Fake Austin Riley AI scam page cost one fan $2,000

According to WBRC, scammers built a fake version of Atlanta Braves third baseman Austin Riley online, told a woman he was facing financial trouble, and persuaded her to send $2,000.

The report traces how the fake Riley reached her in the first place. It started on social media, on pages built to look like real fan communities, with names like "Braves Dugout" and "Tomahawk Territory." Ray Waldheim, who runs the verified page "Atlanta Braves Chop Live" with more than 242,000 followers, said those pages are full of AI-generated images designed to look heartwarming: players in uniform helping flood victims, or doing charity work that never happened.

The emotional setup comes before the money request

Sean O'Malley, co-founder of Atlanta Braves Chop Live, has tracked the same fabricated story, Austin Riley giving away his old pickup truck to a former janitor, showing up on different football pages with different players and the same truck. The story itself is not the scam. It is the warm-up. It gets a fake account comments on real pages, where fans already trust the content, then moves those same fans into private messages.

That move from public comment to private message is the step the scam depends on. In public, the account is just one more voice among fans. In a direct message, it becomes a one-to-one relationship, and that relationship is where the ask for money happens. David Schweidel, an AI expert at Emory University's Goizueta Business School, said that emotional pull is deliberate: "If I can get you thinking emotionally, you're not thinking rationally."

The woman who lost $2,000 believed she was helping a real player through a real hardship. Waldheim's reaction points to the simplest check available: Austin Riley is reported to be on a contract worth more than a hundred million dollars. A professional athlete at that level asking a stranger for $2,000 by private message is itself the tell, regardless of how convincing the photos look.

The scale behind one story

This is not an isolated account. The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center received 859,532 complaints in 2024, with losses topping $16.6 billion, a 33% increase from 2023. In Georgia alone, reported potential losses reached $420 million, a 40% increase year over year.

Schweidel's point about the tools matters as much as the numbers. Publicly available generative AI has gotten very good, very quickly, which means the fake photos and fabricated stories will keep getting harder to spot on sight. The page name, the comment-to-DM move, and the money request are the pattern to watch for, not the image quality.