Ghanaian woman jailed 70 months in US for role in $1.6m romance scam

Nana Takyiwa Adonu, 43, was sentenced to nearly six years in prison by a US District Court in the Southern District of Iowa on July 22, 2026, for laundering money from a nationwide romance scam. She was ordered to pay $1,655,640.76 in restitution and will serve three years of supervised release. She ran a company called "Han-Dak LLC," which received more than $1.6 million in total, including over $55,000 from a single victim in Iowa.

Investigators stated victims sent money believing it would help reunite them with people they met online. Prosecutors said, "Many victims drained their retirement accounts, sold their homes and vehicles, returned to work after retirement, and borrowed substantial sums from friends and family." When questioned by the FBI, Adonu claimed Han-Dak LLC was a legitimate garment-production business operating in China and later submitted false invoices and fabricated customer and vendor lists to a federal grand jury. Her co-defendant, Naabanyin Aniagyei-Cobbold, was sentenced in March 2026 to nine years in prison and ordered to pay $1,554,442.46 in restitution for the same scheme.