News

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Thursday, November 12, 2026

Oregon Woman Guilty in Fraud Scheme

ZANESVILLE – In early 2026, Arianna Stark, of Oregon, was working as a security guard when she befriended a man online. After months of mentally grooming her, the man convinced her that the two were engaged in a real romantic relationship, and presented her with an opportunity to make additional money for herself.

The man convinced Stark to open an LLC and a bank account in Oregon. An LLC is a limited liability company. Scammers sometimes instruct their victims to open an LLC to make their scams look legitimate and hide what they’re really doing. The company may look real on paper even though they never intended to provide a real product or service.

Then he convinced her to “help him out” by receiving payments he was earning in his business, converting them to bitcoin, and transferring them to a wallet he specified.

Stark decided to engage in the plan. She opened the account, and transferred the funds.

At the same time, the man was engaged in a “phishing” scheme targeting Backroad Wellness, a Zanesville marijuana sales company. The man created an invoice that looked like it was from one of the company’s marijuana suppliers. An employee fell for the scam and ultimately paid more than $80,000 to the account opened by Stark.

Stark did as she was instructed and sent the money on to her online romantic partner.

Only her online partner wasn’t a businessman operating in America, but was instead a criminal operating in Nigeria.

ORGANIZED INTERNET SCAMS

Many Americans do not understand the organized nature of international scams. During a recent organized crime training update with the National District Attorney’s Association, Assistant Prosecutors John Litle and Lucas Howard learned from experts about the complexity of foreign fraud centers.

One of the things they learned involved fraud centers operated by Chinese criminals overseas comprising of dozens of city blocks. The criminal operators recruit poor individuals from Africa who are physically confined within the fraud complex for 7 months at a time, running scams 15 hours a day.

Many of the schemes start out with an innocent-sounding, pretended wrong-number text, and work on the kindness of the receiver – sometimes for 6 months – prior to initiating any part of the scam.

These scam centers cannot conduct banking in the United States, and foreigners cannot open a United States bank account from abroad. So in order to get their money, they must recruit American citizens to open accounts and launder the money.

This was Stark’s role, as both the victim of a scam, and a perpetrator of a scam.

CASE RESOLUTION

Stark knew she was getting paid money for engaging in a task that had no legally productive value. She did not know what specifically illegal activity she was assisting.

Ultimately, Zanesville Police Commander Phil Michel caught up with her and her accounts, securing nearly $75,000 of the stolen money before it could be transferred as bitcoin to Nigeria.

Stark cooperated with authorities in ensuring what money could be returned would be, and did her best to identify the Nigerian half of her fake romance.

As a consequence, Stark, who had no criminal record, admitted guilt for money laundering, a felony of the third degree. She will be placed on community control in Oregon, and she will use her experience to educate other at-risk groups of people about the nature of internet scams to prevent others from falling into the same path she took.

“Doing justice in a case doesn’t always mirror what someone thinks after reading a headline,” according to APA Litle, who handled the case. “In this case, Stark made less than $1,000 off of her involvement, and while she knew something was up, she had limited understanding of what she was doing because she, too, was being scammed.”

“She acted stupidly, and her recommended sentence justly balances her criminal actions, the nearly three months she has spent in jail, and her limited criminal intent.”

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