- By Hannah Ajala and the Love Janessa team
- BBC World Service
4 hours ago
For over a decade, a former adult star’s stolen images have been used to swindle victims out of thousands of dollars. How does it feel to be the ignorant face of so many love scams?
This article contains spoilers.
Almost every day, Vanessa receives messages from men who believe they are in a relationship with her – some even think they are their wife. They are angry, confused and some want their money back – which they allegedly sent her to pay for her daily expenses, hospital bills or to help relatives.
But it’s all a lie. Vanessa doesn’t know these men. Instead, her images and videos, drawn from her past life in adult entertainment, have been used as bait for online romance scams dating back to the mid-2000s. Victims had extorted money through fake online profiles using Vanessa’s name or likeness in a type of romance scam called catfishing.
The news flow of stories of money lost and lives shattered has taken its toll.
“I started getting depressed and blaming myself — maybe these men wouldn’t be scammed if it wasn’t for my pictures out there,” says Vanessa — we don’t use her last name to protect her full identity.
For about eight years, Vanessa worked as a “cam girl” – she streamed explicit material live on the Internet via webcam. Being a bit shy at first, she decided to create an alter ego named Janessa Brazil. “It’s not really me, it’s Janessa, so I won’t be ashamed,” she thought.
She chose the surname Brazil not only because she was born there, but also because it is one of the most popular search terms on the internet. It was a wise decision. “I hate that name,” she says now. “But it helped me become popular quickly.”
Everything was great for a while. Vanessa enjoyed the relationship with her fans, who paid up to $20 (£17) a minute to see and interact with her. “I want to please them. I want to have fun with them. And they get addicted,” she says.
At the peak of her career, she says she earned about $1 million a year. Janessa had her own website, a successful brand and a vibrant online presence. But in 2016, her online profile went dark.
It took us nine months to find her for the Love, Janessa podcast. When we finally spoke to Vanessa in her modest apartment on the US East Coast, she told us that one of the reasons she stopped creating online content was to try to stop the scammers. “I no longer want to give them the power to ever use anything from me again,” she says.
Vanessa first became aware of scammers pretending to be her when a man posted in chat during a live show, adamant he was her husband and she had promised him she would stop camming. She thought it was a prank but asked him to email her.
Other victims came forward with similar stories, posting comments during their shows and asking them to prove their identity. Scammers have also emerged with strange requests for them – like putting on a red hat – pictures, which they then use to trick victims.
The constant comments, emails, and tense atmosphere began to affect their business. “It was a nightmare,” says Vanessa. “But I felt sorry for those guys. What should I do?”
Initially, she tried to reply to every email, which took hours every day. She says her then-husband, who was also her manager, also began monitoring the news. He told the scam victims that he and Vanessa are not liable for the money the men lost.
“If I got all the money that these guys sent to all these scammers, I’d be a billionaire today and I wouldn’t be sitting here in my tiny apartment,” she says.
Vanessa believes it’s in the nature of many men to want to take care of women, which explains why they send money to someone they don’t know.
“Even if they don’t have the money, they’re willing to give it just to feel loved,” she says.
Roberto Marini, an Italian in his early 30s, got hooked on a fake Janessa. It started with a message on Facebook from a striking young woman named Hannah, who complimented him on his start-up business – a sustainable farm on the island of Sardinia.
After three months of exchanging pictures and loving messages, she started asking for money. At first it was for little things, like a broken phone, but soon she needed more. She told him she had a hard life – when she wasn’t caring for sick relatives, she had to make a living from adult entertainment.
Roberto wanted to save her and felt a “fatherly energy” towards her. But he was frustrated that they never seemed to be able to speak to each other in person — every time they arranged a call, their phone broke or something else came up.
He then discovered thousands of pictures and videos of Hannah on the internet — with the exception of adult entertainment star Janessa Brazil — and many of them were clearer than the ones Hannah had ever sent him.
Their love felt real, so he wondered if she didn’t want to reveal her true identity in case it complicated their relationship.
Confused, Roberto joined one of Janessa Brazil’s live online shows. “Is it really you?” he typed into the chat. He wasn’t getting the answers he wanted and he was paying by the minute so he didn’t stay long.
In his search for the truth, Roberto also emailed her, along with many other people he thought might be the real Janessa. During our interview with her, Vanessa checked her inbox and found a message from him among thousands of emails.
“Hi. I need to speak to the real Janessa Brazil,” he wrote in 2016. She had replied an hour later, “I’m the real Janessa Brazil.”
He asked her a few more questions to find out if they had spoken before. That email exchange was the first and only contact they ever had.
But that wasn’t the end. Roberto remained ensnared by scammers. He says he sent them a total of $250,000 (£207,500) over four years, used up his life savings and borrowed money from friends and family, as well as taking out loans.
We found Roberto through his online posts warning others that fake accounts are scamming people using Janessa’s stolen pictures. But even after everything that had happened to him, a part of him still believed that he had a deep connection with the real Janessa.
That’s the sign of a successful scam, says Dr. Aunshul Rege, a criminal justice expert from Philadelphia who has studied online love scams.
She says messages are often sent by criminal networks that work in teams to care for victims and share images and information. She even found an example of the manuals they use — handy guides that also list excuses to avoid a call that might expose them.
The scams follow a pattern: love bombing, threats of separation, and then requests for financial help, ostensibly to help the couple finally get together. The tactics are so formulaic that they’ll sound frighteningly familiar to anyone who’s been on the receiving end, but they work.
“As humans, we are designed to help one another. That’s how we’re built,” says Dr. rule.
Vanessa says she hates these cruel tactics. “They show love and then take it away. The boys are desperate and willing to do anything to get her back,” she says.
dr Rege thinks it’s likely that Roberto’s scam was carried out by an organized group. She says there are huge networks operating around the world, with a significant number coming from Turkey, China, the United Arab Emirates, the UK, Nigeria and Ghana.
One of the places Roberto was asked to send money to was Ghana, home to a group of online scammers called the Sakawa Boys. We tracked down some of them in Accra. “Ofa,” a soft-spoken young man, told us that posing on the internet was time-consuming and bureaucratic just to keep track of the lies. He admitted the work made him “feel bad” but he had earned over $50,000 (£41,500).
When shown pictures of Janessa, Ofa said he hadn’t used them himself but understood why they were popular with scammers. He also said that for a scam to work, he needed a variety of images showing the women in everyday situations – like cooking or at the gym.
Vanessa believes her images were used in part because she shared so many candid moments from her daily life. “I put my heart and soul out there, so they were very busy,” she says.
But she draws a clear line between her professional alter ego and her true self. “Vanessa has panic attacks. Not Janessa,” she says.
Eventually, the unstoppable tide of cheating victims grew into “a monster” that traumatized Vanessa.
Having to appear in front of the camera every day began to affect her mental health and her marriage. Exhausted, Vanessa told us she started drinking before her shows. She says she hates watching videos from the period because she can see her own dissatisfaction.
By 2016, she says, she couldn’t take it any longer and decided to quit. She says she packed her car, left home and her husband, and headed to a new life. Now she’s training to be a therapist and writing her memoirs – regaining control of her own story.
Vanessa has never gone to the authorities to report scammers using her picture. She doesn’t think they would take her complaints seriously. “They’ll look at me like ‘You’re a porn star’ and laugh at my face,” she says.
Over the years it has become more resilient. She knows scammers will never stop impersonating her, but she understands why some victims fall into the trap.
“When it comes to love, we can be so stupid,” she says. “I know I was there. It’s like ‘Damn! I’m smarter than that!’ So it happens to all of us.”
Reporting by Hannah Ajala, Laura Regehr, Katrina Onstad and Simona Rata
Listen to Love, Janessa here
video caption,
Watch: Dr. Aunshul Rege has some handy tips for dealing with online love scams