Daejon Love and Taylor Jamie Chan were recently arrested and charged with operating an unusual version of a romance-investment scam in which they are alleged to have stolen $1.3 million from 26 women in California, Idaho, Washington and Oregon and the FBI believes that the true number of people scammed by them is much higher.  Romance scams used to follow the pattern of scammers meeting people online and pretending to quickly fall deeply in love with them and then convince their victims to send the scammers money for various fake emergencies.  The scam has evolved, however to where now the scammers still feign love, but instead of asking for a gift of money, they tell their victims that they have a great investment that is making the scammer massive amounts of money and they want to offer that investment to their targeted victim.  Of course, there is no investment and the victims lose everything they “invested” with their new found love.

What is unusual in this case is that Daejon Love is alleged to have claimed that he was a wealthy professional football player for the San Francisco 49ers and even provided videos and photos that appeared to support his claim.  In fact, some Google searches and AI even supported this false claim.  False information provided by AI and in search engine searches is called “hallucinations” and the reason that this occurs is that both AI and more common search engines harvest their information from the Internet and if a scammer is able to place enough false information in enough places, it can be reported as accurate.

TIPS

No one should ever invest in anything that they don’t understand and with someone whom they have not researched.  Rather than trusting social media posts and search engine searches, if the victims of Love had checked the roster for the San Francisco 49ers they would have learned he was scamming them.  Further, Chan was presented by Love as his successful financial advisor, but if anyone had done a research on Chan, they would have learned that he had utterly no licenses or financial credentials or affiliations that a financial advisor must have.

As for the investments provided by Love and Chan, according to the FBI there were no investments.  Love just kept the money “invested” with him.  The only evidence of investments were phony investment records provided by Love and Chan.  If the victims had done proper research into the investments they would have found that the investments were not registered anywhere and there was no independent documentation for the investments.

It is easy for someone to be emotionally manipulated by a romance scammer so it is very important if a romantic partner offers investment advice to be particularly skeptical.  Trust me, you can’t trust anyone.

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