Las Vegas allegedly used appointment applications to attack the victims who drugged and stole

CNN
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An old man from Nevada seeks love was supposedly drugged and pushed through the border of the United States to Mexico in a wheelchair by a “sinister” scammer before being found dead in a hotel room in Mexico City , one of the almost a dozen victims who fell prey to their deception, the FBI said Friday.

Aurora Phelps, 43, a Las Vegas woman with double citizenship in the United States and Mexico, has been accused in an accusation of 21 positions for her alleged romance scheme, where researchers say she used online appointment applications for attract mainly greater men. Access to your banks, cars, social security accounts and retirement. He even sold more than $ 3 million in Apple shares belonging to a victim, according to the Las Vegas del FBI field.

Phelps, which is in custody in Mexico, He has been accused With seven electronic fraud charges, three postal fraud charges, six bank fraud charges, three identity robbery charges, a kidnapping charge and a kidnapping charge that results in death, according to the federal accusation. The charges can carry a sentence of life imprisonment. American prosecutors say they are working to extradite it back to the United States to face these positions.

“This is technically a romantic scam, but this is a romantic scam on steroids,” said Spencer Evans, the special agent in charge of the Las Vegas del FBI division, at a press conference on Friday. “We have not seen one like this in recent history that is so disastrous, as sinister.”

Three of the four victims identified in the accusation are dead, said the FBI, although the charges involve Phelps in just one of the deaths.

An old Nevada Man was allegedly a victim of Phelps at the beginning of November 2022 when he met her in an online appointment service. When they gathered in a restaurant in Las Vegas, she slipped the medication of man “and other substances”, and became a confused and confused, alleges the accusation.

Phelps supposedly made purchases with the American Express Credit Card without his consent while he was in a drugged state, according to the accusation. When purchases were rejected, she led him to authorize them talking to American Express.

The prosecutors say that Phelps allegedly convinced the drugged man to travel with her, pushed him across the border between the United States and Mexico in a wheelchair and transported him to a hotel room in Mexico City, with his daughter accompanying , according to the FBI and the accusation. The authorities did not immediately explain how the group traveled hundreds of miles between the border of the United States and Mexico City. The man was found dead in the hotel room a few hours later, Evans said.

Two of the other alleged victims of Phelps were also found dead shortly after their meetings with her, including a man who went to an appointment with her in the Guadalajara region of Mexico in May 2022. When her daughter tried to call him and did not receive An answer on the day after the date, the Mexican police was sent home, where they found him dead on the floor of his bathroom, says the accusation.

Days later, Phelps tried to use the financial accounts of the man to make purchases, including the purchase of a gold coin and send it by mail to his house, according to the accusation.

“Several members of the victim family were worried when they could not contact their loved one,” Evans said Friday. “They didn’t know what had happened to them. They made telephone calls to the authorities; They are trying to find out where they were. ”

The only living victim mentioned in the accusation survived and left a five -day coma after Phelps allegedly administered large amounts of sedatives prescribed in the course of a week, Evans said. During that time, Phelps allegedly stole his iPhone, iPads, driver’s license and bank cards, obtaining access to their financial accounts, the accusation said.

Phelps also sold his APPLE actions and tried unsuccessfully to eliminate the money from the victim’s online brokerage account, according to the accusation.

“There may be other people … who were victims of their scams and whose confidence in it has cost them their life,” Evans warned. “The FBI has realized multiple additional potential victims, men and women, both in the United States and Mexico, which we believe that Phelps took advantage of for a period of more than three years.”

The FBI is looking for help to identify other potential victims, which may have interacted or have been used by Phelps, who, he says, used a long list of aka over the years. Anyone is encouraged with information about Aurora Phelps to communicate with the FBI and visit this website.

Phelps does not have an American lawyer who can speak in his name, a spokesman for the Department of Justice He told The Associated Press.