The Fake NFL Star Who Allegedly Used Google’s AI to Help Pull Off a $1.3 Million Romance Scam
· Vice
Google’s unreliable AI slop search results claimed that a 35-year-old man was actually a player for the San Francisco 49ers, a lie that he allegedly used to scam at least 26 women out of a collective $1.3 million.
According to the FBI and federal prosecutors in Oregon, Daejon Labrayae Love and 18-year-old Taylor Jamie Chan allegedly spent years running a romance-investment scam across California, Oregon, Washington and Idaho. Love reportedly presented himself as either a 49ers wide receiver or a wealthy Swiss real estate developer, depending on what worked better. Chan allegedly played the role of his financial adviser.
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He’d meet women on dating apps, establish romantic relationships, show them fake investment profits and convince them to hand over money. Some victims were allegedly encouraged to take out personal loans. The scheme reportedly ran from 2022 until the pair of alleged cons were arrested at the Boise airport in August.
Google’s AI Helped Make a Fake NFL Star Look Legit During an Alleged $1.3 Million Romance Scam
It sounds like a good old-fashioned scam artist’s con, but the modern twist came in when the woman Love met Googled him to see if he was legit. Love purposely poisoned the information well, loading social media with pictures, videos, and stories portraying himself as an NFL player. Court documents say that Google’s AI overview apparently parroted Love’s claim that he was a 49ers wide receiver. He’d post screenshots. Love supplied the lies, and Google’s AI overview did its job by indiscriminately scooping them up and presenting them as fact.
ESPN has put together a roundup of all the ways actual NFL players and teams have mocked Love, some of them using AI-generated pictures to make themselves stand next to Love in the locker room or at practice. Cute, I guess, but it’s all just a bit disconcerting. Google trawled the Internet for information and dumped it into the search results of people who would go on to be scam victims, as they tried to suss out whether someone really was who they said they were.
This seemingly silly story sets a precedent that will be exploited, with techniques that involve complexity and time.
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