I cannot believe we are still doing this, but here we are: a man built a fake NFL career, patiently, for two and a half years, complete with a fake financial adviser accomplice and fake seven-figure bank statements, and it was sturdy enough to pull $1.3 million out of 26 different women before the FBI finally caught up to him hunting for victim number 27 at an airport in Boise. This fake 49ers player scam wasn’t a weekend bit somebody improvised after a few drinks. It was infrastructure.
None of this is really about the San Francisco 49ers, who have exactly zero connection to any of it beyond having their name and colors borrowed for the con. It’s about what “professional athlete” does as a credential — the one job title that apparently short-circuits due diligence in otherwise careful adults, the kind of claim nobody thinks to fact-check because doubting it out loud feels rude.
Federal prosecutors say Daejon Labrayae Love, 35, and his accomplice Taylor Jamie Chan, 18, were arrested at the Boise Airport on August 24, capping a scheme that started back in February 2022. Love posed as a 49ers player or a wealthy real estate investor on dating apps. Chan played the fake financial adviser accomplice, brought in to co-sign the lie whenever a woman got close enough to start asking real questions. Both are now charged federally with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and wire fraud, according to CBS Sports.
The infrastructure is the part that gets me. Love didn’t just claim he played for the 49ers and hope nobody Googled him. He ran actual Instagram stories captioned “Free Agency,” “Year 1,” and “Super Bowl,” all within the same week, photographed in 49ers gear and a helmet, laying down a season-by-season backstory for someone to fall into. According to KGW, he and Chan used phone apps to fabricate bank and investment balances (one screen showed $5 million in cash and $15 million in investments), then staged three-way FaceTime calls to walk victims through their fabricated gains ticking upward in real time. A guy improvising bullshit at a bar doesn’t build a quarterly-statement performance. He just lies and hopes you forget by Tuesday.
At least 26 women across California, Idaho, Oregon and Washington lost more than $1.3 million to Love and Chan, and the FBI has been clear that number is a floor, not a final count. Investigators believe there are more victims who haven’t come forward. Love worked under at least three names while he did it: Jon Love, Avril Lyto Love, Jordan Love. That alone should have tripped an alarm. It rarely does when the guy also tells you he plays for a team you can watch every Sunday.
The FBI issued arrest warrants on August 17. In the five weeks before that, Love crisscrossed New Mexico, California, Oregon, Nevada, Utah and Idaho, not fleeing so much as working. He was in Boise to meet a brand-new prospective victim when he and Chan, who’d flown in separately from California, were both picked up at the airport. A fake 49ers player scammed 26 women over two and a half years, and on the day the warrant finally caught up to him, he was mid-pitch on number 27.
There’s an obvious pushback: romance scams are their own ugly cottage industry no matter what costume the con wears, and fake military officers and fake oil executives have been running this exact play since before Instagram existed. Fair. But “NFL player” carries a specific flavor of unearned trust that “oil executive” doesn’t, because it’s theoretically verifiable — there’s a roster, there are box scores, there’s a whole apparatus of public record sitting right there. That theoretical checkability is precisely what makes people check less, not more. The lie borrows credibility from a real institution and dares you to be the jerk who doubts it. Nobody double-checks the guy who says he sells insurance. Everybody assumes somebody else already vetted the guy who says he plays football for a living.
One fan reaction floating around since the story broke:
https://twitter.com/49ersSportsTalk/status/2093057740507631694
The actual 49ers lose nothing in any of this. Nobody is confusing an Instagram caption with a roster move, and the real players in that locker room have zero connection to any of it. The 26 women who trusted the story lost actual savings and, in some cases, took out actual loans against a life that only existed inside a fake banking app. Love is now staring down federal wire fraud charges, which is really just the government finally running the background check the rest of us are apparently too polite to run on a stranger’s word. That reckoning arrived right around the time he was three states deep into closing in on victim number 27. Somewhere out there is the next guy with a fake helmet photo and a burner Instagram, and he doesn’t need to be smarter than Love. He just needs one team’s colors and a woman willing to skip the follow-up question, and stories like this one suggest that’s a low bar to clear.
