Romance scammer in North Texas sentenced to 37 months for preying on elderly victims
A romance scammer who at times worked out of North Texas and with ties to a Nigerian organized crime syndicate which preyed on elderly victims across the country was sentenced on Monday to more than three years in a federal prison, a federal official said Tuesday
Emanuel Stanley Orji, a 36-year-old green card holder born in Nigeria, received a sentence of 37 months in federal prison from Chief U.S. District Judge David Godbey, who also ordered him to pay $418,030 in restitution to his victims.
U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Texas Leigha Simonton said Tuesday that Orji had pleaded guilty in September to conspiracy to commit wire fraud. He was charged alongside 10 co-conspirators in a large-scale operation that the FBI began investigating in September 2021.
His brother, 38-year-old naturalized citizen Frederick Orji, pleaded guilty to the same crimes and received the same sentence in December, Simonton said in a Tuesday news release.
Federal officials said the organization ran the operation from Jan. 24, 2017, to July 11, 2017, and took hundreds of thousands of dollars from victims.
According to federal court documents, the Orjis and their co-defendants preyed on elderly victims, many of whom were widowed or divorced in states such as California and Michigan.
The Orjis and others assumed fake names and trolled dating sites like Match.com and Bumbledate.com, searching for targets.
Once they had ingratiated themselves with their victims, they concocted sob-stories about why they needed money such as taxes to release an inheritance, essential overseas travel, and crippling debt — and then siphoned money from victims’ accounts, tens of thousands of dollars at a time.
Some banks they used were in Arlington and DeSoto, according to court documents.
In plea documents, Orji admitted that once he and his conspirators had depleted the victims’ accounts of all the funds they were willing and able to send, often emptying their entire savings, the defendants stopped communicating with the victims.
Five additional defendants are awaiting trial, which is set for March 20.
The FBI estimates that more than 20,000 people lost more than $600 million in romance scams in 2020 alone.
For tips on how to protect yourselves and your loved ones, visit the Federal Trade Commission’s romance scam webpage. To report a suspected romance fraud, file a report via the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center at www.ic3.gov.
This story was originally published January 10, 2023 at 12:39 PM.
