

Hunter blocked the man’s number and profiles, preventing further contact.

Everything felt like it had gotten out of control. His sleep was plagued by nightmares.

Not wanting to frighten his children, he kept the threats to himself. He acknowledges his silence was also self-preserving: He didn’t want his kids to hate him for posting photos of them that had been used to hurt others.

When his youngest daughter was 4, he nearly lost her in a car crash that killed his mother. Though she is now 25, he still refers to her as “the baby” and remains fiercely protective. And yet he admits his posts have exposed her to possible harm.

One recent morning, Hunter sends her a photo of the two of them that scammers have altered to make her look pregnant. She laughs. “That’s actually insane,” she replies. “My boobs look good though!”

She frequently laughs over the absurdity of it all. But behind her laughter is genuine concern. Unlike her father, she is deeply private and spoke on the condition that her name not be used.

“I don’t know them — or what they’re capable of,” she says of the victims. “The threat is very real.”

She is torn over her father’s presence online, though would prefer that he not post photos of her.

“He has a family and I understand he wants to share that,” she says. “But it is kind of a double-edged sword.”

—

It is just after dawn and the glow from Hunter’s phone has woken Johnny, as it does every morning. Next to him in bed, Hunter is immersed in his ritualistic message checking, though until today Johnny didn’t realize 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?

“I honestly didn’t know the extent of it until today,” Johnny says, voice trembling. “He keeps a lot in.”

Hunter pats his partner’s arm.

“I’m OK,” Hunter tries to assure him. “I’m just kind of numb to it at this point.”

Johnny wipes away tears and clasps his husband’s hand. He used to love listening to Hunter laugh in his sleep. He hasn’t laughed in a long time.

“I’d just like it to be over,” Hunter says.

The next 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.

After temporarily defaulting to auto-replies, he has returned to responding fully to many victims. He recently consoled a Canadian woman battling cancer who lost 265,000 Canadian dollars ($190,000).

He knows he can’t continue like this. Not long ago, his boss told him that they needed the old Hunter back.

Over plates of pasta, Hunter and Johnny ponder their options.

“I’ve got to do something to make it stop for the kids because now it’s starting to really affect them,” he says. “They don’t like it and I don’t blame them.”

If he goes offline, at least it wouldn’t be in his face. But, Johnny tells him gently, it would still be in his thoughts.

The only thing that will stop it, Hunter says, is if the internet platforms change their policies. But both he and Johnny admit that’s unlikely.

“I don’t know what else to do because I’m a dude in Mississippi with no power,” Hunter says.

He lets out a rueful laugh.

“I think we’re faced with this for a very, very long time,” he says.

“Probably forever,” Johnny replies.

“Probably forever,” Hunter agrees.

The pasta is eaten, the plates are cleared, and Hunter is back on his phone, his thumb returning to its relentless, rhythmic swiping of the screen, waiting with dread for the arrival of another victim’s pain.

___

Associated Press journalist Allen G. Breed in Williamsburg, Va., contributed to this report.

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This story is part of an ongoing collaboration between The Associated Press and FRONTLINE (PBS) that includes the documentary “Scammed.” Watch the documentary at pbs.org/frontline, in the PBS App and on FRONTLINE’s YouTube channel.