If you think you're talking to an LPGA golfer online, no you're not

As it turns out, she’s just not that into you. Not because of who you are — but because she doesn’t exist.

That’s the grim reality facing women in professional golf right now. As The Athletic reports in its “Stalking in Sports” series, LPGA athletes are increasingly being impersonated in catfishing scams that prey on older men, leaving players to deal with the fallout — harassment at tournaments, threats at home, and genuine fear for their safety.

The scam itself is nothing new: fake accounts posing as women golfers on Instagram lure men, often in their 60s or 70s, into private messaging apps like Telegram. Soon, the scammers are convincing them to send money in the form of crypto or gift cards in exchange for promises of VIP tournament access or even private dinners. LPGA athletes have been sounding the alarm about catfishing since at least 2022, but The Athletic's investigation reveals just how widespread the problem has become in women's golf. Multiple golfers have been forced to post public warnings about fake accounts.

And the consequences are no longer confined to lost money. The Athletic reports that a Pennsylvania man in his 70s sent $70,000 to a scammer he believed was 22-year-old LPGA star Rose Zhang, before showing up at her tournament expecting hotel reservations and VIP passes. One man was in the process of selling his home to a scammer, and in an even more chilling incident, a man who lost $50,000 to an account impersonating golf influencer Hailey Ostrom appeared at her home, the report details.

It’s the same tired playbook as other pig butchering and romance scams built on celebrity and perceived wealth, but for LPGA athletes, the stakes are far higher. It’s not just reputational damage or financial exploitation — it’s disgruntled men arriving in real life, angry about a relationship that never existed.

The AI of it all

What makes these LPGA scams even more chilling is the use of deepfake AI to sell the lie. As part of its investigation, The Athletic created a fake account named “Rodney” to interact with one of the scammers. When “Rodney” pushed back on the impersonator posing as two-time major champion Nelly Korda, the scammer escalated — sending an AI-altered video of Korda speaking directly to “Rodney” by name.

The use of AI-generated images and videos to lend credibility to scams is becoming disturbingly common. We’ve covered similar incidents before, including cases where an OnlyFans model’s public photos were digitally altered and used to deceive users on Reddit. The ease of spinning up new fake accounts on dating apps and social platforms only makes the problem worse.

“The current U.S. laws on the use of another person’s likeness are, at best, outdated and were not designed for the age of generative AI,” UC Berkeley professor Hany Farid told Mashable earlier this year. Farid also said that with just "20 seconds of a person’s voice and a single photograph of them," scammers can easily create convincing deepfake videos.

Tracing these scams is nearly impossible, since they rarely originate in the U.S. According to the Global Anti-Scam Org, many operate out of compounds in South Asia and are fueled by organized crime and human trafficking networks. Meanwhile, the FBI is already overwhelmed with identity theft cases. Unless the fraud crosses a certain financial threshold, the agency often won’t intervene, a source told The Athletic. That leaves athletes and their fans to face the fallout largely on their own.