Romance scammers stole his face to pull in $1.4m. Then victims came for him

Hunter Bigham is a father of three who lives with his husband, Johnny, in Tupelo, Mississippi, and works as a sales executive for a furniture manufacturer. He is also, unwillingly, one of the most recognizable faces in online romance fraud. For more than eight years, scammers have lifted his photographs to build hundreds of fake profiles, and the victims who eventually tracked him down have credited him with roughly $1.4 million in losses. He is not the scammer. He is the bait.

The Palm Springs evening where it caught up with him was quiet until a woman's scream cut across the sidewalk, aimed straight at him: 'I TOLD her you weren't real!' Her friend had fallen for a stranger online passing off Hunter's photos as his own. Hunter told her he didn't know her friend, that he was a happily married gay man, and that he was a victim too. At the peak, he says up to 15 victims a day contacted him from the United States, Spain, Venezuela and Hong Kong — cancer survivors, a retired cop, a CEO. Some threatened to hurt him, his family and themselves.

The scammers gave him names: Vince, Roberto and, most prolifically, Henry Clerk, sometimes spelled Clark. The Associated Press found 177 Facebook accounts using his photos as profile pictures. He has been cast as a widowed petroleum geologist in Houston, a Spanish secret agent named John, and, conveniently, an oil rig worker stuck at sea while the landlocked pine for him.

His attempts to fight back have mostly bounced. Requests to internet platforms to remove the fake profiles have been largely rejected, and his complaints to the FBI got him nowhere. He has also been told he could stop it by erasing himself from the internet, a suggestion he rejects. '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.'

He is not the only one carrying the fallout. Bryan Denny, a retired U.S. Army colonel whose pictures romance scammers have used for a decade, co-founded Advocating Against Romance Scammers, which he says has reported more than 3,000 fraudulent profiles of him to Facebook and backed a recently enacted law requiring dating apps to warn users when they talk to someone banned for suspected fraud. '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. Even investigators aren't immune: Rebecca Keithley, who retired in July from the FBI's Financial Crimes Section, was impersonated twice this year on Instagram and Facebook, and says the account was only removed after FBI leadership contacted Meta — then restored about a week later.

Meta told the AP it removed more than 179 million accounts, pages and groups for misrepresenting identity in the first half of 2026, most before anyone reported them, and that new AI tests cut reports of the most impersonated celebrities by over 80%. In Keithley's case, Meta said its systems detected and disabled the impostor account but reinstated it in error. LinkedIn said 99.7% of the fake accounts it removes are shut down before a report. Hunter has some sympathy for the scammers themselves, recognizing many are trafficking victims held in prison-like compounds, but none for the platforms. 'I hold the most responsibility for the platforms,' he says. 'They could stop this today.' A poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found 98% of Americans suspect they have been targeted with scam messages.