When New York City resident Venancia Yolanda Ramirez arrived at Auckland International Airport on January 2, the 60-year-old expected to meet a man whom she was convinced was the love of her life.
But the reality was she had been duped into being a drug mule as part of an elaborate, months-long online romance and inheritance scam that ended only when Customs discovered oddly stiff clothes in her luggage, a court was told this week.
The all-white garments, which also had a suspiciously powdery residue, had been saturated then dried with at least 1kg of liquid meth.
Ramirez’s gullibility helped reduce her sentence significantly as she appeared in Manukau District Court for sentencing on a methamphetamine importation charge. But it didn’t keep her out of prison entirely.
The case was “somewhat unique ... in terms of your naivety and vulnerability”, Judge Janey Forrest told the defendant.
But it seems to be part of a disturbing upward trend, in which defendants are found to be reckless as to the presence of illegal drugs even if they didn’t fully realise what they had signed up for, the judge said.
She noted Ramirez’s case was the third sentencing of the sort she had overseen in recent weeks.
“It is clear to me there is an increasing pattern of vulnerable people being identified overseas performing the role of drug mule,” she said.
The court was told Ramirez’s path to victim and criminal started with a difficult divorce around 2019. After that, she stayed at home as a fulltime caregiver for her adult son, who suffers from schizophrenia.
A violent relationship with another man followed, the court was told. Shortly after ending the relationship, the man died of an overdose in a petrol station toilet as Ramirez was driving him to his family hours away in a neighbouring state.
During that period of grief and trauma, she was first targeted by an online romance scammer who convinced her to send money, her lawyer told the court.
“It is in that context it seems you have been targeted [a second time] by people as someone who is lonely, who is going through a difficult psychological time,” the judge said.
Ramirez received an email in December 2023 stating a dying stranger from overseas had decided to bequeath her US$7 million estate to Ramirez as an act of charity. A photo was provided of a woman in a hospital bed.
“We have a somewhat more sophisticated scheme than some we have seen in the past,” the judge said, explaining the fraudsters provided what appeared to be legitimate identification and wrote in elaborate detail.
On Christmas Eve 2023, Ramirez was told the woman had died. The scammers sent what appeared to be a death certificate, a will and banking documents.
Over the ensuing months, she communicated with several people who represented themselves as bankers, lawyers and a doctor. During that time, the scammers also appeared to create a character by the name of Mr Jones Chow to help solidify her trust.
By May 2024, she had put a notice in her phone’s iCalendar marking the 15th as “my husband Jones Birthday”. Two weeks later, she was convinced to pay for her own flight to Los Angeles to meet Chow before flying the next day to Japan to retrieve her inheritance.
An email later recovered by New Zealand authorities instructed Ramirez she was to meet Chow at an LA hotel, where she would sign documents for the inheritance to be released to her.
“However, Ms Ramirez would be given ‘some T-Shirts to deliver to us when you arrive in Japan, which contains your payment code’,” the email also instructed. “Ms Ramirez was asked to bring this payment code to the Norinchikin Bank in Japan, where the code would be used as proof of Ms Ramirez’s identification, which would allow the funds to be released.”
A later email from Ramirez confirmed she did arrive in Japan, bringing with her “the suitcase with T-shirts and everything else”. She also expressed gratitude for the help she received from Chow during her meeting with him.
She would write in her iCalendar a week later: “Amazing man name Jones Chow American Japanese.”
Authorities said it was unclear from the correspondence what happened over the next six months. But she put another entry in her diary for January 6, 2025: “Jones arrive at New Zealand”.
When she arrived at Auckland Airport on January 2, Ramirez completed the standard traveller declaration stating she knew the contents of her baggage and that she was not carrying goods on behalf of anyone else.
It was her demeanour that caught the authorities’ attention.
“The defendant presented at Customs Immigration processing and told the processing officer that she wanted to visit New Zealand and hop on a boat,” court documents state. “She could not further explain her travel plans.
“The processing officer referred the defendant for further Customs interaction following this conversation.”
As her bags were searched, she confirmed she knew the contents and that everything belonged to her. When the officers found the suitcase with nine pieces of stiff white clothing, Ramirez insisted they were her sleeping clothes.
An on-the-spot methamphetamine test, however, suggested otherwise.
“The officer informed the defendant that some of her clothing was found to contain methamphetamine,” court documents state. “The defendant said that she was going to wash the clothes.”
The clothing items weighed nearly 7kg, which is the amount of methamphetamine Ramirez was initially charged with smuggling. The estimate, however, was later revised to “at least” 1.1kg to account for the weight of the clothing.
In her other baggage, police found electronic devices that were later used to piece together the scam. She had been in jail since the search.
Smuggling methamphetamine into New Zealand carries a maximum possible sentence of life imprisonment, but outcomes vary based on a defendant’s role within a drug syndicate and culpability.
Crown prosecutor Jamie Eng asked the judge to impose a four-year starting point for Ramirez, before reductions were factored in, while defence lawyer Devon Kemp sought three years.
“There needs to be a punitive and deterrent element to the sentence,” Eng argued, pointing out Ramirez lied about the contents of her luggage as she was searched.
It was also suggested Ramirez’s discount for prior good behaviour should be tempered based on the inference that she smuggled drugs into Japan as well.
But while similar cases involved an aspect of “wilful blindness” on the part of the defendant, it appears Ramirez had been unaware of her role until the end because of the unusually lengthy and intricate fraud by her handlers, her lawyer said.
Kemp noted Ramirez had no previous criminal record, adding it would be unfair to punish her for Japan when there’s no evidence she smuggled anything. The judge agreed.
“I think it’s highly likely that was offending of a similar nature, but there is no actual evidence of that,” she said. “It is possible that could have been a dummy run.”
Judge Forrest settled on a three-and-a-half-year starting point before allowing reductions for her guilty plea, remorse, rehabilitation efforts and the extra difficulty of serving a prison sentence in a foreign country with no family support.
“It’s not often I get such glowing information from the Department of Corrections,” the judge said of the defendant’s participation in faith-based prison programmes.
The reductions resulted in an end sentence of 23 months’ imprisonment, which Judge Forrest declined to convert to a non-custodial sentence.
It’s likely, the judge noted, that Ramirez will soon be released on parole given the 10 months she has already served in custody. Once released, deportation will follow.
Ramirez, whose relatives watched via audio-video feeds from overseas, wiped away tears as she was escorted back to a cell to finish serving her time.
Craig Kapitan is an Auckland-based journalist covering courts and justice. He joined the Herald in 2021 and has reported on courts since 2002 in three newsrooms in the US and New Zealand.
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