LOS ANGELES – June 27, 2020 – A Los Angeles judge granted temporary conservatorship to help relatives stop a family member who was losing millions of dollars to a Nigerian fraud ring.
RMO LLP, founding and managing partner, Scott E. Rahn, and partner, Matthew F. Baker, demonstrated to the Los Angeles Superior Court that the victim needed protection from these criminals, who had originally targeted the victim through Match.com in a romance scheme. That romance slowly turned profitable for the fraudsters, who manipulated the victim over a number of years, originally securing trivial “gifts” like phones under the auspices of needing them for secret, special military-like operations, before slowing asking for money via gift cards, wires and bank transfers.
Over time, the fraud changed, with the scammers eventually convincing the victim that they needed even more additional capital to help them secure as much as $40 million from a purported gold and diamond mine, which they proffered to share with the victim. The fraudsters were so unrelenting that they convinced the victim not only to send significant sums of money, but to travel alone internationally, including traveling to war ravaged parts of Africa where kidnappings are rampant, to verify the booty.
“They sometimes get people to come to them and then hold them for ransom, and in our case the victim actually was making plans to travel to meet the fraudsters where the victim might have been put in harm’s way,” said Rahn, whose Century City firm specializes in litigating family trusts and other conservatorship matters. “So, we stopped the fraud not only to cut off the financial drain, but also keep the victim safe.”
The RMO team obtained the emergency, temporary conservatorship over the victim’s objections by helping the judge understand the scammers’ tricks constituted undue influence of the victim and that intervention by means of conservatorship was the best and safest way to protect her.