I’m not sure if this should be a game room thread, since it’s tangentially about sports…
It has recently come to light that a man named Dejean Love has been scamming people out of more than a million dollars by pretending to be an NFL football player (or a real estate investor).
Basically, he’d rent cars and jewelry so he looked like he had money, and had some pictures and videos taken of him in San Francisco 49ers gear, and managed to convince several people that he was uber wealthy. Somehow that legitimized his need for cash, which he’d pry out of people with the promise that he’d pay it back real soon.
What I find fascinating is that this isn’t the first time this sort of thing has happened. Right before I left a law firm in Colorado we were hired to defend James Otis Turner, a guy in his late 40s who was telling people his name was Dante Sir Foster and he played for the Broncos.
I assume the modus operandi was similar: He’s “injured”, which is why he doesn’t show up on the active roster. He’s due a “signing bonus” in a few months, and just needs some money to cover expenses until the money come in (in Turner’s case, his mom “needed surgery”, and the doctor needed to paid in cash).
He had even created a fake website that was a supposed sports story about him leaving the Vikings to come to Denver.
I suppose people get star struck when they think they are meeting a professional athlete. Still, it amazes me that in this day and age that people could fall for such a thing - the internet makes it easy to look up a person’s life history. Besides, really rich people don’t tell you how rich they are, and superstar athletes don’t constantly let people know they are famous.
But suckers are still being born every minute, and grifters gonna grift.
Presumably people did try to do that. In this day of AI, deepfakes can fool gullible people.
I’m reminded of the woman who was convinced that she was speaking directly with Brad Pitt in a hospital. She thought she had spoken directly to him!
With the football player, he had videos taken of him in football gear. It was absurd, of course, since he never practiced with any teammates. But people looking for “verification” were duped.
At first I thought “Why didn’t those women just Google him to see if he was on the roster” but apparently he had manipulated Google AI to show him as a 49ers player with AI search.
Still, though, the women should have demanded to see actual footage of him with players and coaches, not just him alone.
I bet back in the day Roman scam artists used to con old wealthy ladies into thinking they were actually wealthy gladiators who just needed a quick loan to buy a new shield or some such…
It never occurs to some people that they are being conned, and they are usually shocked to find out. Call me old fashioned, but I tend not to trust anyone, except family and close friends, without at least some kind of independent verification, no matter how much I want to believe what they are telling me,. especially where money is concerned.
I am curious how he did that. And I usually look past the Google AI search results to the rest. Like wouldn’t it be better to check the website of the San Francisco 49ers? Or the NFL website?
There’s something missing from that story. It says that the thief presented a ticket for the parked car to the valet and the valet gave the car to him, but it doesn’t mention how the thief might have gotten the ticket. I don’t see that the hotel or the valet did anything wrong. Whenever I’ve valet parked a car, presenting the ticket was all that was required to get the car back. I’ve never been asked for ID or to prove my ownership of the car by any means other than having possession of the ticket. If the owner let the ticket out of their control, it seems that they are the one at fault.
It wasn’t in the article linked above, but the Twitter post in said article had some people mentioning it. So I went and looked it up an found this source:
Artificial intelligence may have inadvertently given a hand to a man who prosecutors say posed as a wealthy San Francisco 49ers player in order to scam women on dating apps. That’s according to newly released court documents pertaining to 35-year-old Daejon Labrayae Love and his fake “financial advisor,” 18-year-old Taylor Jamie Chan.
(Also, no paywall for this one.)
This made me think of a story I read when I was a teenager ca. 1980, IIRC in Rolling Stone, about a man who sort of looked like one of the guys in Styx, so he showed up at various teenage hangouts, and let’s just say plenty of girls fell for it. Yes, he was arrested.
The Styx guy said he sure was glad they caught him, because he was awfully tired of getting phone calls from people accusing him of doing things he didn’t do.
