FILE – The likeness of Benjamin Franklin is seen on U.S. $100 bills, July 14, 2022, in Marple Township, Pa. In 2023, the Federal Trade Commission received over 64,000 romance scams reports that translated into $1.14 billion in reported losses. (AP Photo/Matt Slocum, File)
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Daejon Love and Taylor Jamie Chan were recently arrested by the FBI and charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and wire fraud in regard to an alleged extensive romance-investment scam that officials say scammed 26 women in California, Idaho, Washington and Oregon out of approximately $1.3 million and the FBI believes this is just a small number of the victims of their alleged scam.
Prosecutors say that starting in February of 2022, Love and Chan created fictitious personas on dating apps with Love often posing as a professional football player for the NFL’s San Francisco 49ers or as a wealthy real estate investor.
As with so many romance scams, Love is accused of convincing his victims that each of them was in a sincere romantic relationship with him. Prosecutors say that Love told his victims that he wanted to build wealth and a future together with them. When online romance scams first went mainstream during the early 2000s with the advent of online dating sites, the pattern followed in most of the early romance scams was that the scammers would target vulnerable people and quickly escalate their relationship to an apparent deep love and then ask for money to pay for any of a number of sudden emergency needs of the scammer/lover. This changed in approximately 2016 first in China and then spreading throughout the world with the appearance of the first “Sha Szu Pan” or “pig butchering” scams being integrated into romance scams where rather than quickly establishing a romantic relationship and asking for funds under a wide variety of pretenses, the scammers took their time to develop strong emotional ties and trust with their victims and then, instead of asking for funds, offered their targeted victims the opportunity to share in hugely profitable investments that the scammer represented he was doing.
Love is accused of convincing his victims that he was a sophisticated investor who had made tens of millions of dollars with the help of his investment advisor Taylor Jamie Chan. However, the truth according to prosecutors is that Love was not a sophisticated investor and Chan was not a real investment advisor but was rather a co-conspirator in the scam.
To make himself appear to be legitimate, prosecutors say Love created a substantial online and social media presence which included Instagram photos and videos that appeared to show him in a 49ers uniform doing professional football training and posing with expensive cars. The fake online persona that Love created was so extensive that search engines and AI sometimes identified him as a legitimate member of the San Francisco 49ers, making his scam even more believable. Several factors can contribute to hallucinations, which are false information being indicated as true in AI searches. Repeated claims across multiple platforms are one such factor.
According to prosecutors, Love used software to create the appearance of fake bank accounts that appeared to indicate $5 million in cash and $15 million in fake investment accounts that he would show to his victims. To further support his lies, prosecutors say Love and Chan exchanged electronic messages that purported to show new investment opportunities that Love would then send as screenshots to his victims. This was followed up, court records state, with FaceTime meetings between Chan, Love and their individual victims in which the victims were encouraged to invest with the promise of massive gains.
However, according to prosecutors there were no massive profits. There were not even any investments. Love kept the money supposedly invested by his victims and once the victims had no more money to invest or asked questions, Love stopped all communications with them.
How Could the Victims Have Avoided Being Scammed?
Relying on social media or AI to confirm that Love was a member of the 49ers is not effective. A simple way to have confirmed that Love was not a professional football player was to search for the official 49ers roster which is readily available.
Because so many romance scams now involve pig butchering investment scams, people should be extra skeptical when a new romantic partner suggests investments, particularly when they promise “massive” profits.
Most importantly, no one should even invest in anything unless they have researched the person advising the investment and understand the investment itself. In this case, even a cursory investigation into the qualifications of Taylor Jamie Chan would have shown that he had absolutely no licenses, credentials or registrations as an investment advisor.
As for the investments themselves, screenshots of accounts are no substitute for a detailed prospectus and evidence of regulatory filings. A simple investigation into the proposed investments would have indicated that they were non-existent.
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