If you aren’t a big reader of the sporting news, or the scamming news, you may have missed a modern “Catch Me If You Can” type story.

Well, it was a lot less impressive than that, but anyway: a man named Daejon Love successfully duped at least some small number of people into believing that he was a player for the San Francisco 49ers, allegedly to extract money from them in an investment scam.

If you watch that whole video, you may come away pretty unimpressed with the trappings of his act, as did the NFL insiders they featured laughing at how thin the scam looks to anyone who knows anything about what NFL players are like.

It’s true, it’s hardly a better facade than Donovan McNabb at a rundown sandlot from the iconic Always Sunny episode, which may lead to wonder as we did: how did he pull this off, at all?

How did he convince even the completely uninitiated into NFL fandom that he was not only the real deal, but a deal real enough to meet with to discuss investments?

The answer is important: it’s the new malleability of algorithmic credibility.

Before we get to that, some news and notes.

There’s a very long history of what we’re going to talk about-it just got a little lost in the sauce of new modern scams, which are largely about people pretending to be someone else entirely.

Whether it’s massive compounds meant to create entire character dramas and scenes in the name of scams, or individual actors utilizing increasingly advanced software to assume other identities remotely, lots of the deception that grabs headlines these days has focused on pretending to be someone else entirely.

Let’s not forget about good, old fashioned being yourself, and also lying about your accomplishments, credentials, and qualifications!

Enhancing one’s own credibility, while presenting a stable identity and persona that may well be your own real name and, to some extent, your own real self is a lot easier in the era when people may get their information about you from a single query to an LLM.

As a business operator or investor, there’s a particular version of this algorithmic credit enhancement that you need to be wary of, and that’s when it’s used to provide false scaffolding for companies, experts, and also expert personas serving as avatars for companies.

Look, the on-the-nose example to use here would be an AEO / GEO expert or firm, but there’s a problem with insinuating someone you would hire to help you with your company’s LLM visibility might scam you by appearing to be someone they’re not by manipulating the information in LLMs:

They would have proven they are, at least in some way, good at impacting LLM answers by having done that.

I know any SEO person reading this is screaming right now about how the highest ranking SEO agency might not be the best at SEO, and the difference between short term gray hat results manipulation and long term growth of a rich query portfolio.

You’re right, I know, but this is too annoying a wrinkle to deal with when all I want to do is give a fun example of a fraudulent expert that clearly makes our point!

So you have a whole portfolio of semi-modern companies you’re invested in: fourth wave e-commerce plays, IOT widgets that became LLM widgets, MaaS (mindfulness as a service) marketers who decided to revolutionize SaaS for marketers, the works!

What all these businesses need, badly, is a good source of high quality “user generated content” from “creators.”

A side of strategic input on what they should be trying to achieve with this content, a way to know it’s working, and a whole bunch of other peripheral services would be welcome too.

Luckily for you, here comes Tobi Gleetone and Skompy. The former is a fully formed and heavily credentialed executive-level thought leader in the creator marketing space, and the latter is their revolutionary performance-centric creator procurement and measurement platform for AI natives.

It’s not that Tobi isn’t real, or even that Tobi isn’t Tobi; you had a Zoom call with them, and they are painfully both.

Skompy seems real, too, at least in the sense that it has a website that includes some customer testimonials. They offer a product demo-they wouldn’t do that if it wouldn’t quell all doubt, right?

Let’s walk through how a serious operator with a serious need for truth would shake this Skompy tree and get to the root of this Tobi business.

Let’s take a look at Tobi on LinkedIn.

You look up these companies because you haven’t heard of any of them, which is fine-most companies in the world don’t have broad name recognition.

There are no websites for Prism Group (at least not the one Tobi seems to be talking about, among many entities with this name) nor NexaTech, but you can find some old press releases on PR Newswire and other services that seem to reference these specific entities.

A search for the book Tobi references authoring doesn’t even yield a self-published e-book, but you do find a promotional website, which says the book is sold out at most retailers but provides an email address for requesting a copy directly from the author.

This is where many people would stop, going forward with light suspicion at most.

The zero trust, high diligence operator approach to this is simple, and is a path always worth taking when encountering new would-be authorities on any topic:

Speaking of checking out Tobe’s companies, what’s interesting is that he doesn’t list Skompy anywhere on any of his public social media profiles…

In the course of looking for the other organizations Tobi is in, you couldn’t find anything about Skompy.

Tobi said they’re in stealth mode.

You did, oddly enough, find that Tobi is associated with a different organization called AffiliFriends Ltd; this is the only organization you can find tied to Tobi in the past decade, and this one seems active.

Tobi clarifies that this is the company’s name from before a pivot and it just hasn’t been legally changed yet because that involves a lot of red tape, and they have so little tolerance for anything that isn’t agile.

The technology seems incredible from a quick demo video Tobi sends you.

It looks like you can find tons of creators, with very specific criteria, that are all vetted as able to produce high quality content quickly, and then commission them, approve or give feedback on their work, and pay them all in one place.

After that, their information will all flow automatically into a reporting dashboard with a “360 degree view of closed loop ROI” which looks staggeringly complex and also beautiful.

There’s a lot of ways they might offer to demonstrate and onboard you to this software, like shady “demo logins,” but you can do some work and make some basic requests to skip all this and get right to the meat of it.

Anything that seems like a red flag, or that you can’t find at all, is a much more telling signal than anything you can get from slides in a world where Claude can mock up a digital “product” in ten seconds, or a demo video that could be entirely fabricated.

And now we reach what is arguably the crux of this article: all the types of misinformation a fraudulent persona and/or organization put out that we advised you on avoiding can actually be fairly effective when it comes to confusing an LLM.

According to an FBI agent interviewed by CBS news, Daejon Love successfully managed to have multiple search engines and LLMs confirm his ruse that he was a real 49ers player.

If this kind of confusion can happen on such an easily verifiable fact, with only a handful of trustworthy systems of record from large organizations such as the NFL, the 49ers organization, and the NFLPA…

…imagine what can happen when they sift through the million grains of sand that are all that make up most peoples’ professional reputations, if we’re bring honest?

404 Media has already reported on deliberate efforts by marketers to aggressively manipulate LLM outputs, often succeeding on very short timelines, using nothing but Reddit posts.

Academic papers have been written on rather simple approaches to appear as a top recommendation utilizing tactics familiar to even the older SEO hands.

It seems fair to assume that a person or organization could place information validating any assertion they would care to make, in what seems like a relatively small number of easily accessible information spaces and get an LLM to parrot that information when asked about them, at least for now.

This is why it’s still important to do your own direct primary information sourcing and deep vetting.

One thing not to do should be evident from the case of the fake 49er, but we’ll repeat it nonetheless:

Do not take a physical meeting to be a particularly strong sign of trustworthiness or authenticity, especially if they proactively offer it to you for the stated reason of showing you that they’re “real.”

If Tobi took you to a fake Skompy office, with fake Skompy engineers, for a fake Skompy demo, and even showed you a fake Skompy data center, this wouldn’t be any kind of world-first mega deception.

In fact, these set meetings can so effectively be weaponized as trust building opportunities that you may want to consider a moratorium on physical meetings UNTIL you have vetted all of this as above-board and authentic.

Adhering to all of this won’t only limit your liability and reduce waste spent on ineffective or sham goods and services-it could improve your outlook on all of your business relationships because you’re getting burned less often and dwelling on potential betrayals less.

Happy handshaking, and happier deep due diligence testing new partners!

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to wrap this up and run to a remote session with my quantum healer before they get too busy with this new AI native remote reiki platform they’re building with Sam Altman and the CIA guys left over from MK ULTRA.

This is NOT financial advice, nor legal advice; those people involved in the creation of this are not certified financial professionals, nor are they attorneys.