Gulfport ‘money mules’ helped scam a widow and others out of $300K, court records say

A Gulfport couple was indicted in Pennsylvania on charges on wire fraud connected a fake lottery scam that earned $300,000 in two years, according to court records.

Troy Smith and Michelle Greenwood, who are married, are accused of being “money mules” for a Jamaica-based scam between 2016 and 2018.

According to the indictment, filed in December in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania, the scam involved an unnamed co-conspirator posing as an official of a sweepstakes organization who would call victims to tell them they had won a multi-million dollar cash prize and a car.

The recipients of the fake prize were then told they had to prepay certain taxes and fees before they could receive their winnings — and to direct these payments to Smith and Greenwood.

A Pennsylvania widow, made payments to Smith and Greenwood that mounted over the course of nearly a year. Between October 2016 — when she was first contacted — and August 2017, the couple defrauded her out of $123,000, which she sent via services like Western Union in over 80 money transfers.

Prosecutors say Smith and Greenwood visited a number of Wal-Mart stores to pick up the money, and subsequently wired $50,000 in 57 installments to the other participants in the lottery scam based in Jamaica.

Many of the stores where the couple would acquire the cash were on the Coast, according to the indictment.

Fake lottery scams very similar to the one described in the indictment have grown common in recent years, and are often traced to Jamaica. The “Jamaican lottery scam” is estimated by the Federal Trade Commission to be a billion-dollar-a-year industry in Jamaica, where its proceeds help fuel violent crime. Like other scammers, the fraudsters’ targets are usually elderly and vulnerable.

Smith, a 27-year-old Jamaican national, married Greenwood in 2018. She is 36 and a U.S. citizen.

In order to foil the wire transfer services’ fraud detection tactics, the couple collected the fraudulent money transfers under a variety of aliases involving combinations of their real middle names, the indictment said. The aliases included Romario Smith, Romario Leonardo, Leonardo Smith, Leonardo Romario, Troy Romario, Michelle Nichole, and Nichole Greenwood.

Greenwood was arrested by Gulfport police in 2019 on a charge of false pretense, in a case involving a similar scam where the victim was a 76-year-old woman in Minnesota. The connection between that arrest and the present indictment is unclear.

According to the court docket, Greenwood will be arraigned before a judge on Feb. 9, and Smith has an upcoming detention hearing on Feb. 10.