If you think youre talking to an LGPA golfer online, no youre not

In fact, it is simply not in you. Not because of who you are – but because it does not exist.

It is the sinister reality in the face of women in professional golf courses at the moment. As Athletics Reports in his series “Stalking In Sports”, LPGA athletes are increasingly usurped by cat fishing scams that attack older men, letting players face the spinoffs – harassment during tournaments, home threats and true fear for their safety.

The scam itself is nothing new: false accounts presenting itself as golfers on Instagram lere, often in sixty or 70 years, in private messaging applications like Telegram. Soon, the crooks convince them of sending money in the form of crypto or gift cards in exchange for promises of access to the VIP tournament or even private dinners. LPGA athletes have sounded the alarm on cat fishing for at least 2022, but the athletics survey reveals to what extent the problem has become widespread in female golf course. Several golfers have been forced to publish public warnings on false accounts.

And the consequences are no longer limited to lost money. Athletics reports that a man from Pennsylvania in the 1970s sent $ 70,000 to a crook whom he believed to be the LPGA star, 22, Rose Zhang, before running for his tournament while waiting for hotel reserves and VIP passes. A man was selling his house to a crook, and in an even more scary incident, a man who lost $ 50,000 against an account that came the influencer of Golf Hailey Ostrom appeared at home, the details of the report.

It is the same tired game book as the other scams of pig butchers and romance built on celebrity and perceived wealth, but for LPGA athletes, the issues are much higher. It is not only damage to reputation or financial exploitation – they are unhappy men who arrive in real life, angry with a relationship that has never existed.

Has it of all this

What makes these LPGA scams even more frightening is the use of Deepfake AI to sell the lie. As part of his investigation, Athletics created a false account called “Rodney” to interact with one of the crooks. When “Rodney” postponed the identity to pass for twice the double major champion Nelly Korda, the crook intensified – by sending a video of Korda in a -modern a -modified to “Rodney” by name.

The use of images and videos generated by AI to give credibility to scams becomes disturbingly. We have already covered similar incidents, including cases where public photos of a unique model have been modified digitally and used to deceive users on Reddit. The ease of rotation of new false accounts on dating applications and social platforms only makes the problem worse.

“The current American laws on the use of another person’s resemblance are, at best, exceeded and have not been designed for the age of generator,” Professor Hany Farid of UC Berkeley told Mashable earlier this year. Farid also said that with only “20 seconds from a person’s voice and a single photograph of them”, crooks can easily create convincing deep videos.

The tracing of these scams is almost impossible because they rarely come from the United States according to the world anti-SCAM organization, many operate from compounds in South Asia and are fueled by crime and trafficking in organized human beings. Meanwhile, the FBI is already overwhelmed by cases of identity theft. Unless fraud cross a certain financial threshold, the agency will often intervene, a source told The Athletic. This leaves the athletes and their fans face the benefits largely by themselves.