Inside Billion-Dollar Celebrity Impersonation Scam

In November, Margaret climbed into her Toyota Camry, left her husband of 10 years at their comfortable brick home in the rural South and drove an hour to a hotel where — she was sure — Kevin Costner was coming to meet her.

By this point, Margaret, 73, had spent months making weekly bitcoin deposits for Costner totaling about $100,000. He had messaged her that he was using the money to set up a new production company where she would eventually work for him. Margaret knew that some people would find it odd that an Oscar winner and the star of Yellowstone would need financing help from a retired office manager whom he’d met on Facebook, but Margaret wasn’t exactly a nobody.

She had achieved some renown for activism she’d done, even delivered a TED talk. She was special, and Costner saw it. She also was lonely and restless as her marriage was failing, her career had ended and her kids and grandkids were busy with their own lives.

Costner’s messages represented some welcome male attention, a fantasy to drop into when real life got too real. In one photo he sent, the actor leaned against the wooden headboard of a bed in a white T-shirt, holding a piece of paper that read, “it’s really me Kevin Costner I love you so much MARGARET i can’t wait to meet you MARGARET.”

There was some discussion of flying Margaret out to L.A. before they settled on a hotel in her home state as their meeting place. By the time she got in her car, Margaret had already had her suitcases packed for weeks, ready for the moment when she and Costner would finally be together.

“Her thing is, ‘I just want somebody to love me,’ ” says Margaret’s sister, Carol, in one of many phone conversations we would have over a period of several weeks this spring and summer as her worries about Margaret grew. (Both women’s names have been changed to protect their privacy).

As Margaret waited there in the room on pins and needles, Costner sent her a photo — a picture of a mangled car. He said that he’d been in an accident and wouldn’t make it after all. As she stared at the photo, all the warning signs that Margaret had been willfully avoiding over all these months of buildup and bitcoin payments began to creep into view.

Back in the hotel room, as Margaret stared at the crashed car photo, her heart was pounding. What was this photo, really? A reverse Google image search revealed that it was posted all over the internet. This wasn’t Kevin Costner’s car. This wasn’t Kevin Costner. Margaret’s fantasy man was not coming to whisk her away from her life, and the dawning awareness of that was crushing. “She was hysterical,” Carol says.

It was too late to drive home, and Margaret spent the night at the hotel, beating herself up for having been so stupid. In the vulnerable weeks that followed, someone reached out who said she wanted to help Margaret, a person claiming to be Costner’s 41-year-old daughter, Annie. One of the themes that recurs in romance scams targeting older women is the presence of the man’s children. The children are typically old enough not to need to be taken care of, but, according to the scammers, they will be delighted to welcome the victim into their big, happy family. Annie Costner quickly took to calling Margaret “Mom.” It’s unclear who, exactly, the person claiming to be Annie was. Margaret’s original scammer? A new scammer who found Margaret because of her Costner fandom?

Around the same time her scam relationship with Costner began to unravel, Margaret heard from someone she had been communicating with months earlier, a friend with whom she had a spiritual connection. Before she met the Costner impersonator, Margaret had been talking online with someone who said he was Roumie, known worldwide for portraying Jesus on the crowd-funded The Chosen. Margaret met this person after commenting on a Roumie post on Facebook. She had tried to send him money at one point, but her bank flagged a charge as likely fraud and stopped it. A review of an email chain between the two of them doesn’t seem very intimate — it’s mostly Roumie calling Margaret “honey,” asking how she slept and whether she has bought the Apple gift cards he asked for.

But Margaret believes that her relationship with Roumie is blossoming. And she’s told Carol she’s not allowed to talk to her about it, that Roumie’s management team wants it kept secret, “because he plays Jesus.” Though she was raised Southern Baptist, Margaret has started studying Catholicism, which is what Roumie practices, and she says he sends her a prayer every day.

Since Carol has been urging Margaret to accept that the people she’s communicating with are not who they claim to be, the sisters have been growing apart. Other family members either live far away or are choosing to avoid conflict and don’t bring up the weird online celebrity boyfriend thing.

“She was always my big sister that I looked up to,” Carol says. “I feel like she’s gotten isolated now, and I’m sure that’s the purpose of it. I don’t call her like I used to. Inside, I’m so disappointed. I’m mad at her and I feel sorry for her.”

This summer, Margaret’s divorce will be final. In the divorce agreement, she plans to turn over her house and several acres of land that belonged to her grandmother to her ex-husband in exchange for cash. She says she needs the money.

Americans reported $672 million in losses to confidence and romance scams in 2024, according to the FBI, with people over 60 filing the most complaints and losing the most money, averaging $83,000 per victim. Those figures don’t even include people like Margaret, who will never tell law enforcement what happened to them out of shame, fear of their scammers or the tiny lingering hope that, just maybe, they’d had a real relationship with a movie star.

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