On August 24, 2026, the FBI arrested two men at the Boise, Idaho, airport: 35-year-old Dajon Labrey Love and 18-year-old Taylor Jamie Chan. Both were charged with wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud.

According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Oregon, the scheme had been operating since February 2022—for more than four years. Love met women through dating apps in California, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington. In his profiles, he created fictional personas: a player for the “San Francisco Forty Niners” or a wealthy real estate investor. Chan played the role of Love’s financial advisor.

What followed was the standard investment scam: nonexistent investment products promising huge returns. When a victim ran out of money or started asking too many questions, Love would simply block her and keep the money for himself. According to financial records, approximately $1.3 million came from 26 identified victims. The FBI believes there are significantly more victims. A closed Facebook group called “Dajon Love’s Victims” has at least 80 members. None of the women interviewed received back their initial investments, any payments, or even statements from their investment accounts.

A legend built over the years

The most interesting aspect of this story is how patiently the illusion of authenticity was constructed. Love posed for photos in the team’s uniform. He ran an Instagram account with over 6,000 followers—enough to look notable, but not enough to catch the attention of real NFL fans, who would have exposed him in a minute.

When the 49ers made it to the Super Bowl in 2024, Love reposted behind-the-scenes videos of real players as if he’d filmed them himself. He created fake bank and investment accounts using specialized apps and showed his victims balances in the tens of millions of dollars. He used several aliases: John Love, Dayjon Love, Avril Lito Love, and—in a particularly cynical twist—Jordan Love, the name of a real NFL quarterback. One of the women, Velásquez, told CBS News that she received more than a dozen photos and videos from him purportedly depicting the player’s life. In one, there’s a first-person view on the field at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara. In another, he’s filming fans waving at him through a bus window. She checked the files’ metadata. It turned out they were screen recordings—in other words, videos he’d copied from someone else’s account. After that, she blocked him immediately.

And that’s where Google comes in

Some victims did exactly what all safety guidelines advise: they Googled the name of the person they’d met and verified their identity. Search engines had indexed Love’s fake profiles—Instagram, LinkedIn, and mentions. And the AI summary at the top of the search results synthesized a response from this material that identified him as a professional soccer player. Love noticed this and turned it into an argument.

In one of his Stories, he showed a screenshot of Google’s AI response, which identified him as a player for the “Forty Niners,” and commented: “That’s Google, not me.” He then held up a bent finger to the camera and explained that he was injured and therefore couldn’t take the field.

Why This Is a Technical Issue, Not Just Brazenness

A classic search result shows a list of links. The user sees that the source is an Instagram account and can assess its credibility. An account with 6,000 followers and a few photos in a uniform isn’t the same as the club’s official roster. AI summarization works differently. It collects data from several pages and outputs a single statement without a visual hierarchy of sources. The reader doesn’t see “here’s what their Instagram says,” but rather “here’s the answer.” The difference is that in the first case, the user evaluates the source, while in the second, they receive a ready-made conclusion and are inclined to accept it as fact. The model has no way of distinguishing a credible biography from four years of carefully constructed lies. It sees pages that are consistent with one another and formulates a confident statement. The confident tone here has nothing to do with the accuracy of the content—and that is precisely what makes it so dangerous. In other words, a tool designed to facilitate fact-checking has, in this specific case, done exactly the opposite: it has provided the fraudster with seemingly independent confirmation.

What does this mean in practice?

The advice to “just Google it” no longer works as a standalone verification method. Not because Google is bad, but because you need to verify the primary source, not the search results. For this specific scheme, verification took a minute: the official NFL or team website has a complete list of players. Lava wasn’t there and never was. General principle: Verify claims where they should be officially recorded. An NFL player—on the league’s website. A doctor—in the medical registry. A company—in the state registry of legal entities. Social media, LinkedIn, and AI-generated summaries are not primary sources—they merely relay what someone has written about themselves. The second lesson to take from this story is metadata. Velásquez exposed the scheme precisely because she looked at how the files were created. The “screen recording” tag on a supposedly self-recorded video is a definitive answer. Third: real athletes rarely walk around everywhere with a helmet in their hands.

Reaction

The story quickly became a meme. Los Angeles Chargers linebacker Dayan Henley posted a photo of himself with a caption along the lines of “believe it or not, I’m really in the NFL.” The team reposted it with the comment “confirmed.” Pittsburgh Steelers defensive back Cameron Hayward took it a step further and used AI to generate an image of himself with Love in the team’s locker room, captioning it to suggest that Love had allegedly just been at the facility.

The irony is that the joke was created using the very same tool that helped orchestrate the hoax just two weeks ago.

What’s Next

Love appeared in court in Boise on August 27 and is being transferred to Oregon for further hearings. Chan has opted for a preliminary hearing in Oregon. Both face charges of conspiracy to commit fraud and wire fraud. Under U.S. law, this carries a sentence of up to 20 years in prison for each count. Important: Both are presumed innocent until proven guilty in court. At this stage, these are charges brought by the prosecution, not a verdict. The FBI continues to search for victims and believes there are significantly more than 26.