Twin brothers from Ghana and an American woman have pleaded guilty to taking part in an international criminal network that ran romance fraud schemes against victims who were mostly older Americans, including at least one resident of Edgerton in Williams County. The scams, which prosecutors say involved roughly $9 million, also reached victims across 24 other states plus Austria and Germany.
The alleged conduct ran from about July 2024 to April 2026, with the defendants accused of using dating sites and social media to build relationships through fake identities before seeking wire transfers. The three pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud; each faces a maximum of 20 years in prison, with sentencing set for Feb. 9 and 10, 2027. The investigation involved the FBI Cleveland Division and law enforcement agencies in Ghana, among others, as described in the U.S. attorney’s office announcement.
The guilty pleas were part of a $9 million fraud case targeting older Americans. Victims included an Edgerton resident in Williams County, with others across two dozen additional states as well as Austria and Germany.
Fake Romances and Gold Inheritance Stories
Court records and related reporting describe how conspirators built fake romantic personas and spun stories involving gold inheritances to convince victims to send money. According to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of Ohio, as detailed by cleveland.com, victims sent money to accounts controlled by the conspirators, with some of the proceeds and merchandise ultimately routed to Ghana.
One earlier case involved a Cuyahoga County man who was sentenced to prison for his role in romance fraud schemes that also targeted elderly victims throughout Northern Ohio and elsewhere, per the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of Ohio. That case, involving Abdoul Issaka Assimiou of Parma, ended with a 63-month federal prison sentence, three years of supervised release, and an order to pay $220,485 in restitution to 15 victims, the same cleveland.com report notes.
The Ohio case is not the only recent federal prosecution involving romance fraud linked to Ghana. In July, Derrick Van Yeboah, a Ghanaian national, was sentenced to 85 months in prison for his role in a separate international criminal organization; prosecutors said he personally took more than $10 million through romance scams. In 2019 and 2020, he induced an Ohio woman and a Delaware woman to transfer about $4.2 million, the Southern District of New York said.
A Broader National Problem
In San Diego, a separate federal case produced guilty pleas from 11 defendants, including lead defendant Hua Wang, in a $65 million multinational fraud and money laundering scheme targeting elderly victims across the country, including in San Diego.
The scale of the problem shows up in federal data as well. The FBI received 23,159 confidence and romance fraud complaints involving $929.3 million in reported losses last year, according to the same cleveland.com account, and people age 60 and older alone filed 10,188 of those complaints, reporting $584 million in losses. Nearly 60% of people who lost money to a romance scam in that period said the contact began on a social media platform, the report states.
The FBI’s 2025 figures show an increase from the prior year: its confidence-and-romance category recorded 23,159 complaints and about $929.3 million in reported losses, compared with 17,910 complaints and about $672 million in 2024. The category covers confidence fraud as well as romance scams, and the totals reflect complaints filed with the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, not a count of every scam or loss. The figures appear in the FBI’s 2025 Internet Crime Report.
Older adults can face substantial financial harm from scams.
