In the past few years, US investigators have moved from treating romance scams as largely “online nuisances” to pursuing them as transnational organised crime. One consequence has been a sharper focus on Ghana, with a growing number of Ghanaian nationals arrested, indicted, extradited or sentenced in US courts for roles ranging from direct victim grooming to laundering stolen funds.
US officials say the reason is not simply that scammers are Ghanaian. It is that, case after case, investigators have found Ghana-based or Ghana-linked networks sitting at key points in the fraud pipeline: running the chats, receiving the wires, moving the proceeds, and recruiting others to do the same.
Last week, US prosecutors announced a new indictment against Frederick Kumi, 31, from Swedru, who is known online as “Abu Trica” and is also named under another alias. Investigators allege he was part of a network that took more than $8m from elderly victims across the United States since 2023, using romance-style deception to extract money. His arrest in Ghana, and the expectation of extradition, fits a pattern that has become increasingly common: suspects are no longer simply named in US indictments and left abroad, but are being physically brought into US courtrooms.
Earlier in 2025, US authorities unsealed an indictment describing a Ghana-based criminal organisation accused of stealing more than $100m through a mix of romance scams and business email compromise schemes. Four Ghanaian nationals were named, including men US prosecutors described as senior figures in the operation: Isaac Oduro Boateng (“Kofi Boat”), Inusah Ahmed (“Pascal”), Derrick Van Yeboah (“Van”), and Patrick Kwame Asare (“Borgar”). Three were extradited from Ghana to the United States. The fourth was still being sought at the time of the announcement.
Also in 2025, Joseph Kwadwo Badu Boateng, known publicly as “Dada Joe Remix,” was extradited to the US to face charges linked to a long-running “romance and inheritance” style scheme targeting elderly victims. US prosecutors allege victims were persuaded to pay fees and taxes tied to fictitious fortunes, inheritances or assets.
In 2024, one of the most internationally publicised Ghana-linked cases reached sentencing. Ghanaian social media personality Mona Faiz Montrage, widely known as “Hajia4Reall,” was sentenced in a New York federal court to 12 months and a day after pleading guilty to a conspiracy offence related to receiving stolen money from romance scams. Prosecutors said her role involved receiving proceeds tied to victims who had been manipulated into sending funds.
That same year, prosecutors in New York announced a 48-month sentence for Emmanuel Quamey, described as a Ghanaian national, for receiving and laundering money stolen from romance scam victims. Authorities said millions of dollars flowed through accounts connected to the network, with older and vulnerable victims among those targeted.
In Wisconsin, Paul Williams Anti, a Ghanaian citizen in his sixties, was sentenced to six years for laundering proceeds of wire fraud. The case was not framed as “romance” alone, but it sat squarely in the same ecosystem of online fraud, false identities and financial camouflage that often overlaps with romance-scam proceeds.
In Kentucky, Nana Kwabena Amuah, a Ghanaian national, was sentenced to more than seven years for money laundering conspiracy after prosecutors tied him to a scheme that included an attempted multi-million-dollar theft involving the City of Lexington and other victims. The case became widely discussed in Ghana because of its local pop-culture spillovers, but US prosecutors treated it as a classic laundering-and-control structure: directing others to open accounts, moving funds, and using false documentation.
In 2024 as well, US authorities in Florida detailed the sentencing of Ghanaian-linked defendants in a Ghana-based romance scam case, including Ghanaian nationals resident in the US who admitted roles that prosecutors said helped move proceeds and keep the scam machine working.
Going back to 2022, federal prosecutors in Ohio announced that Samuel Antwi, described as a Ghanaian citizen and a former US resident, pleaded guilty after being extradited from Ghana. Prosecutors said he laundered proceeds of online romance scams and possessed stolen financial data. The significance here was not celebrity or scale, but the mechanics: the US was already signalling that leaving the country would not end a case.
And in 2021–2022, US authorities in New York described Fred Asante as a top US-based money launderer for a Ghana-based criminal enterprise that, prosecutors said, ran multiple fraud streams, including romance scams targeting elderly victims. His sentencing reinforced an important point in the US strategy: romance scammers do not survive on persuasion alone. They need laundromats.
Across the last five years, a few patterns stand out.
Romance scams are increasingly being prosecuted as financial systems crimes. Early public understanding of romance scams often focused on the emotional manipulation. US prosecutors now centre the financial architecture: the accounts, the shell companies, the money transmitters, the crypto conversions, the couriered cash, the recruited intermediaries. This is where “romance” becomes “money laundering” and where long sentences and extradition efforts become more likely.
Ghana appears repeatedly in the middle of the pipeline. In some cases, Ghana-linked suspects are alleged to be the people doing the persuading. In others, they are the people receiving wires, creating layers of accounts, or coordinating those who do. From the US perspective, this makes Ghana not just a “location of suspects,” but a recurring jurisdiction where fraud proceeds land and are moved.
Visibility has increased, making networks easier to map. Investigators have more tools than they did even a decade ago: platform records, cross-border financial compliance reporting, device tracking through warrants, and faster international coordination. Meanwhile, the online world produces its own trail. Even when social media display is not evidence of wrongdoing, public footprints can help investigators connect identities, associates and movement patterns that later show up in financial evidence.
The “elderly victim” dimension has sharpened US political pressure. Several of the best-known Ghana-linked cases explicitly involve older victims. In the US, fraud against the elderly is politically sensitive and prosecutorially attractive because it combines clear harm with a compelling moral narrative. That pressure translates into resources, task forces, and a willingness to pursue suspects abroad rather than stopping at domestic “money mules”.
A decisive shift has been the US move from “disruption” to “deterrence”. For years, the easiest wins were domestic: arrest the person receiving money in the US, seize a bank account, warn the public. But prosecutors increasingly argue that this leaves the real organisers untouched. So the strategy has expanded: build cases that identify leadership layers abroad, then use extradition channels when partner governments cooperate.
Ghana’s cooperation matters here. Once the US successfully arrests and extradites suspects from Ghana in a few headline cases, prosecutors become more confident that future requests are realistic. Each successful transfer lowers the practical and psychological barrier for the next.
For Ghana, the implications cut in two directions.
On one hand, repeated US cases risk reinforcing damaging stereotypes about Ghana and cyber fraud, with knock-on effects for travellers, legitimate businesses, and the diaspora. On the other hand, allowing fraud networks to operate openly does deeper long-term harm, and cooperation with international partners can be framed as a sign of institutional seriousness.
The harder question is domestic: why the pipeline keeps producing recruits. US prosecutions can punish individuals and disrupt networks, but they cannot resolve local drivers such as youth unemployment, status competition, weak deterrence, and the normalisation of “online hustling” in some subcultures. Those are Ghana’s policy problems to solve.
If the last five years show anything, it is that romance scams are no longer treated as private embarrassments. They are treated as bank-fraud networks with human victims. And once the US frames it that way, arrests abroad become not exceptional, but routine.
