As Christmas approached in 2012, Audrey Elaine Elrod was in a bad spot financially. The 45-year-old junior-college dropout was scraping by on $344 in weekly unemployment benefits and whatever she earned selling prescription drugs and toilet paper. Elrod was engaged to a Scottish oil worker named Duke McGregor, whose son had been in a terrible automobile accident. To help cover the mounting medical expenses, Elrod made complicated money transfers to McGregor, moving vast sums overseas even as she struggled to make ends meet.
Except McGregor wasn’t a Scottish oil worker. He wasn't even real.
Elrod’s messages—and many thousands of dollars—were going to a con artist. And by completing his wire transfers for him, she participated in a wide-reaching fraud. In this fascinating true crime story, Brendan I. Koerner examines how these scams, operated by “Yahoo Boys” in Nigeria, rely on idealized romantic love to financially and emotionally devastate their victims.
