Because it seems, she’s simply not that into you. Not due to who you might be — however as a result of she doesn’t exist.
That’s the grim actuality going through ladies in skilled golf proper now. As The Athletic reviews in its “Stalking in Sports activities” collection, LPGA athletes are more and more being impersonated in catfishing scams that prey on older males, leaving gamers to take care of the fallout — harassment at tournaments, threats at house, and real concern for his or her security.
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The rip-off itself is nothing new: faux accounts posing as ladies golfers on Instagram lure males, typically of their 60s or 70s, into non-public messaging apps like Telegram. Quickly, the scammers are convincing them to ship cash within the type of crypto or reward playing cards in change for guarantees of VIP match entry and even non-public dinners. LPGA athletes have been sounding the alarm about catfishing since a minimum of 2022, however The Athletic’s investigation reveals simply how widespread the issue has grow to be in ladies’s golf. A number of golfers have been pressured to publish public warnings about faux accounts.
And the implications are not confined to misplaced cash. The Athletic reviews {that a} Pennsylvania man in his 70s despatched $70,000 to a scammer he believed was 22-year-old LPGA star Rose Zhang, earlier than displaying up at her match anticipating resort reservations and VIP passes. One man was within the means of promoting his house to a scammer, and in an much more chilling incident, a person who misplaced $50,000 to an account impersonating golf influencer Hailey Ostrom appeared at her house, the report particulars.
It’s the identical drained playbook as different pig butchering and romance scams constructed on superstar and perceived wealth, however for LPGA athletes, the stakes are far greater. It’s not simply reputational harm or monetary exploitation — it’s disgruntled males arriving in actual life, indignant a couple of relationship that by no means existed.
The AI of all of it
What makes these LPGA scams much more chilling is the usage of deepfake AI to promote the lie. As a part of its investigation, The Athletic created a faux account named “Rodney” to work together with one of many scammers. When “Rodney” pushed again on the impersonator posing as two-time main champion Nelly Korda, the scammer escalated — sending an AI-altered video of Korda talking on to “Rodney” by title.
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Using AI-generated pictures and movies to lend credibility to scams is changing into disturbingly frequent. We’ve lined related incidents earlier than, together with circumstances the place an OnlyFans mannequin’s public photographs have been digitally altered and used to deceive customers on Reddit. The convenience of spinning up new faux accounts on relationship apps and social platforms solely makes the issue worse.
“The present U.S. legal guidelines on the usage of one other individual’s likeness are, at finest, outdated and weren’t designed for the age of generative AI,” UC Berkeley professor Hany Farid instructed Mashable earlier this 12 months. Farid additionally stated that with simply “20 seconds of an individual’s voice and a single {photograph} of them,” scammers can simply create convincing deepfake movies.
Tracing these scams is sort of unimaginable, since they hardly ever originate within the U.S. Based on the International Anti-Rip-off Org, many function out of compounds in South Asia and are fueled by organized crime and human trafficking networks. In the meantime, the FBI is already overwhelmed with id theft circumstances. Except the fraud crosses a sure monetary threshold, the company typically gained’t intervene, a supply instructed The Athletic. That leaves athletes and their followers to face the fallout largely on their very own.
