‘A Romance Scammer Left Me $850,000 in Debt’: How Fraudsters Target Homeowners To Drain Their Equity

In early 2023, Anola Johnson had just returned from a trip to Paris and life was good.

She had a job she loved, two adult sons with whom she was close, and a group of friends.

She was also in a healthy financial position—she not only had around $300,000 in retirement accounts, but her home north of Salt Lake City was only two years away from being paid off in full.

Then in March, she received a "hello" message out of the blue from a man on LinkedIn. "Pedro" was a handsome, well-dressed, bespectacled gentleman in his mid-to-late 50s, and his profile said he was a freelance oil rig engineer.

"He had a great smile," Johnson tells Realtor.com®. "Like somebody you could totally trust. It was all very benign at first. I thought LinkedIn was safe."

From that benign start on a professional platform, Johnson would become ensnared in a highly sophisticated international romance and investment scam of the type that steals at least $2.1 billion a year from unsuspecting victims, an eightfold increase since 2020, according to the Federal Trade Commission.

Romance scams, which often blend with investment scams and are colloquially termed "pig butchering," tend to be vastly underreported due to the victim feeling deeply ashamed.

In general, these scams are perpetrated by teams of people working abroad—Nigeria and Ghana are the capitals of romance scams but they exist all over—who are experts at separating targets from their money.

Photos and videos of real people are stolen from their online profiles and used to lure in (or "catfish") victims. Increasingly, however, AI is being used to create a convincing but fake human face, voice, and even video.

Within nine months of that initial greeting from "Pedro," Johnson—an educated woman who made a good living as a global travel specialist—would lose nearly everything she had.

"I didn't know people could be so evil," she says.

Anatomy of a romance scam

Within two weeks of their first communication on LinkedIn, Pedro declared his love for Johnson via text message.

The speed he was moving—plus their age gap (Johnson was 67 when he contacted her)—made her feel a bit uncomfortable, but Johnson's skepticism began to erode under the warm glow of Pedro's unremitting interest.

Multiple times a day, he would check in with her—asking about her day, inquiring about her health, and telling her how much he thought about her. He also had a tragic backstory that gained her sympathy—his parents had died when he was young, and his wife had died from cancer.

Soon, Johnson found herself entranced by what she believed was the beginning of a serious, albeit long-distance, relationship. Pedro said he lived hundreds of miles away in San Diego, though he claimed he'd been born and raised in Spain.

Occasionally, he told her things that didn't quite add up, such as that his young son attended school in Texas, not San Diego. But Johnson assumed the child was in boarding school.

Early on, Pedro made a point of telling Johnson that he was financially secure—raking in around $500,000 a year as an oil rig engineer.

At the time, she thought it was odd he would reveal his salary to her, but chalked that up to cultural differences.

The telltale signs

The pair had a video call—but because of connectivity issues on his end, Johnson only saw Pedro's face for a few moments. "It looked like the man on the LinkedIn profile," she says. "But he was far away from the camera."

This didn't bother her too much. Pedro's "Spanish" accent was thick, so she preferred they communicate over text message anyway. And the pair were making plans to meet in person.

But before they could meet, Pedro informed her that he'd been offered a lucrative job in Abu Dhabi. As proof, he sent her a document showing that he would be paid a whopping $6 million for his services.

Although Johnson found the amount almost suspiciously staggering, she figured she did not know anything about oil rig work and perhaps this is was industry standard.

And, by now, Johnson was fully under Pedro's spell. The bombardment of daily text messages declaring his love—like nothing she had ever received from a romantic partner before—had completely won her over.

"I was infatuated with him," she says.

Additionally, he was spinning a vision of a future that would include world travel and marriage. After a few months, he suggested that to help fund this future, they should invest together. And he knew of the perfect investment, one that had made friends of his a lot of money: cryptocurrency.

"I raised an eyebrow to that," she says. "But I also wanted to please him. I thought we were building a relationship."

Johnson decided to cash out a $100,000 IRA account she says wasn't doing well anyway. She then sent half the money to a crypto platform, one that, to her untrained eye, looked perfectly real. Pedro had supposedly put in an equal amount.

In reality, Johnson's $50,000 had been siphoned off by Pedro, and the platform she was looking at was a sophisticated fake. As her initial investment began to grow by leaps and bounds, she was not suspicious.

"I'd heard of people making a lot of money in crypto," she says. "Overnight millionaires."

The returns were so impressive that when Pedro asked for another $50,000 to invest with an even more lucrative crypto company, she sent him the rest of her IRA funds. And again, she watched as her money grew exponentially—unaware that she was looking at a sham platform controlled by the scammers.

"Everything was going great," she says. "There was no reason to question anything."

But, in hindsight, there was. For one, after doing a reverse image search on one of Pedro's photos, Johnson saw that his face was attached to multiple social media profiles.

But Pedro explained that away, telling her that his image had been stolen.

"I was making all kinds of excuses [for him]," she admits. "By then, I'd been manipulated enough and I wanted this thing to go forward. I was totally under his spell."

The acceleration of a romance scam

A couple of weeks later, Pedro told Johnson that he needed her help.

Since his internet service on the oil rig in Abu Dhabi was weak, he asked if Johnson could log in to his bank account and transfer funds for him to his suppliers.

"I see that he has over $4 million in his account," says Johnson. But she was looking at a convincing fake bank account.

She wired $1.4 million to another bank in Singapore, one that supposedly belonged to Pedro's supplier. All went smoothly, so he asked her to repeat the transaction with a different supply company.

On the third request, Pedro's "bank" locked her out. "I'm thinking I did something wrong," she says.

Pedro told Johnson not to worry, that he would sort out the issue.

But then he had more bad news. He told her that his bank required him to appear in person to unlock his account. Since Pedro was in Abu Dhabi for the month, he asked Johnson if she could loan him $100,000 to pay his suppliers, promising to pay her back with interest.

Convinced that Pedro had the funds to refund her money—after all, she'd just seen what looked like his very bloated bank account—she agreed, and cashed out a second IRA. This time, the funds were wired to a bank in Seattle—another supposed "supplier."

At this point, Pedro's requests for money became unrelenting. With him apparently unable to access his bank account, and needing to pay his many suppliers, Johnson began to fund his business operations, all with the promise that she'd be paid back with interest.

"It just went on and on like that," she says. "He always needed money for something."

The end stage of the romance scam

After a few months, Johnson ran out of funds. However, she had one remaining asset she could tap into—her nearly paid off house.

Johnson's bank approved her for the largest available home equity loan—80% of the value of her home, or $350,000.

While a loan officer did ask her what she needed the money for, Johnson said home improvements. Pedro had instructed her not to reveal the real reason she needed funds, telling her that the bank may refuse the loan.

Convinced she needed to help her "boyfriend" out of his financial jam, especially as she felt his locked bank account was her fault, she pressed on, using large chunks of her home equity loan to send to various U.S. banks—all of which supposedly belonged to Pedro's suppliers.

A lender's responsibility

Banks do have a fiduciary responsibility to their customers. Investment and financial services, and even cryptocurrency platforms, must adhere to Know Your Customer (KYC) standards.

Financial institutions are required to know the type and purpose of customer relationships and create risk profiles to spot suspicious activities, according to Investopedia.

Due to their high dollar amounts, real estate transactions have become popular targets for scammers, who have done everything from hijack wiring information to impersonating borrowers to steal equity.

"Licensed mortgage professionals have a fiduciary duty to their clients, and seniors represent a protected class that requires a higher level of diligence," Doug Perry, a strategic financing adviser at Real Estate Bees and a mortgage finance industry expert, tells Realtor.com.

"One of the early questions in the lending process is to ask the borrower what they are doing with the money, so right from the get-go a lender can be a line of first defense in a scam."

Johnson admits that bank staff did ask her questions—even, at one point, asking if she had met the recipient of her wire transfers in person. She said she had.

However, by this time, Johnson was living in an alternative reality. She says the bank's questions were not forceful or direct enough to override her singular mission to help her "boyfriend" get out of his jam.

Today, she believes if someone in a position of authority had sat her down and firmly told her she was in the grip of a scam—and explained in clear language how these scams worked—then she might have snapped out of it.

She notes that her frequent wire transfers for large sums were completely uncharacteristic and out of her typical decades-long banking patterns—in fact, she had only ever once before wired money and that was for only $1,000.

"I'd been at that credit union for 20 or 30 years—and I just paid my bills and did the mundane things in life," she says.

While banks will often cut off relationships with customers they feel are being scammed—and this is exactly what eventually happened with Johnson—it often comes too late to save the victim's money.

Perry agrees that Johnson's extremely large equity loan for "home improvements" and her history of mundane banking that suddenly switched to frequent and large sums being wired not to home contractors but to out-of-state banks, should have been a red flag that something was deeply wrong.

"At some point, the bank or the fraud department should have said, 'This is unusual. Let's tap the brakes here,'" he says.

The wake-up call

In December 2023, Johnson was at work when she got a call.

A law enforcement agent told her he was working on a case and found a package of electronics that Johnson had mailed to Texas. He asked her if she was aware that the package was being diverted to Nigeria.

Alarmed, Johnson told him that no, she had sent the package to her boyfriend's son in Texas as a Christmas present. But her heart sank because, in that moment, it all started to make sense to her.

"At this point, I knew that Pedro wasn't Pedro—and he had taken everything from me."

After she was able to get her wits together, she called the agent back and told him all that had been going on. Between the agent's information and her own research, the full scope of Johnson's betrayal became undeniable.

"Pedro" was a scammer or team of scammers likely based in Nigeria—where her package to Pedro's nonexistent son was being diverted—who had posed under a false identity using stolen photos of an innocent man.

Johnson thinks the one video call she had with Pedro—when she briefly saw his face—was AI generated.

By the end of the nearly yearlong scam, Johnson was out around $850,000, including multiple credit card advances.

Thanks to financial help from her brother, she was able to pay off her credit card debt. And she converted her home equity loan to a lower-interest mortgage refinance loan. Still, her monthly payments on her house surged from $1,000 to $2,700. Her home won't be paid off until she's 97.

"At this point, I have nothing," she says. "I've been stripped of everything."

In February, she even lost her job—something she attributes to the immense amount of stress she was under while in the throes of the scam.

"My head wasn't in the right place," she says.

Johnson admits she hit a bottom so low that she considered ending her life—but felt she couldn't do that to her children.

Fighting back

Romance scams are a crime not well understood by those who don't experience them. Victim blaming and ridicule is common, and the victims often carry an immense burden of shame.

In 2025, a French woman scammed out of her life savings in a celebrity romance scam—the scammer used images of actor Brad Pitt to catfish—was so roundly mocked online that a French television broadcaster withdrew a documentary about her.

"In retrospect, it's very embarrassing," Johnson says. "The last thing I wanted to do was tell my family—or anyone."

But rather than keep silent, she has chosen to use her experience to warn others.

Johnson started a podcast called Romance Scam Rebellion, where she not only shares her scam story, but interviews other victims.

"You can't let these scammers win," she says. "You've got to fight back."

If you think you could be the victim of a romance scam, learn the signs and how to report it here. Johnson has a GoFundMe to try to recover financially.