Though the San Francisco 49ers didn’t have anything to do with this latest story, the strange and oh-so peculiar offseason for the NFL franchise continues.
Football season is right around the corner, and I know one California football team called the 49ers can’t wait to get out on the field. Why? Because it’ll help steer the narrative away from their head coach getting into a strange car accident, the team’s owner getting arrested for suspicion of engaging in prostitution, and the team’s likeness being used to pull off a $1 million-plus scam.
The only thing it probably won’t help is the online conspiracy about the team’s practice facility being next to an electrical substation. Pardon the pun here, but as the season goes on, and injuries pile up, that story will only become more charged.
But back to the scam. It’s one of the wildest and “how did someone fall for that” schemes you’ll ever see. Federal prosecutors recently brought the hammer down on two men – 35-year-old Daejon Labrayae Love and 18-year-old Taylor Jamie Chan – charging them with wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud. They were arrested earlier this week after flying to Boise, Idaho to meet with what would have been their next victims.
So what was their trick? How did they steal over $1.3 million from various victims? Starting in 2022, Daejon Love started posing as a player for the San Francisco 49ers – and thus a wealthy investor – on dating apps. Women in four separate states (Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and California) bought it, and once Love was able to rope them in with a fake romance, the scam ensued.
Basically, Love would tell the women that he met (who were probably over the moon to be talking to who they thought was an NFL player) that Chan was his financial advisor. Using fake bank accounts and making it appear that he was rolling in the dough, so to speak, the women then forked over their money to be invested as well.
That money was then never to be seen again, and once the victims had their bank accounts completely wiped, they didn’t hear from Love or Chan again.
It appears that a big part of the ruse was Love’s social media accounts, which made him “look” like a wealthy NFL player. I put the word “look” in quotations there because… you’d have to be incredibly gullible to believe the content he was putting out online. Taking pictures in fancy cars, walking in parking lots in head-to-toe San Francisco gear, and obviously fake beach drills in a 49ers helmet was apparently all it took to trick his victims.
Now that the social media world has got wind of the story, and seen the videos for themselves, they can’t believe that women were seeing content like this and actually thinking the guy played in the NFL:
Also, a simple search of the 49ers roster would tell you that Daejon Labrayae Love has not ever been a member of the San Francisco 49ers. He just bought a couple of shirts and got his hands on a helmet, and that was all it took.
Federal prosecutors say that the scam Love and Chan ran turned into a fortune in the tens of millions of dollars. Obviously, now that they’ve been caught, they won’t get to hold on to that. But in an age where the scams are getting more and more complex, it’s scary to see that one so simple – and easily debunk-able – still tricked people out of millions.
