Every fanbase deals with a guy who lies about knowing a player. This one just took it to federal-crime levels. According to court documents, 35-year-old Daejon Love spent years telling women on dating apps he was a member of the San Francisco 49ers, using that fake identity to scam more than two dozen of them out of a combined $1.3 million.
Stay Hot, San Francisco: 35-Year-old man scammed 26 different women for $1.3 million by pretending to be a wide receiver on the 49ers t.co/6aDrh6hPIH
Per the Department of Justice, Love wasn't working alone. He had an 18-year-old accomplice, Taylor Jamie Chan, posing as his financial adviser. The two allegedly ran the scheme going back to February 2022, targeting women across California, Oregon, Washington and Idaho. Love would meet victims on dating apps, present himself as a wealthy NFL player and real estate investor, and lean on Chan to host fake FaceTime calls showing doctored investment gains to convince women to hand over cash — sometimes pushing them to take out loans when they ran dry.
The scheme finally caught up with them on August 24, when the FBI arrested Love and Chan at the Boise Airport after Chan flew in from California to meet him. Both now face federal wire fraud conspiracy and wire fraud charges, and investigators believe the 26 known victims are just the ones who've come forward — the FBI has said it expects more.
Barstool's football accounts jumped on the story fast, because a fake NFL player running a multi-year catfish operation is exactly the kind of headline this corner of the internet lives for. Pardon My Take flagged it Friday morning, and it didn't take long for the rest of the network to pile on.
There was a man pretending to be a San Francisco 49er and scammed more than 2 dozen women out of $1.3 million dollars
Nicky Smokes had the line of the day, telling women to spend 30 minutes a week actually watching football so nobody can run this play on them again — a joke, not a scouting report, but it lands given the story. Barstool Sports' main account, meanwhile, couldn't resist lumping this in with the rest of San Francisco's brutal offseason, name-checking Brandon Aiyuk, Kyle Shanahan and Jed York in the same breath as a guy who was never actually on the roster.
This one isn't really about the 49ers at all — Love never played a snap for the team, he just used the jersey as a prop to build trust. But it's a reminder of how easy that trick still is to run. A little swagger, a fake persona, a borrowed logo, and a willingness to burn through relationships as fast as bank accounts — that's apparently all it took to pull off a $1.3 million con over four years before anyone caught on.