Hunter Bigham has been credited with roughly $1.4 million in losses among the romance scam victims who have tracked him down.

He is not the scammer.

He is the face the scammers stole.

For more than eight years, fraudsters have lifted his photographs to build hundreds of fake online profiles, using them to extract money from lovesick men and women. When victims finally discover the deception, many go digging, and the trail leads them to Hunter. People like Hunter are the highly visible front of the scammers’ schemes.

As victims of identity theft, they are almost entirely unseen, and they are left to deal with the consequences by themselves. The Palm Springs evening was quiet until a woman’s scream cut through it, as piercing as if she had seen a ghost. Her shriek flew across the sidewalk and startled Hunter Bigham, who was waiting with his husband to cross the street.

He glanced over his shoulder and tried to work out who the woman, now beelining toward him, was screaming at. “I TOLD her you weren’t real!” she shouted, eyes locked on Hunter. “I TOLD her you weren’t real!” In that moment, Hunter understood: he was the ghost, the source of the chaos.

And he understood why. By this point, the woman’s story was grimly familiar to him. Her friend had fallen in love with a stranger online who was passing off Hunter’s photos as his own. The woman had been trying to convince her friend that the romance, and Hunter’s supposed online persona as her romancer, were not real.

Hunter told the woman he did not know her friend. He told her he was a happily married gay man. And he told her that he, too, was a victim of romance scammers: not as their financial target, but as their unwilling bait. Some victims, wrongly convinced that Hunter is the scammer, threaten to hurt him, his family and themselves, threading dread through his daily life.

One victim cursed furiously at Hunter, said he knew where he lived and vowed to destroy his son’s career. At the peak, Hunter says, up to 15 victims contacted him a day. They came from the United States, Spain, Venezuela, and Hong Kong. They have been cancer survivors, a retired cop and 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 Facebook accounts using Hunter’s photos as profile pictures. The scammers have cast him as a widowed petroleum geologist in Houston. They have cast him as a Spanish secret agent named John. Frequently, and conveniently, they cast him as an oil rig worker, stuck at sea while the landlocked lovelorn pine for him, or rather, for the person they believe 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 it 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 attached to his face began to sink in. So did the futility of his attempts to stop it. His requests to internet platforms to remove the fake profiles have been largely rejected. 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.

So 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.” A rainbow flag adorns the back porch of Hunter and Johnny’s home, flapping in a breeze that is 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 now that he knows 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 people 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. Very 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 romance scammers have used 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 requiring dating apps to warn users when they talk to someone banned for suspected fraud.

Denny, who believes thousands of people are used as scammers’ bait, understands Hunter’s guilt. Denny says it’s his image being used to defraud people. Beyond the guilt lies 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. The Facebook account used her name and photos, yet Meta repeatedly determined it did not violate its community standards, Keithley says.

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.”

Such scams plague other platforms too, but Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, is the world’s largest social media company. In a statement to the AP, Meta said that in the first half of 2026 it removed over 179 million accounts, pages and groups for misrepresenting identity, most of which it removed 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 reinstated it 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 anyone reports them. Hunter has some compassion for the scammers themselves. He recognizes that many are trafficking victims forced to work in prison-like 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 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. At first, Hunter was flattered, assuming the impersonators thought he was handsome and were emulating him to gain followers. Soon, though, the people contacting him said they were losing money. He realized it was something more sinister: scammers were using him.

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 had 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 because, for so long, it had seemed unattainable to him. Raised as a Southern Baptist to believe that homosexuality is a sin, he had 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 were 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 could not 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. 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, alongside 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, and some 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, a burgeoning unease grew. One woman told Hunter he was coincidentally near her home on a business trip when she realized she’d been scammed.

She wrote that she would have fainted if she had bumped into him. “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 week-long 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 did not 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. Hunter baited Kyle by asking: “What do you look like?”

Kyle responded with a series of photos, all 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, the FBI staffer told him there was little they could do, he says. The FBI told the AP it could not comment on individual complaints.

He debated whether to shutter his social media accounts. But then the scammers could keep using the photos they already had, and victims would have virtually no way to find the real Hunter. He also 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 had video calls with people who looked like him.

They sent him passport photos bearing his image but strangers’ names. The scammers’ net grew so wide that seven people Hunter knew told him his impersonators had approached them online. One day, his boss at the furniture manufacturer told him 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 as his husband fixated on the pain of strangers.

Those worries escalated sharply in 2022, when 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 had rented in Nice, France. Hunter approached carrying a cup of gelato, flanked by his 25-year-old daughter, her three friends and Johnny. The gelato was a deliberate choice, to make the meeting appear more casual and less consequential. For a year, the woman had believed Hunter’s face belonged to the man she loved.

For another year, she had 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, looking at her. “She’s just sad.” He invited the woman up to their apartment. Johnny rolled his eyes, because the couple had agreed beforehand that the meeting would happen in public.

But the woman seemed harmless, and Hunter did not 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 a geologist from Florida named Bryce Kane approached her on LinkedIn.

Staring at his photo, she was struck by the warmth in his eyes, which were 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 video-called her. She received a call from a woman who said she was Bryce’s daughter and urged her to help her father.

Bryce said he was leaving for Venezuela to work aboard a ship. He needed money to pay his employees’ 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 surreal sense of disbelief. 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 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 had 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 would ruin the young man’s career. He sent a photo of Hunter and his son, altered to align with the scammer’s backstory. Hunter sent him the original image and 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 replied sympathetically. “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 sent the voicemail to a lawyer. But the man’s messages kept poisoning his inbox. “I’m contacting your workplace,” he warned. “Do they know you’re 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 others used to hurt them.

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 calls her “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 laughs often at 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 online presence, though she would prefer 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 on his mind. 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.

They eat the pasta, clear the plates, 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.