“I felt so betrayed and ashamed of myself that I’d fallen for a scammer,” said Alice, a woman from Australia. “And that I’d parted with so much money.”
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — Over the last several years, “romance scams” have become much more common, where people will use dating profiles or intimate relationships to try and scam people out of their money.
It happens all over the world, but for one Grand Rapids man, he was scamming women around the world, and he didn’t even know it—his picture was being used on fake accounts.
13 ON YOUR SIDE Reporter Keely Lovern spent weeks digging into this international story that has connections in West Michigan, Texas, Australia and even to the FBI.
“This is the epitome of catfishing,” said Stella Albarez.
In 2019, Stella Albarez was recently divorced, and joined a dating app to get back out there. That’s where the San Antonio native met a man in his 50s named Henry Lloyd Wright, who said he was an architect from Austin.
“It was pretty surface-level for the whole time,” said Albarez. “Nothing like heavy romance, but a little flirty, and it didn’t take long.”
They communicated for a few weeks, but the whole time, Albarez…
