Amanda Eyre Ward is an Austin writer and author of 13 novels—three of which are set in Texas and the rest scattered all over the world. Her latest book, Arrivals and Departures, out June 16, delves deep into the dark world of international romance scammers and how they masquerade as lovers by employing deepfake videos, rom-com scripts, and high-pressure sales pitches. Some even have scammer handbooks, scam universities, and how-to rap songs. 

Ward recently spoke with the Texas Observer about her book, what she learned about the scammers who live everywhere from Lagos to Austin, and about how some Texas-based fraud detectors are exposing them.

TO: I love that you dove into the world of scammers because, of course, they’re everywhere. You spent two years researching them. And along the way you visited members of the International Association of Certified Fraud Examiners in Austin, right?

So, a mom friend of mine said, “I run this thing. Do you want to come?” And my jaw dropped. I was almost done with the novel at that point. But wow! I didn’t know there were lawyers [and investigators and accountants] whose entire job is dismantling scams and finding scammers in Texas. They are fascinating people. And this is what they do every day. So they’re telling stories in this throwaway tone that are just so insane. Like the person who got billions of dollars out of a nursing home…it was a resident. 

And I met scammers and I met people who were scammed. And people who are scammed, to a one, kept going when it was pretty clear that it was a scam. They just continue, and this happens in my novel.

Even when you’re positive objectively that this person is scamming you, when you wake up in the morning and someone says: “If you send me $10, my dear, and tell me about your day,” it’s like Stockholm Syndrome. It’s worth the $10 to keep pretending that there is this person who loves you and wants to hear about your day.

That’s very sad.

I know. It’s sad, but it’s all just fascinating. And this was before [artificial intelligence]—the deepfakes and psychology. The scammers know what they’re doing. 

I started my research, honestly, [on] TikTok. And on TikTok and YouTube, there are “Yahoo Boys,” what they call the Nigerian scammers and a new book just came out about them. [The Yahoo Boys: Love, Deception, and the Real Lives of Nigeria’s Romance Scammers by Carlos Barragán] 

But anyway, the Yahoo boys have classes. So they’re like: “Join my class, I’ll teach you how to do it.” And there’s universities.

And then I found out there were Americans doing it. Then I found there were kids in Austin doing it…

One thing you shared in a post is that so often they pretend they’re surgeons when they’re using deepfake AI videos. Why?

I found a training manual in Chinese—a “pig butchering manual.” That’s what they call the scamming, is pig butchering. And it explains what you should say about why you can’t be on screen. For example, you are to say you’re autistic and you can’t really talk to people’s faces.

(Courtesy of Amanda Eyre Ward)

Anyway, you asked about the surgeons. So one of the things that I found out through my research was that the deepfake technology can take a kid in another country or a kid in Austin and make them look like a handsome age-appropriate man or woman… However, the mouths don’t always work right. Some of the movements are a little janky, but usually the voice works, the face works, but the mouth cannot keep up; the mouth flaps with the words. So they decided to make them surgeons so that they could call from the operating room with their mouths covered. And a lot of the romance scammers are supposed surgeons for that reason.

I have noticed that there’s a lot of doctors and military fake profiles on platforms like Facebook, and they tend to have first names for both their first and last name (Brian George, etc.)

A lot of military because when you’re in the military or like on an oil rig you can sort of explain [ the anomalies]. Like if you send a gift link, and if they hit it, it’ll tell [the location]. But if you’re in the military, you can explain why you’re in Yemen, for example, or Iran when you say you’re from Brooklyn. [They say] things like, “I need money to go on leave to see you.” They’ll say, I have a week, this is the only week, and this is how much the plane ticket is…. It’s always very stressful and very specific.

Tell me about the people you found doing this in Austin?

I have kids who go to Austin High and I always talk to them about what I’m doing. And a lot of them are friends with kids from all over the city. … I said this is what I’m researching [and] they said there’s kids doing that here… and I went to their social media and contacted some of them… And they are not as much romance scamming, the kids that I met. They are pretending to be your grandson who was in a car accident. 

You also delve into addiction and mental illness in this book. Your character Lee, the reality TV star, is introspective about her drinking and depression. You’ve been open about your own recovery journey. How do you infuse what you know about drinking and recovery into a character like that?

The question is, “How can I not?” … It’s my obsession, you know, I grew up with an alcoholic dad. I’ve been sober for 12 years and it always comes up. And it’s something I just find endlessly fascinating. Addiction, because you’re not in control of what you’re doing and it’s so ruinous. And why does it happen to some people and not others and how do you escape it and how do brains work? 

I thought, if somebody reads this and they’re reading it [for] the romance scams, they’re reading it for the Greek beach scenes, the love, and they also understand very specifically how mania and bipolar lows happen, so maybe that they’ll recognize someone in their own life and either be more understanding, [or] be more helpful….

So that is really important to me to remove the stigmas around these issues and also about addiction.

You have several books set in Texas: The Lifeguards, set in Austin, The Same Sky, your book about the border…and Sleep Towards Heaven—that’s my first novel about a librarian from Austin and women on death row in Gatesville. So three books set in Texas.

Do you tend to choose a place for a book, or do you tend to say, “I’d really like to write about this place” and then travel there to do your research?

Texas is endlessly fascinating to me. And I could set all of my books there. But I also lived in Athens when I was younger. My next book is set in Hawaii, where I’ve spent a lot of time. My daughter goes to camp there. I think it’d be hard to write a book from a tourist point of view if you’re just in a place for a day or two. So it’s more places I know well.

It’s more, I get obsessed with ideas like romance scamming.

What other other tricks did you find that scammers were using that aren’t ones that people might expect?

Well, here’s one thing I didn’t know: In the really organized systems, the main source of income for a lot of geographical areas is scamming dumb Americans and Europeans. There are different levels of scammers. So if there’s a bunch of kids, like the lowest level, will just be sitting around a generator in a slum in Nigeria, for example, and texting hundreds and hundreds of people a day. So most people don’t answer when you get those silly texts, like, “Jane, are we meeting for lunch?”

So once they get an answer, it goes up to the loaders. So the loaders—because a lot of them don’t speak English—have purchased scripts. So if you have enough money to purchase a script to do a little back and forth, well then you can be a loader.

And then the next level, once they really get going, there’s pickers. Then there’s the AI guy. There’s the video guy. They will hire a local woman to come be the video person or they can do the deepfake. And it all depends on your level. And your level depends on if you can speak English, if you know how to do more of the technical stuff. I mean, it’s just so organized. I thought that was amazing.

That is amazing and creepy.

And so creepy. And then one of my biggest places for research is the AARP podcast called “The Perfect Scam.” And it is fascinating. It’s probably hundreds of stories of people who were scammed. And it’s everything from love to things like, you buy a dog who doesn’t exist, …and you’re paying and they’re saying: “Oh my God, I’m 10 miles fromAaustin and my truck broke down and I need a little bit of kibble for the night at the motel, can you just send me 15 dollars?”

And people just keep going—they’ve spent hundreds of dollars and they’ve seen pictures of the puppy and they’re gonna pay another $15 when it’s so obvious! 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The post Inside the Dark World of Romance Scammers appeared first on The Texas Observer.

We have a plan for the day you are born and the day you die. 

We can make you breathe—or at least try to—when your lungs fail and your blood can no longer clot. At the Texas Medical Center (TMC) in central Houston, we repair spinal defects before birth and replace hearts after a mother’s cardiovascular system collapses. I have watched doctors bring women back from the dead. It is an astonishing and beautiful thing.

But when your baby is diagnosed with a lethal anomaly, we cannot help you. Not because we lack the training or the skill. Because the law forbids it.

If you learn about fetal anomalies only online, it might distort your sense of scale. Around 3 percent of pregnancies are complicated by a life-limiting anomaly. At the TMC, that means roughly 800 families a year—or about two a day—learn that their child will not survive birth or will die minutes after. As the region’s referral center, we deliver this tragic news more often than our colleagues at other facilities.

We are not afraid to weep with our patients. A diagnosis like this is a fault line; there is life before and life after. Some choose to continue their pregnancies. We do everything to help them deliver safely. This choice is not without risk. These mothers take on the dangers of delivery—eclampsia, hemorrhage, disseminated intravascular coagulation—to spend a few moments with their dead or dying baby.

Others are willing to take on the risks of pregnancy only if there is the possibility of a living child on the other side. This is a more than reasonable position, especially as Texan women have poor maternal health outcomes overall. According to recent federal and state data, the Texas maternal mortality rate is higher than the U.S. average. And Black women in Harris County die from pregnancy-related causes at nearly four times the rate of their white counterparts.

You can study the data for years. Read the journals. Analyze the case reports. Until the very real threat of dying while giving birth starts to feel abstract, like something that happens only to someone else. Spend a week on a maternal-fetal medicine team at the TMC, and that distance disappears. The only thing that matters is the patient in front of you, who cannot get the care she needs.

ABORTION CAN ALSO SAVE LIVES.

I remember the patient who destroyed my sense of scale. The shape of her red stud earrings. The chocolate from Trader Joe’s that her husband piled in the corner of her room. The bright smile she beamed at the entire team even when we woke her up at 5 in the morning for pre-rounds.

It wasn’t her first pregnancy, but it was her first real chance at a live birth. Before being transferred to the TMC from a rural Texas hospital for this pregnancy, our patient had previously endured multiple miscarriages and several failed rounds of IVF. She wanted this baby more than anything. More than she wanted to avoid the serious risks to her own health—an autoimmune condition made her more likely to miscarry and more likely to experience serious complications—or the obscene mountain of medical bills piling up in her mailbox at home.

We realized something was wrong near the end of her first trimester. The resident couldn’t find the baby’s kidneys on ultrasound. We already knew the baby was small for its gestational age, but we’d attributed the growth restriction to our patient’s existing autoimmune disorder. This new knowledge, combined with a low amniotic fluid index, sent up several red flags at once. When the attending took the probe, her face went white.

For most parents, an ultrasound is pure joy. A first glimpse, a tiny nose that looks like dad’s, a photo to send to the family group chat. But when an ultrasound reveals a lethal fetal anomaly, each image is the unwinding of a miracle.

Our attending clicked through the frames again. The resident was right. There were no kidneys.

In a healthy pregnancy, fetal kidneys create the amniotic fluid that protects the body and allows the lungs to develop. Without this fluid, the lungs fail to develop properly. Even worse, without this protective amniotic buffer, the fetus is slowly crushed in the womb. 

Most of these babies die before birth. Those who survive delivery gasp for air until they suffocate in their parents’ arms. When we explained this to our patient, she howled as though someone had trampled her heart. Her husband slumped at the end of the bed, shredding a chocolate wrapper between his fingers. Our attending held back her own tears until the husband asked if he could donate his kidneys to their baby. As she explained that surgery couldn’t fix this, her voice shook. 

Then, the parents asked whether this meant they qualified for the narrow exceptions to Texas’ abortion ban, especially given the autoimmune disorder that had brought the mother to the TMC in the first place. But there is no exception in Texas for lethal fetal anomalies. And our patient was too sick to travel out of state.

When we left the room, the parents and the entire medical team had been stunned into silence. I remember thinking that it couldn’t get worse than that heartbreak. Until it did.

Days later, the patient’s room was empty. I asked the resident what happened to her. Overnight, in a cruel turn, her own kidneys had begun to fail. She was transferred to the ICU, and I started working with another team in the hospital. I never learned what happened next.

Every morning after, I imagined running into her husband in the elevator, standing with his usual bag of snacks, telling me that his wife made it through the hellish ordeal. But I never did.

I grew up believing abortion was a sin. My parents raised me in a conservative religious community just outside Dallas, where I was taught that hormonal contraception was an “abortifacient” and that women who defied church teaching might be punished with miscarriages.

The more I learned about medicine—and how quickly a healthy pregnancy can turn deadly—the less certain I became about the worldview I’d inherited. When I discussed the case of the patient with the autoimmune disorder with a physician from the community that I grew up in, he agreed that ending the pregnancy was likely safest, before adding that women “shouldn’t use abortion as birth control.”

Others from my past have been less generous. They now accuse me of defending “baby killers,” or simply of using a tragic case—a woman too sick to continue her pregnancy, a baby too sick to survive delivery—to justify what they deem to be a barbaric procedure. To those who share this view, I ask them to consider this: Abortion can also save lives.

Before Roe, hospital wards were filled with women dying from botched abortions. The procedure was legalized, in part, because doctors recognized a public health crisis. Even now, I’m grateful that many patients can safely self-manage with pills ordered online for a few dollars. And I worry about the women who can’t, like an incarcerated patient whom my colleague recently cared for.

Her baby was diagnosed with acrania, a rare malformation characterized by the partial or complete absence of the fetal skull. This is always lethal. Some women, by virtue of their own resources or with help from abortion funds, are able to travel to a state that doesn’t restrict abortion care—but this wasn’t an option for this patient.

I think about Samantha Casiano and her daughter, Halo, who lived for four hours before suffocating in her parents’ arms. I think about Kaitlyn Kash, who was denied an abortion after her baby was diagnosed with osteogenesis imperfecta, a lethal condition that leaves bones so fragile they can break in the womb. I think of Tierra Walker, who died of preeclampsia at 20 weeks pregnant, found lifeless in her bed by her 14-year-old son.

These cases are a direct result of legislation that forces our patients to continue perilous pregnancies. These intolerable, unimaginably cruel laws meet the threshold of a human rights crisis and will only continue to cause harm.

How many more preventable maternal deaths will there be in Texas? How many more times will we delay necessary care to satisfy political imperatives unmoored from medical evidence? How many more times in my medical training will I sit with a patient and help her write a birth plan for the dying?

Every one of those questions has the same answer: too many.

The post A Birth Plan for the Dying appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Paul Skalnik was a con artist, passing bad checks, role-playing as a successful businessman, and racking up a series of sometimes overlapping marriages. Over the years, he bilked numerous people out of their savings with hollow promises and half-cocked schemes, which often ended with him fleeing town. 

That in itself would make him a compelling character for a book. He’s the type of grifter who calls to mind simpler, more naive times. Indeed, he did a lot of his damage in the 1980s, before the internet made it easy to check if someone was actually, for example, a high-powered executive.

But Skalnik’s cons didn’t stop at the romantic and financial. They came to have life-or-death consequences. 

Pamela Colloff, a legend of Texas magazine journalism, uses Skalnik’s story to expose a perilous flaw in the criminal justice system in her long-awaited debut book, Catch the Devil: A True Story of Murder, Deception, and Injustice on the Gulf Coast, out from Knopf this July.

Colloff, who spent two decades at Texas Monthly before assuming a double role as a reporter for ProPublica and a staff writer at the New York Times Magazine, has long covered some of the most consequential wrongful-conviction cases in the state. 

In 2010, she published an article on Anthony Graves, who was on death row for more than a decade after being convicted of the 1992 murder of a Burleson County family. By the time Colloff wrote about Graves’ story, an appeals court had overturned his conviction, a rare and telling move that indicated something was seriously wrong with his case. His conviction had relied on the word of a co-defendant who used his dying words to recant the accusations. But for four years after his case fell apart, Graves remained in jail, awaiting a new trial, where the state would, once again, seek the death penalty. Just a month after Colloff’s article outlining the weakness of the case was published, attorneys abandoned the prosecution, and he was released.

She built on that coverage in 2012, when she published a two-part story about Michael Morton, a Williamson County man who had been exonerated by DNA evidence in 2011 after spending almost 25 years in prison for the murder of his wife. Lawmakers later passed a law in his name mandating that prosecutors turn over evidence to the defense. 

Wrongful convictions and prosecutorial misconduct have loomed large in Colloff’s reporting throughout her career, and all the stakes are there in her new book, which takes aim at another troublesome aspect of America’s criminal justice system: the so-called jailhouse snitch.

Catch the Devil: A True Story of Murder, Deception, and Injustice on the Gulf Coast (Courtesy)

For years, Skalnik—whose story begins and ends in Texas—attempted to dodge accountability for his own past by acting as a crucial witness for the State of Florida, delivering testimony of supposed confessions his neighbors at the Pinellas County Jail had let slip to him. In Catch the Devil, readers get a dual narrative: Colloff writes about Skalnik’s life and how prosecutors and judges enabled his doubtful testimony, and she also tells the equally compelling story of one man Skalnik helped send to death row. 

In 1985, James Dailey was implicated in the murder of 14-year-old Shelly Boggio by his roommate and co-defendant, Jack Pearcy. Investigators in Pinellas County lacked forensic evidence, corroboration, or even a clear motive as to why Dailey, a Vietnam veteran, would have suddenly participated in such a crime. Pearcy, with a record of violence against women, was a much better fit, but officers pressed forward with the case against Dailey anyway.

Awaiting trial, Dailey ended up in the same jail as Skalnik. It was a twist of fate that would allow Skalnik to insert himself into the case and hold Dailey’s fate in his hands. 

While Skalnik’s work with Florida prosecutors made him one of the most prolific jailhouse snitches in the country, he was hardly the only person offering up stories about other people in jail. Testimony given by jailhouse informants has played a role in sending at least 266 innocent people to prison in the United States since 1968, according to the National Registry of Exonerations. The Innocence Project reports that in about 20 percent of cases where DNA ultimately exonerated someone, the person had initially been sent to prison with the help of jailhouse testimony. In Texas, at least 17 people have been exonerated after being convicted based on false jailhouse testimony—four of whom were sentenced to death and 10 to life in prison. 

In cases like these, prosecutors allow people who were in jail with the defendant pretrial to testify about what they allegedly heard the person discuss—or confess to—in the halls or through the bars of the county lockup. These witnesses are all facing their own criminal charges, and prosecutors are often willing to offer leniency in exchange for their help in gaining a conviction. In some cases, the jury doesn’t hear about these deals. As Colloff writes, Skalnik swore on several occasions that he was testifying only out of the goodness of his heart—only to get a deal shortly after.

Whether propelled by curiosity, anger, or incredulity, readers will charge through Colloff’s new book. 

I cover the flaws of the criminal justice system for the Texas Observer, but even I was shocked by the apparent bad faith of state actors and the near-admirable heel-digging of prosecutors in the face of clear injustice. 

The facts are sometimes stranger than fiction, but Colloff’s literary ability turns an inherently interesting story into a deeply impactful one. Her characters’ arcs take them across genres—love stories, wartime accounts, legal thrillers—and she navigates each one adeptly with evocative and descriptive prose. 

Her deep reporting also allows her to jump between perspectives, to put readers into different people’s heads. What if you were the unwitting wife of a con man? A prosecutor hopelessly stuck on a high-profile case? A guy willing to do anything to stay out of jail?

Her ability to craft these characters is what stands out, and she’s able to extend empathy and fairness to even the most frustrating actors. No one in the book is one-dimensional. She contends with the consequences of squandered potential, of destructive alcoholism, of panic in the face of losing your freedom. Underpinning the book’s nuance and complicated narrative, though, is something in too short supply among Skalnik and his state-employed enablers: a commitment to the truth.

The post A Jailhouse Snitch and the System that Made Him appeared first on The Texas Observer.