A lonely widow was scammed out of her life savings, and even coerced into mortgaging her home, before being roped in to helping a sinister romance fraud scam
A woman who was concerned about her missing mum found a chilling note that eventually unravelled a huge, multi-million-dollar conspiracy.
Kelly Gowe had received a voicemail from a federal investigator who said that her 57-year-old mother Laura Kowal “may have been involved in a fraud scam.” Kelly immediately called her mum to find out what was going on, but her mother assured her that there was nothing to worry about.
“But something about that call, something in her mother’s voice didn’t quite sit right with Kelly,” says true crime podcaster Annie Elise. “Something was clearly off with Laura so Kelly hopped in her car and she drove to her mom’s house.” But by the time time Kelly arrived, her mother had disappeared.
Anxiously, Kelly looked through her mother’s house hoping to find some clue to her whereabouts. What she found was a spine-chilling note.
It read: “Kelly, you have kept me going this long. I love you! You were right in your judgement of me. I’ve been living a double life this past year. It has left me broke, and broken.
“Yes, it involves Frank, the man I met though online dating. I tried to stop this many times, but I knew I would end up dead.”
The note ended with a set of instructions for how to access her mother’s emails.
“Frank”, Kelly knew, was a man that recently-widowed Laura had met via dating site Match.com. It was clear from what her mother had told her that she had fallen head-over-heels in love with this handsome Swedish investment adviser.
But Kelly herself had never met “Frank Borg” and it later emerged that he had never existed. Laura had been taken in by an unscrupulous team of Nigerian scammers named Anthony Ibekie and Samuel Aniukwu.
Over the course of a two-year whirlwind romance, in which “Frank” repeatedly assured Laura that he was her soulmate, the pair took at least $1.5million from her.
It was part of a wider criminal conspiracy that is known to have resulted in losses to victims of at least $3.5 million, and may have taken much more. But perhaps the most insidious part of the scammers’ methods is that, once their victims’ bank accounts had been completely drained, the hapless women were themselves drawn into the fraud.
The scammers began ordering Laura set up fake companies and bank accounts to move money. This is why Kelly had received that fateful phone call on that morning.
“This is sadly pretty common in a lot of situations like this,” Annie Elise explained. “Once scammers take you for all that you’re worth, they then try to rope you into into the con with them.
“In 2023 alone there were more than 64,000 reports to law enforcement of different romantic scams in the United States.
“Altogether scammers made more than $1 billion from their victims and sadly that might even be an underestimate because those are just the scams that got reported to the police. A lot of officials think there are a ton of other people out there who got ripped off and are just way too embarrassed to let anybody know.”
Laura’s response went far beyond embarrassment. On August 9, 2020, Missouri State Police officer responded to a report of a body floating in the Mississippi River near hundreds of miles from Galena. Laura Kowal had been found.
Kelly alleged that the fraudsters, who had forced her mum to mortgage her house so she could give them money, had been threatening her before her death. She rejected the police investigators’ conclusion that there had been no foul play involved in Laura’s death and she had simply taken her own life.
But Laura remained unconvinced. Annie continued: “She also had her suspicions after she talked with the couple who first had spotted Laura’s body floating in the river because they told her something that hadn’t made it into any of the news reports. There apparently was a second body in the water.”
This body of another, as yet unidentified bikini-clad woman, had been spotted by the eyewitnesses, but was never recovered. Nevertheless, Kelly remains convinced that there is more behind the romance scam story than official accounts suggest.
The masterminds behind the fraud were eventually brought to justice. Nigerian national and Illinois resident Anthony Ibekie, 59, was convicted on 14 counts of wire fraud and forgery in November 2024. Witnesses said he “cried a little” as sentence was passed.
His co-conspirator, Samuel Aniukwu was handed a reduced sentence of 10 years after he opted to plead guilty and cooperate with investigators.
A third conspirator named Jennifer Gosha, who is believed to have been another victim that had been drawn into the conspiracy, was convicted in December 2024 and sentenced to three years probation with her first six months on house arrest.