99.7% of the fake accounts LinkedIn removes are shut down before a report
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. Though the Facebook account used her name and photos, Keithley said Meta repeatedly determined the account did not violate its community standards; 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 said, and it took another intervention to get it taken down. “I’m at a loss for what to do,” Keithley said. “I have no confidence in Meta’s security’s ability to do anything.” Meta told The Associated Press that its systems initially detected and disabled the impostor account but it was reinstated in error.
Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, is the largest social media company in the world. 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 — the vast majority before anyone reported them — and that 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. LinkedIn — another platform used by Bigham’s impersonators — told the AP that 99.7% of the fake accounts it removes are shut down before a report is made.
As the losses deepened, of money and of hope, Bigham grew desperate to shut it all down. His own requests to internet platforms have been largely rejected. He reported fake profiles to Facebook, he said, but the platform repeatedly told him they didn’t violate community standards and removed only a handful. Meta told the AP it removed four accounts Bigham 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 Bigham posed as a potential victim, one scammer, “Kyle,” promised to pay off his debt if Bigham sent him credit card details; when Bigham baited Kyle by asking, “What do you look like?”, Kyle responded with a series of photos of Bigham. Enraged, Bigham 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, he says, an FBI staffer told him there was little they could do. The FBI told the AP it couldn’t comment on individual complaints.
Bigham has some compassion for the scammers themselves; he recognizes that many are trafficking victims forced to work in prisonlike 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,” Bigham said. “They could stop this today.”
The scale of what he was up against became visible on a sidewalk in Palm Springs, California, where Bigham was waiting with his husband to cross the street when a screaming woman bore down on him, shouting, “I TOLD her you weren’t real!” It was then that Bigham knew he was the ghost, the cause of the chaos — and he knew why. The woman’s story was grimly familiar: Her friend had fallen in love with a stranger online who was using Bigham’s photos as his own, and the woman had been trying to persuade her friend that the romance was not real. Bigham assured the woman that he didn’t know her friend, that he was a happily married gay man, and that he, too, was a victim of romance scammers — not as their financial target, but as their unwilling bait.
For more than eight years, romance scammers have stolen Bigham’s photos to create hundreds of fake online profiles used to trick lovesick men and women out of their money. When many victims realize they have been duped, they dig, eventually finding Bigham. The losses he has tallied just from victims who have contacted him have reached roughly $1.4 million. Some victims, wrongly believing Bigham is the scammer, threaten to hurt him, his family and themselves, injecting a thread of dread into his daily life. One victim furiously cursed at Bigham, said he knew where Bigham lived and vowed to destroy his son’s career. At its peak, he says, up to 15 victims a day contacted him, from the United States, Spain, Venezuela and Hong Kong; they have been cancer survivors, a retired cop, a CEO. They knew him not as Hunter, but as Vince, Roberto, and — perhaps most prolifically — Henry Clerk, a name sometimes spelled Clark, under which The Associated Press found 177 accounts on Facebook using his photos as profile pictures.
The scammers have claimed he is a widowed petroleum geologist in Houston, a Spanish secret agent named John and, frequently and conveniently, an oil rig worker stuck at sea while the landlocked lovelorn pine for him — or rather, for the person they think he is. 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, posting photos of himself and his family on social media and promoting, as he calls it, his side hustle in the adult entertainment industry.
As the face of scammers’ schemes, people like Bigham are highly visible. As victims of identity theft, they are virtually unseen, left to handle the fallout alone. Few 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. Nor is Bigham’s experience unique, said Bryan Denny, a retired U.S. Army colonel whose pictures romance scammers have used for the past decade and whose life has been upended by victims who harassed him and his family. Denny co-founded Advocating Against Romance Scammers, which he says has reported more than 3,000 fraudulent profiles of him to Facebook, and the group backed a recently enacted law requiring dating apps to warn users when they are talking to someone who has been banned for suspected fraud. Denny, who believes there are thousands of people used as scammers’ bait, put it this way: “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.” Meta said it is continually improving detection and enforcement with fake accounts.
The chaos began in 2018, with a string of mysterious online messages: Was he in London? Berlin? Sydney? strangers asked. He wasn’t, but accounts featuring his face were posting from far-flung locations. Bigham was initially flattered, assuming the impersonators thought he was handsome and were emulating him to gain followers. But soon the people contacting him said they were losing money, and he realized he was being used by scammers — for reasons far less flattering than he first thought. “I realized it’s not because I’m so good looking,” he said. “It’s just because I am so average that I look attainable.” Indeed, while some victims said they had been drawn to Bigham’s looks, many were drawn more to the attention the impersonators provided. By 2020, the scammers had become more sophisticated: victims told him they had held video calls with people who looked like him and sent him pictures of passports bearing his image but strangers’ names. The net grew so wide that seven people Bigham knew told him they had been approached by his impersonators, and one day his boss at the furniture manufacturer told him that someone had contacted the company insisting Bigham owed them money. Worried the job he loved was at risk, Bigham explained that the person was a scam victim.
That responsibility compelled him to reply to every victim. “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 Bigham’s nonexistent identical twin. “I am retired and have no way to replenish this money.” Bigham answered her agony with his own: “I’m just at a complete loss. … My heart is just breaking. I wish I could help somehow,” he wrote. “I feel partly responsible.” He reassured the heartbroken that they were worthy of love. Some victims found the humor in their situations — after realizing the face of the man she loved belonged to an adult film actor, one great-grandmother congratulated Bigham on his nude physique: “Not as notable as my first husband,” she wrote, “but deserves an applause.” Others were devastated: “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.” He replied gently: “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!” In a rare moment, one victim acknowledged his 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. He recently consoled a Canadian woman battling cancer who lost 265,000 Canadian dollars ($190,000).
Yet alongside his sympathy was a burgeoning unease. One woman told Bigham that he had been coincidentally near her home on a business trip when she realized she was being scammed; she would have fainted if she had bumped into him, she wrote. “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.” He wondered how far this could possibly go. His stomach knotted at the arrival of each new message, some of which snowballed into weekslong exchanges in which he tried to persuade the victim he was not the enemy. He stopped talking about it much, even to Johnny. 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 amid his husband’s fixation on the pain of strangers.
Those worries escalated sharply when, in 2022, Bigham came to Johnny with a request: A victim in Switzerland had asked to meet Bigham in France during his family’s upcoming vacation. Was that OK with Johnny? It was not. “This has gone too far,” Johnny replied, but Bigham assured him the meeting would be quick and might 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 a mother of two in a rocky marriage when she was approached on LinkedIn by a geologist from Florida named Bryce Kane. Staring at his photo, she was struck by the warmth in his eyes — Bigham’s eyes. She is a finance professional who has taken courses on internet fraud and warned her own clients against making questionable payments. She told the AP, on the condition that her name be withheld to protect her children’s privacy, that “It all felt kind of like a fairy tale” — she fell in love, though she says now, “I’m so ashamed of it. … But that’s how it was.” Bryce sent her a picture of his passport, held a video call with her and had a woman call claiming to be his daughter, urging her to help her father; he said he was leaving for Venezuela to work aboard a ship and needed money to pay his employee’s wages. The scheme drained her of 48,000 euros ($54,000) before she noticed Bryce was also communicating with another woman, found three more profiles bearing his photos, and “Bryce” eventually admitted he was a scammer from Nigeria.
In the dark outside the holiday apartment Bigham had rented in Nice, France, the woman was waiting for him. For a year, she had believed Bigham’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 Bigham. Bigham approached flanked by his 25-year-old daughter, her three friends and Johnny, carrying a cup of gelato as a deliberate choice to make the meeting appear more casual. As soon as she saw his smile, her anxiety melted — “This beautiful man really does exist,” she thought. His nerves calmed too: “She’s not crazy,” he thought. “She’s just sad.” He invited her upstairs; Johnny rolled his eyes, since the couple had agreed beforehand that the meeting would happen in public, but the woman seemed harmless and Bigham did not want to have an emotional conversation on the street. In the living room, she gave them chocolates from her village and shared her story, and Bigham 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 sense of the surreal — how odd, he thought, to be talking to someone who once believed she was in love with his husband. Their meeting ended in an embrace. She walked away in tears, relieved. “They’re both so great,” she says now of Bigham and Johnny. “I love them to pieces.” Bigham was relieved too, 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.”
Where there was love, there was also hate. The first venomous messages from an American man arrived as Bigham was preparing to depart for France. The man had lost $600,000 to a scammer who groomed him for more than three years and was certain that scammer was Bigham. He threatened to turn Bigham into the FBI, mentioned Bigham’s oldest son by name and said he would ruin the young man’s career, and sent a photo of Bigham and his son that had been altered to align with the scammer’s backstory. Bigham 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, Bigham’s reply was sympathetic: “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 threatened suicide again. Bigham suggested a paper trail might help investigators track the money. “It all went by bitcoin,” the man wrote. “Goodbye.” One day on a business trip, Bigham noticed he had a voicemail and pressed play. “After what you put me through … you don’t think I’m gonna let this slide?” the man’s voice sneered. “There’s no way in hell I’m gonna let this slide.” For three minutes the man ranted, threatening to report Bigham to his boss and issuing expletives about Bigham’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?” Bigham felt panic swelling; he was away from home, and he wondered whether his family was safe. He sent the voicemail to a lawyer, but the messages continued: “I’m contacting your work place,” the man warned. “do they know your a scammer.” When Bigham begged him to contact the FBI and to save all his conversations and documents, the reply chilled him: “Does the police know where you live in MS,” he wrote. “I do.” Bigham blocked the man’s number and profiles.
Everything felt as if it had gotten out of control. His sleep was plagued by nightmares, and he kept the threats from his children — partly, he acknowledges, because he didn’t want his kids to hate him for posting photos of them that had been used to hurt others. 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 refers to her as “the baby” and remains fiercely protective. Scammers altered a photo of the two of them to make her look pregnant. “That’s actually insane,” she replied. “My boobs look good though!” 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 presence online, though she would prefer that 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 Bigham’s phone has woken Johnny, as it does every morning, while Bigham checks his messages: Are any of the victims about to kill themselves? Are any coming after his family? How can he defuse the ticking time bombs in his inbox? “I honestly didn’t know the extent of it until today,” Johnny says, voice trembling. “He keeps a lot in.” Bigham pats his arm: “I’m OK,” he 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. Johnny used to love listening to Bigham laugh in his sleep; he hasn’t laughed in a long time. “I’d just like it to be over,” Bigham says.
For Bigham, a gay man in the American South, the theft of his image is entangled with the long fight to claim it. The rainbow flag on the back porch of his and Johnny’s home flaps in the breeze as a symbol of gay pride that was hard-won. Raised as a Southern Baptist to believe that homosexuality is a sin, he spent decades denying who he was, married his childhood sweetheart and had three children; when she found out about his sexuality, she was crushed, and he wondered whether it would be easier on his family if he was dead. At her urging, he met with staff at a “conversion therapy” program — a discredited practice that 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 couldn’t 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 Bigham, he had once been married to a woman. His first gay relationship was with his divorce attorney — and the attorney’s boyfriend — as part of a throuple. Bigham knew within 30 minutes of meeting him in person that he was the one; Johnny moved in three months later, and the two began producing adult content together. Shirtless photos of Bigham became a staple of his social media, along with proud-dad posts about his children. “People just don’t understand the depth of it and the breadth of it,” Bigham says. “It goes really, really deep, but it also goes really wide because it takes in so many people’s lives.” “I worked so hard to get where I am and to accept myself for who I am,” he said, his voice breaking. “It nearly killed me. And I just — I just can’t go back there again.”
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. Walking away entirely would leave the scammers with the photos they already had and victims with virtually no way of finding the real him — and he acknowledges a less benevolent motivation, too: he uses social media to promote his work in the adult content industry. Beyond that, he says, vanishing from public view would feel 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.”
At a Mississippi State football game, amid thousands of fans and clanging cowbells, thoughts of the scammers invaded his mind and the network was overloaded when he tried to check his messages. After temporarily defaulting to auto-replies, he has returned to responding fully to many victims. He knows he can’t continue like this; not long ago, his boss told him the company needed the old Hunter back. Over plates of pasta, he and Johnny weighed 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.” Going offline, Johnny told him gently, wouldn’t put it out of his thoughts. The only thing that will stop it, Bigham 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,” Bigham 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,” Bigham agrees. Then he picked his phone back up, his thumb returning to its relentless swiping, waiting with dread for the arrival of another victim’s pain.
The reporting is part of an ongoing collaboration between The Associated Press and FRONTLINE (PBS) that includes the documentary “Scammed.” Associated Press journalist Allen G. Breed in Williamsburg, Va., contributed to the report.