The 22-year-old Vancouver woman had just graduated from college and was living at home with her parents when she connected with a stranger on the dating app Bumble in August 2024.
He reached out first. His profile said he was from Switzerland and that he was a professional football player.
He sent her his phone number. Then came the texts, FaceTime calls, phone conversations and voice memos. Within days, he told her he was in the Portland metro area and wanted to meet.
She was intrigued.
“I wasn’t looking for anything serious at the time, so I was kind of just excited or interested to see what this was about,” she said.
Over the next month, the woman said she met the man three times, in the Wilsonville area, Eugene and Portland. He was attentive and affectionate. He told her he liked her, wanted to build a relationship and “have a life together.” All along, she said, he called her “babe,” “my love,” or “baby,” and promised to fly her to California to watch his football games.
It was a promise he never kept.
Instead, over the course of the brief relationship, she gave him a total of $18,000 — through Apple Pay, Western Union, and cash — and took out multiple personal loans to fund what he had convinced her was a lucrative investment account, according to court documents.
After another woman sent her an Instagram direct message warning her that the man was a fraud, she said she realized she had been deceived. Unsure where to turn, she sought advice from a lawyer at an office close to where she worked as a receptionist.
Attorney Scott Mullins, who typically represents defendants accused of fraud, advised that because the man appeared to be operating across state lines, federal law enforcement — not local police — was better equipped to investigate. He arranged a meeting between the woman, the FBI and federal prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Portland in September 2024. The Portland FBI field office, working with Assistant U.S. Attorneys Chris Cardani and Bryan Chinwuba, launched a multi-state investigation that led to arrests last month.
The Vancouver woman, who is identified in court papers only by her initials M.F., was the catalyst.
The Oregonian/OregonLive interviewed her Saturday and agreed to withhold her name to protect her privacy.
The FBI arrested Daejon Love, 35, and his alleged accomplice, Taylor Jamie Chan, 18, on Aug. 24 in Boise, Idaho, charging the pair with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and wire fraud. They allegedly defrauded 26 women from Oregon, Washington, Idaho and California out of at least $1.3 million. Since their arrests, the FBI has identified another 35 potential victims, bringing the total number to more than 60, FBI Special Agent in Charge Douglas A. Olson said Friday.
Chan, through his lawyer C. Renee Manes, denied the allegations in court earlier this month. Love, still in custody in Idaho, is due to make his first appearance in federal court in Oregon next month.
“Unlike other online scams, he has contact with the people. … He’s coming to your neighborhood. He’s taking you to dinner. He’s dining you. He’s wining you, and then he’s taking all your money and making you go into debt, and it’s abhorrent,” Mullins said. “This conduct is so predatory. It needed to stop.”
Oregon Federal Public Defender Fidel Cassino-Ducloux said his office would be representing Love and declined to comment on the allegations.
‘Zoomy’ car with logos
The Vancouver woman, now 24, said she first met Love in person outside his hotel about 20 minutes southwest of Portland, just off Interstate 5.
Dressed in a black athletic shirt and shorts, he directed her to park her car in the lot, and then led her to his flashy, bright-green sports car - either a Corvette or Lamborghini - plastered with multiple logos, including Chevron and his own Instagram handle. She said he told her the logos represented all his sponsors, all while conspicuously flaunting a diamond watch and fingering a very large, round gold “4-4-4” necklace. That was his lucky number, she said he’d told her, and he was waiting to get the number on his San Francisco 49ers jersey.
He took her to a nearby Oswego Grill restaurant, where they sat at the bar. He told her he didn’t drink or do drugs. He also didn’t order anything to eat, so she just ordered a plate of baked donuts. Afterward, he took her for a ride.
“He was taking a back road and going a little fast in his zoomy car. I was like, that’s fun,” she recalled.
A song by No Doubt called “Hella Good” came on – one of her favorite artists. He acted as though he hadn’t heard it before and said he really liked it.
“I was like ‘Oh, I love this song. This song is so much fun. I have the CD in my car,’ ’’ she recalled. Later, she realized she had listed the artist on her Bumble dating profile and suspected he had done his homework.
He drove her back to her car. They kissed. He said he’d invite her up to his room, but his personal assistant was there. Instead, he offered to show her his football helmet, which he had in his car.
“It was really heavy,” she said. She tried it on. “I had him take a picture of me in it.”
He told her he was 24, that he was in Oregon scouting real estate, and shared photos from Zillow listings for million-dollar homes. She said she was curious how he “achieved so much being so young.”
A day or two later, he called her to say he couldn’t stop thinking about her. She found the intensity a little overwhelming, and told him she’d want to see him again before deciding to move forward with a relationship.
Less than a week later, he invited her to Eugene. On her drive south, she said he called repeatedly, insisting she open an investment account. She told him she wasn’t ready for that, maybe in the future. But he persisted.
“He was just calling me and telling me that I had to do this so that we could have a life together, and because he wanted to take care of me and wanted to help me,” she recalled. “He was like, ‘you need to do this right now so that I don’t have to worry about it when you get here.’”
She said she was eventually persuaded and sent him $1,000 before she arrived.
In Eugene, they had nonalcoholic spritzers at a McMenamins. He invited her back to his hotel to swim, but first stopped at a nearby Target so she could buy a bathing suit. He chatted idly about needing to buy floss for his teeth, his veneers, and about his dentist friend who had a boat, she said. That night, he showed her screenshots of the account he claimed to have set up in her name with the help of his financial adviser.
Days later, he told her he was coming to Portland to pick up his personal assistant from the airport and to practice at the Nike campus. He sent photos of himself running sprints and invited her to meet him at the Skeleton Key, an oddities shop in downtown Portland. Before they met, she said he told her he needed cash for a “big investment” opportunity to grow her portfolio. He sought a high amount, about $3,000, and she agreed to provide about $700, she said.
They met up at the downtown shop, and Love brought a teenager with him who he introduced as Bob, his personal assistant. He told the woman that Bob was “a kid” from his hometown that he pays to do his social media. She spent about 30 minutes with Love at the store and he suddenly said he had to go back to practice. She said that he asked her if she could give him the cash so he could deposit it. He kissed her and she handed over the cash, though she said she felt weird about doing it.
He promised to call that evening to meet her for dinner. But later that night, she said, he told her something had come up and he wasn’t going to make it.
In the days that followed, he told her he was headed to training camp and sent her photos of himself running on a football field and in a stadium. He said he was going to a preseason game in Las Vegas. He promised she’d see him play.
“I’m going to fly you out. You’re going to visit me. You’re going to see me play,” he’d tell her, she recalled.
Then came an urgent request for $9,000, she said. He claimed his wallet had been stolen along with his ID, leaving him locked out of his bank account. He promised to repay her immediately and pestered her until she sent the money. She asked if he had a passport, but he claimed he didn’t have ready access to any other identification.
“Eventually it got to where I didn’t have anything left,” she said. He convinced her to take out multiple loans and pull cash advances from her credit card.
She lost a total of $18,000, according to court documents.
“I haven’t been able to come back from that,” she said. She has since paid off one high-interest, short-term loan he pressured her into taking, but still carries credit card debt.
About a month after their first meeting, she said she got a direct message from another woman on Instagram who accused Love of being a con artist and said other women had lost thousands to him. The Vancouver woman found their accounts online and wept to her parents, who did what they could to help.
She texted Love, telling him she needed to pay student loans and wanted her money back.
She said that he turned on her.
“He gaslit me. He called me a b—h. He told me to leave him alone. He was just like cursing at me over text and then just blocked me,” she said.
She sent a message to the NFL’s Instagram account, hoping to warn the league that Love was using the 49ers’ name to defraud women. She received no response.
Once the FBI began its investigation in September 2024, the NFL and San Francisco 49ers “were completely cooperative,” said Olson, Portland’s FBI special agent in charge. The league quickly confirmed that Love was “never an employee, never a player, not even ever in the NFL,” Olson said.
According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Love and Chan began their scheme in February 2022, with Love meeting multiple women through dating apps and creating “fictitious personas,” including repeatedly presenting himself as a member of the 49ers or a wealthy real estate investor. Chan sometimes posed as Love’s financial adviser and assisted Love in convincing the women that he would invest their money. Investigators found no evidence that Love or Chan invested any of the victims’ money, instead pocketing the funds for personal use, according to a federal affidavit.
The women targeted were mostly college graduates, 35 and younger, Olson said. Love and Chan were “ahead of their time,” in using AI-enhanced images on social media to establish Love’s fake identity so when women searched his name online, his fake NFL persona came up, Olson said. The pair also fabricated investment accounts, staged video calls and falsified financial documents, according to Olson.
After telling her story to the FBI, the Vancouver woman continued to check the dating apps and found Love was still active, so she kept reporting him. Then last month, she saw news of his arrest.
“It was hard to believe,” she said. She said she felt vindicated, but also still traumatized.
Mullins, her attorney who has experience with complex federal fraud investigations, said he was struck by the government’s pace. “They moved fairly quickly,” he said.
The woman said she feels relief knowing that the man accused of draining her savings is not going to be able to do that to anyone else.
She’s disturbed that he may have been targeting women like her who were simply looking for love, stability or happiness.
“Having that twisted and manipulated – it’s just incredibly painful,” she said.
The financial and emotional toll has been lasting. The woman said she had to delay moving out of her parents’ home until last year, lost her savings and put graduate school on hold.
“It took me a really long time to feel like I could trust someone with money, with myself, with my body, with my relationship, like with my love in general,” she said. “It’s something that I’m still healing from, and I will be healing from for a long time.”
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