An Oregon man falsely posing as a professional football player and his young accomplice scammed roughly $1.3 million out of at least 26 women across four states, the FBI alleges. The duo’s efforts to bolster the con online eventually got sucked into Google’s misinformation-plagued AI Overviews feature, which parroted it back as fact — a blunder that the accused scammers seemingly tried to use to further ensnare victims.
The FBI says that the alleged fraudsters, 35-year-old Daejon Labrayae Love and 18-year-old Taylor Jamie Chan, cooked up a convoluted scheme in which Love masqueraded as a player for the San Francisco 49ers — or in some cases, a rich Swiss real estate developer — while Chan pretended to be his financial advisor. After connecting with women through dating apps, Love and Chan would convince them to put money into fake investment opportunities which the men then pocketed. Some of the women were even convinced to take out loans to pay into the scheme, the FBI alleges.
Love was a prolific poster, and portrayed himself on Instagram, TikTok, and even LinkedIn as an active but injured receiver for the 49ers. According to court documents, because of Love’s prolific posting, the pair found unwitting accomplices in tech like search engines and AI, which investigators say sometimes reinforced Love’s social media lies when victims went online to check if the purported pro athlete really was who he said he was.
“Some victims became suspicious of Love and searched for Love’s information through the Internet,” reads the document. “Due to Love’s false social media representations, search engines and artificial intelligence occasionally stated that Love was a bonafide 49ers player.”
What’s more, Love appears to have used these false representations to further reinforce his fraudulent narrative. According to the LA Times, in one since-deleted Instagram post about his “NFL Journey,” the fake football pro shared screenshots of a Google AI Overview which incorrectly stated that “Daejon Love is a wide receiver for the San Francisco 49ers, and information about his position, contract and teammate texting habits is available online. He is also associated with the team in various social media content and articles.”
“That’s Google,” Love said when displaying the screenshots, per the LA Times. “That’s not me, that’s Google.”
Chatbots can easily be manipulated into displaying certain products or factual claims, a reality of AI search tools that’s given way to a new successor industry to search engine optimization. And while doing things like lying on social media or altering Wikipedia pages are practices that people have been engaging in to distort information for years, it’s easy to forget that AI, like humans, can come to incorrect conclusions when given incorrect information. The adage “don’t believe everything you read online” is good advice for humans and chatbots alike.
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