Inside the Ghana–Ohio Romance Scam Ring: 13 Defendants, Years of Sentences
A federal indictment in the Southern District of Ohio dismantled a transnational romance-fraud crew. Here's who was charged, who was convicted, and what victims should look out for.
What happened
The US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of Ohio unsealed indictments naming Ghanaian operators and US-based money mules in a long-running romance-fraud conspiracy targeting older Americans on dating apps. Several defendants have already been sentenced; others are awaiting extradition from Ghana.
For the full evidence package and named co-conspirators, see our Operation Sunshine dossier on the Ghana–Ohio romance ring.
The two-layer model
The operation followed the standard transnational romance-scam structure:
- Foreign social-engineering layer (Accra, Ghana) — operators ran dozens of dating-app profiles with stolen photos, love-bombed matches, then asked for money.
- Domestic mule layer (Columbus & Akron, Ohio + Brentwood, TN) — US-based co-conspirators received the wires into their personal bank accounts and converted the funds to crypto or money orders.
Disrupting the mule layer is what made federal prosecution possible. The Ghanaian operators alone would be effectively unreachable; the Ohio mules made the money laundering a US wire-fraud conspiracy.
Sentences handed down
- Otuo Amponsah & Anna Amponsah — 108 months each
- Dwayne Asafo Adjei, Nancy Adom, Eric Aidoo — 71 months each
- Portia Joe — 51 months
- Nader Wasif — 12 months
What this means for victims
If you sent money to a "boyfriend" or "girlfriend" you met online and the recipient name on the wire did not match the person you were talking to, that's the mule layer in action — and it is exactly the evidence the FBI uses to charge cases like this. File a report with IC3, your bank's fraud line, and on scamers.org so the next person searching that name gets a hit.