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File: Alabama Crimson Tide fans react.<\/p>\n
Jamie Squire\/Getty Images<\/p>\n
Months after a massive scam surrounding the death of Charlie Kirk<\/a> ensnared NFL players and teams, a new scam tied to Cole Tomas Allen \u2014 the man charged with the attempted assassination of President Donald Trump at Saturday\u2019s White House Correspondents\u2019 Dinner \u2014 is gaining traction online.<\/p>\n And this one is going after college football fans.<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n An SFGATE investigation Tuesday revealed dozens of mostly college sports-themed Facebook pages spreading fake information \u2014 but not just any fake information, the same fake information. Seemingly innocuous sports pages like \u201cRoll Tide, Over and Over,\u201d \u201cSpartan Unfiltered\u201d and \u201cKate Martin Nation –\u00a0Hawkeyes and Valkyries Fans United\u201d were among dozens of pages that posted an almost identical pair of photos in the hours that followed Allen\u2019s arrest. The first was the widely viewed photo of a shirtless Allen tied up with his face pushed into the floor of the Washington Hilton hotel, and the second, an artificial intelligence-generated image of Allen wearing a jacket with a corresponding university logo on it. The photos are all accompanied by nearly identical text:<\/p>\n \u201cBREAKING: The shooter at the White House Correspondents\u2019 Dinner has reportedly been identified as 30-year-old Cole Allen from Torrance, California. A former staff member of the Tennessee basketball team, his wife is currently also employed by the team.\u201d<\/p>\n But in each instance, \u201cTennessee basketball team\u201d was replaced with whatever university athletics program the fan page was dedicated to, including the \u201cAlabama Crimson Tide football team,\u201d \u201cGeorgia Bulldogs football program,\u201d and the \u201cLSU Tigers basketball team.\u201d Even one of the old 49ers pages from the Charlie Kirk killing scam (\u201c49ers Pride Nation\u201d) is in the mix here too<\/a>, saying Allen worked for the Niners.<\/p>\n A screenshot of an Alabama Crimson Tide Facebook fan page.<\/p>\n Screenshot via Facebook A screenshot of a South Carolina Gamecocks Facebook fan page.<\/p>\n Screenshot via Facebook A screenshot of an Arizona Wildcats Facebook fan page.<\/p>\n Screenshot via Facebook<\/p>\n Of course, Allen has never been a staff member at any major college or university or NFL team. A 2017\u00a0graduate of the California Institute of Technology<\/a>, Allen also earned a master\u2019s degree in computer science from California State University, Dominguez Hills and from there worked as an independent game developer. He was listed on his LinkedIn as working as a tutor at C2 Education at the time of his arrest.<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n Make SFGATE a preferred source so your search results prioritize writing by actual people, not AI.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Add Preferred Source<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n These falsehoods, though, are nonetheless spreading widely across the internet. The 10 largest college sports fan pages reviewed by SFGATE had more than 75,000 Facebook followers combined \u2014 twice as many followers as San Francisco news outlet Mission Local, one of the 20 most-read nonprofit newsrooms<\/a> in America.<\/p>\n Comments on the posts range widely. Many people seem to believe the posts, and are then heartbroken about their university\u2019s ties to Allen.<\/p>\n \u201cI read he was a teacher from California. \u2026\u00a0geez, you do not know who to believe anymore,\u201d a poster commented on a Georgia dupe of Allen. There were several people who identified the photos as AI generated and intimated various versions of \u201cthis why you can\u2019t click on media sites\u201d even though these aren\u2019t actually media sites, they\u2019re very clearly scams. Others seemed to know something was off, but couldn\u2019t put their finger on exactly what, leading them to ask: \u201cWhere is the proof?\u201d<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n The scam provides an alarming view into the state of media literacy, but it\u2019s also sometimes hard to blame Facebook users because of how hard these sites work to trick them into believing they\u2019re reliable sources of news.<\/p>\n A screenshot of a Tennessee Volunteers Facebook fan page.<\/p>\n Screenshot via Facebook<\/p>\n Let\u2019s take the page \u201cRocky Top Diamonds,\u201d for instance. The entire feed is dedicated to Tennessee women\u2019s softball and is filled with legitimate content about actual games (largely stolen from the team\u2019s official social media posts or actual news sites). Many of the posts don\u2019t link off to any sort of articles, instead existing exclusively for engagement farming (\u201cSay yes if you love the Tennessee Lady Volunteers,\u201d reads one caption) to increase followers. Once the pages gain those followers, they occasionally insert political posts, like an AI-generated image of Allen in a Tennessee shirt wearing a staff badge or a post about a former player dying (which are almost universally false), or even this fake gem<\/a>: \u201cBreaking news: Mike Tomlin has become a defensive strategy advisor for Tennessee after deciding to retire and leave the Pittsburgh Steelers.\u201d<\/p>\n Facebook isn\u2019t doing much to regulate any of this. Just one of the dozens of Allen posts on college sports Facebook pages reviewed by SFGATE had a Community Note that told readers the images were AI-generated.<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n Reached for comment, Meta spokesperson Erica Sackin said it\u2019s \u201creprehensible when opportunists seek to exploit moments of tragedy. We are committed to removing any content that violates our policies.\u201d The company said it has already begun removing the violating posts, including one SFGATE shared, but then also asked SFGATE to flag any additional problematic posts.<\/p>\n Meta did in fact remove the Rocky Top Diamonds post about Allen previously working for Tennessee, but left up the fan page itself, which will certainly allow the scam to continue.<\/p>\n When people are convinced the posts are real enough to click through to read more, that\u2019s where the scam pays off for the scammers.<\/p>\n A screenshot of a Michigan State Spartans Facebook fan page.<\/p>\n Screenshot via Facebook A screenshot of an Arizona Wildcats Facebook fan page.<\/p>\n Screenshot via Facebook<\/p>\n All of the Facebook pages included a caption that was also accompanied with a link to the \u201cfull story.\u201d Clicking that link drove unsuspecting college sports fans to one of two ad-riddled scam sites (\u201cGoldflow.daily24.world\u201d and \u201cSport.jervisfamily.com\u201d) that appear to be written entirely by AI, often without any mention of the false college tie-in at all when you click through. All of the images for both sites are pulled from the same third-party host, a WordPress site (aic5.com) with a media library that ties a nice little bow on the scam network.<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n According to website traffic checker Similarweb, the two ad-riddled scam sites to which the college sports pages are driving a majority of their traffic have combined for 464,000 visits a month since January \u2014 a number that will likely be much higher in April thanks to this scam. Even with the lowest level programmatic ad rates possible \u2014 these sites are very likely generating thousands of dollars on the scam.<\/p>\n According to NewsGuard<\/a>, a company that rates the reliability of online news outlets, there are now 3,006 AI content farm sites (and counting) as of March of 2026. That\u2019s nearly triple what it was at the start of 2025 as the proliferation of AI on the internet has accelerated. According to an Internet Archive study earlier this year<\/a>, a third of websites created since 2022 are AI-generated.<\/p>\n Fortunately, not everyone is fooled: Several people across the various sites note that the images are clearly AI, while still others spotted the fake simply by being extremely dedicated sports fans. \u201cThought we were Nike not Jordan brand?\u201d a commenter noted on an AI-generated photo of Allen in a Spartans shirt on the Michigan State fan page \u201cSpartans Unfiltered.\u201d That post is still live on Facebook.<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"File: Alabama Crimson Tide fans react. Jamie Squire\/Getty Images Months after a massive scam surrounding the death of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":614737,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[67],"tags":[399,398,396,397,247473,13472,245396,99],"class_list":["post-614736","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ncaa-football","tag-football","tag-ncaa","tag-ncaa-football","tag-ncaafootball","tag-sfgpolitics","tag-sfgsports","tag-sfgtech","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/614736","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=614736"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/614736\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/614737"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=614736"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=614736"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=614736"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/p>\n
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