Relationship Cheating Stories

Her owner, Angela Casey, looked where the dog was looking

Fear and fascination collide: a sealed Valentine’s card wedged four feet up in a dead juniper led to a theft of $263,000 and a fabricated lover - but how did a man track certificate of deposit dates to steal from a grieving widow? What was hidden in that stamped envelope addressed to “Amy”?

In this episode, we follow the discovery that started everything and the steps investigators took to connect a single physical card to a pattern of timed withdrawals and identity theft, asking how someone engineered trust from a distance and targeted financial milestones to take everything.

Date: January 9, 2019
Person: Angela Casey
Person: Amy Sawyer
Person: Kimberly Baker
Amount: $263,000

- The sealed, stamped envelope was wedged four feet up in a dead juniper on the Pinebluff Nature Loop.
- The card inside was addressed to “Amy” and signed “- R.” with the message “I will be with you soon, my love.”
- Amy’s first wire transfer of $41,000 left eleven days after a certificate of deposit matured in July 2017.
- The transfers continued with amounts including $38,000 in October and repeated timing within eleven days of CD maturity through 2018.
- The profile photo used by “Russell O’Brien” belonged to Howard Lind, a 61-year-old retired engineer who had not met Amy.

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© 2026 OBOMEDIA. All rights reserved.
This episode and its content (audio, text, and related materials) are the exclusive property of OBOMEDIA and are protected by applicable copyright laws. Reproduction, distribution, editing, or commercial use, in whole or in part, without prior written permission from OBOMEDIA is prohibited. For permissions, licensing, and business inquiries: [email protected].

The laptop at Packer Creek: what Jennifer Lewis meant to say

A sealed freezer bag loops to a trotline in gray December light, a Dell laptop dry inside, an index card folded against the keys: She was real to me. That is not nothing. Jennifer Lewis had just been arrested for defrauding a twenty-two-year-old chess player out of eighteen hundred dollars using a stolen face and a fabricated crisis. So why did she return to the creek where her victim had once sent a photograph, seal her equipment in plastic, and leave it where a fisherman would certainly find it?

In this episode, we trace the six-week hunt that built Miriam Voss from stolen research, the carefully structured financial asks that arrived after warmth rather than before, and the single detail in small talk-a regional cable broadcast mentioned by someone claiming to live eight hundred miles away-that unraveled everything. We follow Detective Roy Vance's evidence laid on a table, Lewis's deflection and silence, and the inexplicable decision to preserve rather than destroy. But the question that survives the guilty plea is whether the note represents a final manipulation or the only honest moment in four months of contact.

Person: Kelly Pruitt
Perpetrator: Jennifer Lewis
Location: Brackett, Indiana; Carmel, Indiana; Packer Creek
Amount: Eighteen hundred dollars
Event: Laptop discovery at Packer Creek, December eleventh
Date: September to December, same year

- Kelly Pruitt, age twenty-two, worked as a claims processor at an insurance adjuster's office in Brackett, Indiana.
- Jennifer Lewis studied Kelly's public game history on Boardroom for six weeks before sending a message as Miriam Voss on a harvested LinkedIn photo of Amber Coles, a dental hygienist in Raleigh, North Carolina.
- Kelly sent four hundred dollars on November nineteenth for a fake rental car deposit and fourteen hundred dollars on December first for a fake eviction notice.
- Detective Roy Vance identified Lewis using Zelle account metadata, Signal phone records, and a regional cable broadcast mention in an Indiana-Purdue game message that revealed Cleveland residence was false.
- Lewis was arrested December ninth, drove to Packer Creek the night of December eighth, sealed a Dell laptop in a freezer bag with copper wire and an index card reading She was real to me. That is not nothing.

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© 2026 OBOMEDIA. All rights reserved.
This episode and its content (audio, text, and related materials) are the exclusive property of OBOMEDIA and are protected by applicable copyright laws. Reproduction, distribution, editing, or commercial use, in whole or in part, without prior written permission from OBOMEDIA is prohibited. For permissions, licensing, and business inquiries: [email protected].

The envelope under the oak: how Jean documented her own deception

In this episode, we follow Jean's journey from a cancer support group on Facebook to 112 thousand dollars sent to UK bank accounts, through Henry Brock's reverse image search revealing the stolen identity of Craig Decker, and into the six-week period when Jean built her case on a kitchen table in Pennsylvania. We trace the moment when a retired mail carrier's four printed pages, a co-administrator's metadata report, and an insurance examiner's complaint converged-all while an oak tree held the most consequential evidence none of them knew existed.

Person: Jean Keller
Perpetrator: Ronald Simmons (constructed identity)
Actual identity: Craig Decker (Portland engineer, photo stolen)
Amount stolen: $112,000
Location: Elderton, Pennsylvania
Event: Romance fraud through fake cancer support group

- Jean Keller was diagnosed with stage two breast cancer two years before joining the Beyond the Bell Facebook group in January.
- The perpetrator used Craig Decker's photograph from a LinkedIn profile; Decker was a licensed civil engineer in Portland, Oregon, entirely unaware his image was being used.
- The Beyond the Bell group was created twenty-two months before Jean joined, not four years as "Ronald Simmons" claimed.
- Between April and October, Jean wired eight thousand dollars, six thousand dollars, four thousand dollars, and nine thousand dollars across multiple transfers to UK bank accounts.
- Thomas Stein, an Armstrong County surveyor walking a disputed property line on Alderton Pike in November, found the sealed envelope containing Jean's forty-three-page dossier buried under an oak tree's roots.

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© 2026 OBOMEDIA. All rights reserved.
This episode and its content (audio, text, and related materials) are the exclusive property of OBOMEDIA and are protected by applicable copyright laws. Reproduction, distribution, editing, or commercial use, in whole or in part, without prior written permission from OBOMEDIA is prohibited. For permissions, licensing, and business inquiries: [email protected].

The patient interval: how forty-one letters built a six-year fraud

A septic inspector found forty-one envelopes under a house in Portsmith, Ohio in October 2022, each one postmarked from Greece and addressed in careful handwriting. But the woman who hid them couldn't throw them away-and investigators discovered she had been sending wire transfers to a man who didn't exist. How did Derek Osei maintain the same letter-writing rhythm for twenty-seven months without breaking pattern, and what did the acoustic signature in two voice recordings reveal about where he really was?

In this episode, we trace how a system built on perfectly timed letters and fabricated customs documents extracted sixty-three thousand dollars from Marcia Bell, a widow who volunteered at a food pantry and believed she was helping a civil engineer in a Greek refugee camp. We examine the HVAC hum embedded in voice recordings, the IP address that traced back to Atlanta, and the plagiarized grief copied from a published essay and mailed as personal memory.

Person: Marcia Bell
Perpetrator: Derek Osei, age 39
Location: Portsmith, Ohio; Atlanta, Georgia; Thessaloniki, Greece
Amount stolen: $63,000
Event: Letters discovered October 2022; arrest March 2023; trial January 2024
Program: Open Letter Exchange

- Marcia Bell, age 62, lived alone in Portsmith after her husband Dennis died in spring 2016; she worked part-time in accounting and volunteered at the food pantry every Tuesday and Friday for nearly five years without missing a shift.
- Scott Crawford's first letter arrived in February 2020, postmarked from a transit camp near Thessaloniki; correspondence continued every fourteen to twenty-two days for twenty-seven months until September 2022.
- Derek Osei, a thirty-nine-year-old dual Ghanaian-American citizen with a prior fraud conviction in Florida from 2015, applied for a rental property in Marcia's name from an Atlanta IP address while she paid monthly rent on a house she never entered.
- Two of seven voice recordings contained a low-frequency HVAC hum matching southeastern United States commercial air conditioning systems, appearing in call four and call six separated by several months, proving Osei was in Atlanta not Greece.
- Osei's notebook contained forty-two entries documenting at least eleven victims across six years; he received a nine-year federal prison sentence in January 2024 on charges of wire fraud and aggravated identity theft, with appeal denied in spring 2027.

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© 2026 OBOMEDIA. All rights reserved.
This episode and its content (audio, text, and related materials) are the exclusive property of OBOMEDIA and are protected by applicable copyright laws. Reproduction, distribution, editing, or commercial use, in whole or in part, without prior written permission from OBOMEDIA is prohibited. For permissions, licensing, and business inquiries: [email protected].

The postcard from a man who never existed

In this episode, we follow Marilyn Duncan from her consistent life in Orviston, Indiana, through four months of carefully engineered emotional manipulation by a man named Carl White, to the moment a reverse image search took less than three minutes to collapse the entire fiction. We explore the whiteboards that tracked relationship timelines, the co-signer variant designed specifically for her financial caution, and the mystery of how a postcard with her own words printed on it arrived eleven days after Carl Gould's arrest.

Person: Marilyn Duncan
Perpetrator: Carl Gould, age 39
Location: Haskett Avenue, Bridgeport, Ohio; Orviston, Indiana
Amount stolen: $42,000 (from Evelyn Marsh)
Event: Postcard arrival, eleven days after Gould's arrest
Platform: ReachBoard professional networking site

- Marilyn joined ReachBoard in June and was contacted within one week by a user named Carl White claiming to be a 44-year-old deaf architect from Portland, Oregon.
- Carl White's photograph belonged to Owen Pressley, a licensed architect from Asheville, North Carolina, who had been dead for approximately two years.
- The operation at Haskett Avenue maintained detailed relationship timelines on whiteboards tracking the pace of emotional development and optimal windows for financial requests.
- A postcard arrived at the Hendricks County Sheriff's Office addressed to Marilyn at her apartment with four lines from a Pablo Neruda poem she had quoted privately to Carl White in July.
- Evelyn Marsh, a 63-year-old retired schoolteacher from Akron, wired $42,000 in six installments over seven months after being managed by the same operation using an identical profile architecture.

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© 2026 OBOMEDIA. All rights reserved.
This episode and its content (audio, text, and related materials) are the exclusive property of OBOMEDIA and are protected by applicable copyright laws. Reproduction, distribution, editing, or commercial use, in whole or in part, without prior written permission from OBOMEDIA is prohibited. For permissions, licensing, and business inquiries: [email protected].

The dry newspaper: what Troy Porter couldn't stop himself from doing

Four uncollected papers lay on Pamela Taylor's porch on August 7, 2022, but one placed there after 2 a.m. was bone dry while the others held the weight of dew. That pristine newspaper, dated August 4th, was left by the man who had just stolen $22,000 from her across six carefully orchestrated wire transfers-a man who drove 210 miles in the dark to place it there, then drove back, leaving behind the one piece of evidence that would eventually lead detectives to his door.

In this episode, we trace how Troy Porter assembled a fictional civil engineer named Daniel Mercer from the faces, professional history, and published words of three real strangers who never knew each other, then used that fabricated identity to extract $22,000 from a divorced dental hygienist over four months. We follow Detective David Becker's investigation from the uncollected newspapers to the encrypted chat logs, the fake bank screenshots, and the printed spreadsheet with twelve names-each one marked with notes like "recently divorced, lonely, trusts fast"-and we confront the mystery the verdict never resolved: why did Porter drive to her house at 2 a.m., and what was he actually standing in the dark to do?

Person: Pamela Taylor
Person: Troy Porter
Perpetrator: Troy Porter, age 36
Location: Moline, Illinois; Roseland, Chicago
Amount stolen: $22,000
Event: Romance fraud scheme, April-August 2022

- Pamela Taylor downloaded a dating app in April 2022, three years after her divorce was finalized in 2019.
- Troy Porter's fake profile, Daniel Mercer, claimed to be a civil engineer working on a bridge project near Chicago, originally from Portland.
- Daniel's photographs were the face of Philip Moran, a real civil engineer in Bend, Oregon who had no knowledge of the fraud.
- Between July 19 and August 3, 2022, Pamela sent $22,000 across six transactions in response to fabricated emergencies involving contractor disputes and frozen funds.
- On August 4, 2022 at 2 a.m., Troy Porter drove 210 miles from Chicago to Pamela's house and left a newspaper on her porch before driving back.
- Porter was arrested September 14, 2022 and sentenced to seven years federal prison on charges of wire fraud, identity theft, and money laundering.

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© 2026 OBOMEDIA. All rights reserved.
This episode and its content (audio, text, and related materials) are the exclusive property of OBOMEDIA and are protected by applicable copyright laws. Reproduction, distribution, editing, or commercial use, in whole or in part, without prior written permission from OBOMEDIA is prohibited. For permissions, licensing, and business inquiries: [email protected].

The badge in the gravel: how a volunteer became a predator

In this episode, we follow Debra Marshall through November's darkest mornings after her brother's overdose death, to the Wednesday in January when she walked into Steady Ground and met a man with silver temples who said he understood loss. We trace the photographs with no gravity, Susan Wells' reverse image search that revealed a face stolen from a physical therapist in North Carolina, and the escalating requests-forty dollars, eighty dollars, then four thousand dollars for a daughter hospitalized in Oregon who had no name, no hospital, no city.

Person: Debra Marshall
Perpetrator: Craig Pell, alias Charles Watson
Location: Dunmore, Iowa; Millhaven, Nebraska
Amount stolen: Eleven thousand two hundred dollars
Event: Pell's arrest in August in the Quad Cities area of Illinois
Date: January through June, six-week volunteer period beginning October prior

- Debra's brother Mitchell died in November of an accidental overdose; she had been his primary support for years.
- Debra worked as a dispatch operator at Precision Climate Solutions and cared for a twelve-year-old diabetic basset hound named Pepper on a strict twice-daily insulin schedule.
- Craig Pell completed a volunteer orientation at Dunmore General in October under a false name, received a hospital badge, and cleared a background check using an alias.
- The photographs Charles sent to Debra were reverse-image searched and identified as belonging to Douglas Merritt, a physical therapist in Raleigh, North Carolina, whom Pell had never met.
- Debra drove to Millhaven, Nebraska in June to meet Charles and find his broken-down truck, but found nothing; Pell was arrested in August and sentenced to seven years for three counts of wire fraud and one count of identity fraud.

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© 2026 OBOMEDIA. All rights reserved.
This episode and its content (audio, text, and related materials) are the exclusive property of OBOMEDIA and are protected by applicable copyright laws. Reproduction, distribution, editing, or commercial use, in whole or in part, without prior written permission from OBOMEDIA is prohibited. For permissions, licensing, and business inquiries: [email protected].

The portrait in the service channel: how loneliness became currency

A utility lineman discovers a framed wedding photo placed carefully in a stranger's yard on a June morning in 2019-clean glass, unoxidized frame, resting on a folded blue moving blanket. How did a man using stolen photographs and a fabricated identity convince Pamela Marshall, a meticulous office manager who caught billing errors for a living, to wire sixty-two thousand dollars to someone she had never met?

In this episode, we trace the architecture of Roy Minter's operation through a handwritten ledger naming at least four women across three states, forensic evidence placing a prepaid phone at Pamela's house during work hours, and a circled property listing in Tema, Ghana priced at exactly sixty-one thousand, eight hundred dollars. We examine how a man posing as Norman White, a widower structural consultant in Accra, exploited not naivety but the specific silence that had filled Pamela's house since her daughter left for college in 2015.

Victim: Pamela Marshall
Perpetrator: Roy Minter (aka Dennis Colby, Norman White)
Location: Cutter Falls, Ohio; Millhaven Road
Amount stolen: $62,000
Event: Wire fraud operation across three states, 2016-2019
Date of discovery: June 11, 2019

- Pamela Marshall, age 52, had caught $40,000 in vendor billing errors over five years at Ridgecrest Partners civil engineering firm.
- Roy Minter, age 31 at arrest, had prior wire fraud conviction in Columbus in 2012 and worked in roles providing access to women's personal data.
- The prepaid phone and wedding portrait were discovered by utility lineman Dale Taylor at 7:15 a.m. on June 11, 2019, in the service channel behind Pamela's cedar fence.
- Device metadata placed the prepaid phone at Pamela's GPS coordinates on two weekday afternoons when she was at work; motion sensor recorded two entries in the prior 30 days.
- Minter's handwritten ledger recorded at least four women victims, with crisis code abbreviations (C.P.O. for corrupt port official, K.S. for kidney stones, B.F. for bank freeze) and seven wire transfers totaling $62,000 sent between January and April 2019.

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© 2026 OBOMEDIA. All rights reserved.
This episode and its content (audio, text, and related materials) are the exclusive property of OBOMEDIA and are protected by applicable copyright laws. Reproduction, distribution, editing, or commercial use, in whole or in part, without prior written permission from OBOMEDIA is prohibited. For permissions, licensing, and business inquiries: [email protected].

The scissors on the drain: how a con man learned to steal with grief

A pair of red-handled garden scissors sits on a storm drain with a handwritten tag: FOR RACHEL. THESE WERE HIS. But the man who owned them is dead, and the will that named them has been rewritten by someone who never should have had access to Martin Sheridan's language, his loneliness, or his love.

In this episode, we follow the eleven transfers totaling sixty-three thousand dollars, the incorporation of a fake company seven months before contact, and the crafted will that used Martin's own grief against him-language so constructed it broke under scrutiny. We trace how a man named Alan Foss, operating under the alias Paul Harris, methodically built trust along a morning walking route, then ask why the scissors themselves became the one piece of evidence that his confession could never account for.

Person: Martin Sheridan
Age: 78
Location: Dunmore, Ohio
Date of death: March 9
Perpetrator: Alan Foss (alias Paul Harris)
Amount stolen: $63,000

- Martin Sheridan died of congestive heart failure compounded by sustained psychological stress on March 9 in Dunmore, Ohio.
- Alan Foss incorporated Cedarfield Garden Consulting LLC in Delaware seven months before meeting Martin, with a mailbox at a UPS store in a Columbus suburb.
- Foss made eleven transfers between August and February totaling $63,000, each modest enough to avoid automatic fraud review thresholds.
- On September 19, Martin signed a new will naming Paul Harris as sole trustee of the Connie Sheridan Memorial Garden Trust, reducing Rachel's inheritance by 60 percent.
- Alan Foss was arrested mid-May in a furnished apartment and convicted on six counts: four counts of wire fraud, one count of financial exploitation of an elderly person, and one count of identity fraud, receiving a nine-year sentence.

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© 2026 OBOMEDIA. All rights reserved.
This episode and its content (audio, text, and related materials) are the exclusive property of OBOMEDIA and are protected by applicable copyright laws. Reproduction, distribution, editing, or commercial use, in whole or in part, without prior written permission from OBOMEDIA is prohibited. For permissions, licensing, and business inquiries: [email protected].

The notebooks below: how he lived where she called

Pink and white carnations sat on a porch in Fenton, Ohio, with a notecard apologizing to a person who no longer existed. Peggy Vaughn, a careful 29-year-old billing coordinator, had sent $4,000 to a man named Charles O'Brien after six weeks of nightly phone calls at 8 p.m. sharp. But when she ran a reverse image search, she discovered the man she trusted was stolen from a structural engineer in Denver-and investigators would soon find him living one floor below her the entire time.

In this episode, we trace the operation from Valentine's Day 2019 through spiral notebooks that read like a training manual, complete with annotated scripts for crisis calls, timing variants, and margin notes on what works. We explore how Peggy's college friend discovered an identical pattern in a consumer fraud forum, how a storage unit warrant revealed six stolen identities and at least four other victims, and why O'Brien's confession was delivered using the same script structure documented in those notebooks.

Person: Peggy Vaughn
Perpetrator: Charles O'Brien (arrested six weeks after storage unit warrant)
Location: Fenton, Ohio (Colwell Street duplex)
Amount: $4,000 wired from car-repair savings account
Date: February 14 - March 22, 2019
Event: Storage unit warrant; notebooks and laminated sheet recovered

- Peggy matched with profile "Charles O'Brien" on February 14, 2019, who noticed a book title visible in her profile photo that she had never mentioned.
- O'Brien called at exactly 8 p.m. almost every night, running calls close to two hours, never suggesting video calls and citing travel and unreliable internet.
- On March 22, 2019, O'Brien called at 6:30 p.m. instead of 8 p.m., 90 minutes early, claiming his father needed a medical procedure and insurance had denied the claim.
- Peggy discovered via reverse image search that the photos belonged to Scott Navarro, a structural engineer in Denver whose LinkedIn profile dated to 2017.
- Storage unit held three spiral notebooks organized by stage (early rapport, crisis introduction, repayment delay, secondary crisis) with annotated language variants and margin notes on effective phrases, plus a laminated sheet listing six stolen identities.

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© 2026 OBOMEDIA. All rights reserved.
This episode and its content (audio, text, and related materials) are the exclusive property of OBOMEDIA and are protected by applicable copyright laws. Reproduction, distribution, editing, or commercial use, in whole or in part, without prior written permission from OBOMEDIA is prohibited. For permissions, licensing, and business inquiries: [email protected].