Inside the "hustle kingdom," where overseas scammers prey on Americans online

Down a dusty alley in the Ghanaian capital Accra, young men huddle together in a small, dark room and cast off their true identities, taking on the phony role of women looking for love online.

They call it their hustle kingdom.

They are West Africa's "Yahoo boys," fraudsters who swindle Americans out of millions of dollars by luring them into all kinds of scams -- many preying on widowers looking for love and companionship.

"I'll go on Instagram and use a girl's picture," Abdullah (not his real name) told CBS News when our team gained access to the hustle kingdom over the summer. "Then I go on an online dating site. I find a male friend. I pretend to be a girl. Chat with him."

Abdullah is part of this syndicate that CBS News filmed undercover. The scammers pretend to be white American women residing in the U.S., tricking men into falling in love with them.

"I'm using what I have here to survive," said one of the well-educated but under-employed romance scammer kingpins tracked down and interviewed by CBS News. "I fish everywhere in the world. Easy to catch are the Americans."

Billions of dollars are spilling out of American banks as a result of a persistent wave of overseas-based fraud schemes like these in Ghana, while anti-fraud safeguards are failing to stop the gushing flow of money, a CBS News investigation has found.

The toll on Americans has been staggering. Consumers reported losing more than $10 billion to fraud in 2023, marking a 14% increase over reported losses in 2022, according to a Federal Trade Commission assessment released earlier this year. The brazen theft has taken a financial and emotional toll on millions of Americans. And it has placed new legal and political pressure on American banks, which have struggled to find ways to prevent the fraud, even when they have suspected it.

Victims and their families are increasingly filing lawsuits alleging banks have missed or ignored repeated red flags as their customers lose hundreds of thousands of dollars to scammers overseas.

"Everybody that has a credit card in this country is familiar with having transactions declined," says attorney Anne Marie Murphy, who represents a family that sued the financial firm Charles Schwab earlier this month. "The reason that credit cards are so good at doing this is because they're on the hook for fraud. The same isn't true with banks.

"So you have hundreds of thousands of dollars being transacted and wired out of people's accounts, but the banks don't believe that they have much liability."

The lawsuit against Schwab is filed on behalf of a 92-year-old retired nurse who alleges Schwab bankers repeatedly allowed wire transfers for gold purchases she made at the direction of overseas scammers involved in what's known as a computer repair scam. She was told to wire her money to purchase gold bars that were delivered to her, and then she was directed to turn them over to the scammers. The fraud is similar to a romance scam in that it uses psychological manipulation to ensnare vulnerable victims. CBS News has agreed not to use Ruth's last name to protect her privacy.

The complaint alleges Ruth's daughter "begged Schwab to do something because of suspicious circumstances. Schwab repeatedly blocked and unblocked [her mother's] accounts while allowing her life savings to slip out of the Schwab accounts."

Schwab has disputed those claims in a statement to CBS News, saying the company proactively warned Ruth and her daughter about the risk of fraud but Ruth was adamant that the transactions were legitimate.

Schwab said Ruth told her advisers there "multiple times" that the gold purchases were being made free of outside influence as part of her investment strategy.

"We do not want our clients to be victimized by criminals," Schwab's statement said. "When clients wish to access their funds, we have a responsibility to respect their autonomy in [a] way that credit card companies simply do not have."

Banking officials said the dueling obligations -- to protect their customers from fraud while at the same time honoring their wishes for how they use their own money -- has turned overseas-based scams into a fraught challenge for their industry.

"The hardest part is we want to make sure that we provide a safe environment for people to transact business," said Paul Benda, the executive vice president for risk, fraud and cybersecurity at the American Bankers Association.

"You talk with some of these tellers who have longtime customers that are pleading with [their customers] not to do this," Benda said. "It's awful. No bank ever wants their customer to be scammed. These are their friends, they're neighbors. These are people they grew up with. They would love to be able to do everything they can to stop them from losing their money. But a lot of times in the end, it's their money. It's their decision."

Still, some would like to see banks do more. New York Attorney General Letitia James has sued Citibank, claiming the bank failed to implement strong online protections to stop unauthorized account takeovers and failed to respond to fraudulent activity.

"Banks are supposed to be the safest place to keep money, yet Citi's negligence has allowed scammers to steal millions of dollars from hardworking people," the New York attorney general said in a statement. "There is no excuse for Citi's failure to protect and prevent millions of dollars from being stolen from customers' accounts and my office will not write off illegal behavior from big banks."

Citibank has moved to have the suit dismissed, with arguments scheduled for October. The bank accuses James of trying to use litigation to solve a problem that requires legislation.

"There is no denying that the problem is real," the bank writes in its reply to the lawsuit. "But no system will catch every scam every time."

Both lawmakers and law enforcement officials have told CBS News banks can do more to intercede if they know their customers are wiring away their life's savings to con artists overseas.

"We think it's really important for the financial institutions to step up and curtail the abuse of American citizens," Deputy Assistant FBI Director James Barnacle told CBS News. He has overseen financial crimes investigations at the Bureau. "If the customer is doing things that are suspicious, you have an obligation as a financial adviser to ask questions and to report that to your management."

Banking officials counter that law enforcement and lawmakers need to do more to empower them to intercede before customer money is wired overseas - and to provide a single, central point of contact.

"Ask yourself this question: Who's in charge of the national anti-scam, anti-fraud strategy in the U.S.?" Benda said. "Where do I report?" Who's my partner on the government side?"

Benda said that even after investing hundreds of millions of dollars in fraud detection technology, banks remain hamstrung by their obligation to honor their customers' wishes.

"Even if a bank has identified there is a problem with a transaction, there are rules that essentially require banks to facilitate that transaction," Benda told CBS News, citing banking regulations that prevent banks from restricting account holders from accessing their money. "Banks don't want to be the ones to decide when a person should make a transaction or not."

The sophistication of the scams lies at the heart of the problem, the banking officials said. Victims are brainwashed to believe they are on the cusp of love or a financial windfall, and then coached at how they can bypass the safeguards erected by banks.

In the case of 92-year-old Ruth, who filed the lawsuit, her daughter Lesley alleges she engaged in months of appeals to her mother's bankers, urging them to stop her mother from wiring away more of her life savings. But her mother believed the scammers were "helpers" trying to protect her.

"When they shut down my mom's account, the helpers would say to her, 'Ruth, you've got to get that account opened'," Lesley said. "They'd give her instructions on what to say ... on how to get her frozen account opened again. ... She was a slave to them."

The CBS News investigation tracked a significant amount of money lost to romance scams to Ghana. A country with up-to-date technology and an educated population, Ghana has seen inbound wire transfers increase more than 140 % in the last decade, according to World Bank data.

In hundreds of underground boiler rooms, tucked away in apartments in the capital city, small-time hustlers called "Yahoo boys" crowd around glowing screens, working for bosses who set them up with phones, laptops, electricity and internet.

In one such room, these men could be seen crafting text messaging and emails to seduce their American targets -- many of them older men they met through online dating sites.

One syndicate boss, who called himself Voodu, along with a senior member who calls himself Cola, have been scamming American victims for more than a decade. They agreed to speak with CBS News on condition of anonymity.

They claimed their motives are misunderstood.

"I come from a poor family and a poor background," Voodu said.

And in a world connected by the click of a button, these men turned to cyber fraud.

"I couldn't pay my hostel fees, school fees," said Cola, a university graduate who said he couldn't find a respectable job. "I feel disappointed, like I didn't go to school to do this. ... Sometimes when I take money from people, l imagine that is my dad."

The money men like these take can bankrupt Americans of their life savings and tear apart families with shame, anger, and guilt.

Most of the scam activity unfolds in texts and emails. If someone insists on a voice call, Voodu said he recruited women to play the part. For a video call, he said he hires online porn stars and records them acting out scenarios that he directs, from the mundane to the raunchy.

"They think they're talking to this beautiful blonde woman," Voodu said. "I have paid to just have her on video call."

Building trust and deceiving the victims, he told CBS News, can take months.

"We do all that to get his attention and trust. Then, boom!" he said.

CBS News documented their flashy lifestyle, filled with expensive clubs, beach parties and fancy cars. On what they call a "good night," they can be seen celebrating by throwing money in the air.

Voodu and Cola claim their biggest payout was in the millions.

For Ruth, the 92-year-old retired American, the losses totaled more than a quarter of a million dollars. Though she saved responsibly her entire life, now she worries constantly about money.

Scammers convinced Ruth to purchase the gold bars and then deliver them to an anonymous courier, which was captured on surveillance video.

It was only when Ruth saw her accounts emptied -- and risked being unable to pay rent at her senior living apartment -- that she was finally convinced she had fallen prey to a scam. By then, the damage had not only been financial, but also emotional. The ordeal, her daughter said, was bruising for the entire family.

"We were torn apart," Lesley said. "We said bad things that should never have been said in order to elicit the truth. And we've come out the other side. We were a close family. We all love each other very much. ... I have to let go of [it] just to have a good relationship with my mother."