Bret Curtis, Brian Haugen, documentaries, Hey Beautiful: Anatomy of a Romance Scam, Hulu, Paul Raffile, Ruth Grover, true crime, TV
May 21, 2025
by Carla Hay
“Hey Beautiful: Anatomy of a Romance Scam”
Directed by Andy Robertson
Culture Representation: The three-episode documentary series “Hey Beautiful: Anatomy of a Romance Scam” features an all-white group of people representing the working-class and middle-class.
Culture Clash: Three women share their stories about getting scammed out of money by online “boyfriends” who turned out to be frauds.
Culture Audience: “Hey Beautiful: Anatomy of a Romance Scam” will appeal primarily to people who are interested in watching true crime documentaries about online romance scams, but the documentary is cheap exploitation that drags out for too long and ultimately does not reveal any new information.
If you’ve seen any documentary, talk show episode, or news report about women over the age of 50 who’ve been scammed by an “online lover” who turned out to be a fraud, chances are the culprit was someone who lived far away, usually in another country, and lied about everything. “Hey Beautiful: Anatomy of a Romance Scam” is more of the same type of cautionary tale, but it’s dragged out to annoying levels because it still doesn’t reveal the individuals who were behind the scams featured in the documentary.
It’s an example of a documentary that didn’t need to be stretched into three episodes. The details on who’s likely to do these romance scams have been covered elsewhere. The re-enactments are tacky. The victims are used as props for tabloid-like TV exposure.
Directed by Andy Robertson, “Hey Beautiful: Anatomy of a Romance Scam” puts the spotlight on three women over the age of 50 who were victims of these scams. Their last names are not revealed in the documentary. They all say that they met and fell “in love” with someone online and never met this boyfriend in person but sent money to him anyway.
The first episode, titled “The Face of Trouble,” details the scams that each woman had and how they got lured in by photos of a good-looking middle-aged man. The second episode, titled “Male Fraud,” reveals who is the man in the photos. The third episode, titled “In the Flesh,” shows the women meeting him in person and the results of an investigation into their scams.
The women admit that they were vulnerable to this fraud because they were feeling lonely and looking for passionate romance in their lives. They all describe meeting a handsome middle-aged man online who showered them with attention and compliments. He was not someone who presented himself as wealthy but as a responsible upper-middle-class career man who fell in love with them and wanted to start a life with them. They say they fell “in love” with him because of his kindness and personality, but it’s also obvious that the sexy pictures they saw of this long-distance lover was a huge part of the attraction.
Roxy, a homemaker from Connecticut, says her 51-year marriage became boring and stagnant when in 2019, she met a man who called himself Scott Hall through playing the online game Words With Friends. The man described himself as a widower father who worked as an oil rigger in Texas. Within four months of their first “meeting,” Roxy says her secret “romance” with Scott escalated to where she and Scott were making plans to run away and start a new life together. She sent him $1,000 through Bitcoin. However, she quickly found out that he was a scammer when a $4,000 check that he sent to her was returned by her bank as fraudulent, and the bank temporarily shut down her account until she able to clear up the matter and prove that she wasn’t responsible for the fraud.
Annette, a restaurant server in the Canadian province of Ontario, was going through a difficult time when she met a widower father named Mark Da Silva, who said that he lived in New York City and owned a gas-and-piping company. He said that his wife died of cancer and he was the father of a 20-year-old son. Annette says when she met him on a Facebook dating group, she had recently ended an unhappy marriage where her husband was too controlling; she was estranged from her stepchildren; and she was grieving over having to give away her dog because the dog bit some people. Annette says she and her online boyfriend planned to move to California together. She ended up giving her online boyfriend $40,000 (Canadian dollars) because he claimed he had banking problems when he had to do work overseas.
Gaby, a business owner in Germany, met a man called Michael Silver on LinkedIn. He told a similar story of being a widower whose wife died of cancer. Michael claimed to be a London-based owner of a wholesale company that bought and sold gems. He asked for money that he said were loans to pay for unexpected equipment repairs and customs fees. In total, Gaby says she sent him €1.5 million, which is about $1.7 million in U.S. dollars in the mid-2020s. Just like Roxy, Gaby says that she was married but bored in her marriage and was ready to leave her husband for her online lover.
What all of these women have in common, besides being scammed by a fake online lover, is that whoever conned them used stolen photos of the same man and presented these photos as pictures of themselves. The man whose photo images were stolen is Brian Haugen, a Los Angeles-based makeup artist and actor. And he’s a victim of identity theft because Haugen’s photos and videos that he posted online have been used for an untold number of scams (hundreds, according to the documentary), where the fraudsters set up fake accounts to contact women to scam out of money.
Annette’s best friend Nicole (whose last name isn’t revealed in the documentary) says she was able to detect a bad alteration of one of the photos because Haugen’s head was placed on the body of a man wearing an oil rigger outfit. The head looked too big for the body. Photos that look fake are an obvious “red flag” that the person online is using a false identity.
Did any of the victims in this documentary get suspicious before sending money to someone they never met in person? Gaby says she was skeptical, but the first time the online boyfriend had borrowed money from her, he promptly paid her back. In hindsight, Gaby says that it was just a way for him to gain her trust because the other times he subsequently asked her to send him money, it was for much larger amounts than the amount he asked for and paid back the first time. She never got her money back except for that first repayment.
Gaby says she also asked the scammer to do a video chat with her. She now knows that the scammer used one of Haugen’s videos and altered it with artificial intelligence “deep fake” technology to use Haugen’s video image but with the scammer’s movements and voice superimposed on the image. Ruth Grover, founder of the group ScamHaters United, is interviewed as a fraud expert in the documentary, and is one of the few sources of helpful information in the documentary. She recommends that if people are communicating with someone by video chat and need to verify it’s a real person, not “deep fake” imagery, the best thing to do is to ask to see the person stand up and turn around during the chat.
“Hey Beautiful: Anatomy of a Romance Scam” doesn’t reveal Haugen’s identity until the second episode. The fraud against the female victims is even more apparent when Haugen states that he’s been openly gay for years. Haugen then reveals he has “secrets” too: He’s a “leather daddy” who is heavily involved in BDSM (bondage, discipline, sadism and masochism) but he keeps that part of his life separate from his job.
Well, it’s not secret when you willingly say and do these things for a documentary on a streaming service with millions of subscribers: As if to prove his “leather daddy” status, the documentary shows Haugen at a gas station wearing leather chaps with his naked butt cheeks showing. The cameras also show him at a BDSM nightclub where another man in leather uses a tasseled whip to lightly spank him on his rear end.
At this point, this true crime documentary about a romance scam turns into a showcase for someone who looks like he wants to be the star of a Grindr reality show. Haugen is then shown introducing his much-younger boyfriend Jabril. And then there are segments of Haugen promoting his makeup tutorial business. He’s also shown as an unofficial therapist to Roxy, Annette and Gaby during video chats after the women have found out Haugen is the real person in the photos they saw online under their “online boyfriends'” names. Roxy, Annette and Gaby all say that Haugen is a compassionate and wonderful person with them.
A fourth woman named Kathy (from Alabama) is mentioned as a victim of a scammer who used Haugen’s photos and made contact with Kathy on Instagram. Kathy was conned out of an estimated $300,000 to $400,000, according to Kathy’s younger sister Sandy and Kathy’s niece Mandy, whose last names are also not revealed but who are are interviewed in the documentary. The documentary also shows Haugen interacting cordially wth Sandy in person and online. Kathy (who found out that she had been scammed) died of malnutrition, but Sandy and Mandy both say that she really died of a broken heart, and the malnutrition was a manifestation of it.
It’s mentioned in the documentary that Kathy was being used by her scammer as a “money mule” to launder cash. He would have other women he was scamming send thousands of dollars in cash to Kathy, who would then transfer the money to the scammer through a Bitcoin account. Kathy believed him when he told her that the women sending her cash were customers who were sending him payments for his business.
Although the grief and embarrassment of these scam victims seem very real, “Hey Beautiful: Anatomy of a Romance Scam” has too many scenes that look rehearsed or semi-scripted. The victims do re-enactments that look very awkward because the acting is so bad. Re-enactments are common in true crime documentaries. However, in “Hey Beautiful: Anatomy of a Romance Scam,” it probably would’ve been better to have professional actors and actresses do the re-enactments.
“Hey Beautiful: Anatomy of a Romance Scam” has a half-hearted attempt to find out who’s responsible for the scams that cheated Roxy, Annette, Gaby and Kathy out of their money. Annette and Haugen do online video chats with a Nigerian man, who uses a cat avatar as a disguise and who makes vague and unsubstantiated claims that he’s a former scammer who knows the person who scammed Annette. He refuses to give any important details.
Roxy says that her scammer (also from Nigeria) contacted her four years after she cut off contact with him. She claims that she demanded that he tell her his real name. He only gave her the name Johnson. Would this scammer really be stupid enough to give a victim any part of his real name? We’ll never know because Roxy had no way of tracing his messages.
Paul Raffile, a cyber investigations analyst, is brought in to do some sleuthing. In the end, he finds out a possible suspect for Kathy’s scams because Kathy kept meticulous records. This possible suspect is not named in the documentary.
The other women only get vague or dead-end answers that their scammers are most likely part of the Yahoo Boys network of online scammers, which share information and use many of the same scripts and tactics to defraud people. Unfortunately, the victims in this documentary are unlikely to get justice. Haugen says he faces a tough battle to get his name and reputation cleared up because social media companies rarely do anything when fake accounts get reported to social media companies.
And to put it as tactfully as possible, Annette is not the smartest one in this bunch. Even after she knows that Haugen is gay, she is seen snuggling up to him and saying in a voiceover that a part of her wishes that Haugen could “change is mind” about being gay so she could date him. Someone get Annette to a PFLAG meeting as soon as possible.
Annette also admits in the documentary that she was so angry when she found out she was scammed, she deleted all of the photos and messages from her scammer. Raffile says deleting or destroying evidence is one of the biggest mistakes that scam victims can make. He also says that the most progress can be made in the investigation of Kathy’s scammer because she kept so much evidence, which Raffile says he is handing over to authorities as soon as possible. One of the people interviewed in the documentary is FBI special agent Bret Curtis, whose expertise is in cybercrimes.
Of course, people of any age or gender can become the victim of online scams. But there’s something deliberately mocking about the way this documentary singled out lonely middle-aged women to be featured in this documentary. It seems to be perpetuating a stereotype that women who are in Generation X and older generations didn’t grow up with the Internet and therefore are more likely to be unwitting victims of Internet scams.
“Hey Beautiful: Anatomy of a Romance Scam” is also noticeably inconsistent in revealing how the fraud affected the victims’ lives after they found out that they were victims. Kathy’s family members believe that Kathy lost her life from a “broken heart” because of the scam. Roxy says, “I hurt my whole family,” but she implies that her family (including her husband) forgave her. However, the documentary never bothers to mention if Gaby’s marriage survived this scam.
As for Annette, she is not asked in the documentary how she might be changing her online dating activities because of what she experienced with the online fraud. Clearly, Annette has still got some ignorance issues to resolve if a part of her hopes she has a chance to date Hausen if he “changes his mind about being gay.” This exploitative documentary doesn’t seem to care if these victims really heal from the trauma but just wants to put them on display to be laughed at for falling for these online scams.
Hulu premiered “Hey Beautiful: Anatomy of a Romance Scam” on May 20, 2025.