If you haven’t checked your Facebook account in a while, don’t panic, spam accounts are still very good. Now with terrible and constant improvement AI has fallen into their arsenal—and, lately, football fans to prey on.

There is a group of Facebook accounts that claim to be a set of fan accounts for various National Football League teams. But a quick scroll through these pages, each with several thousand followers, reveals false information paired with a series of photos that appear to be created by AI. Based on the comment sections of these photos and the number of likes some of them are getting, people absolutely believe what they are posting.

“After his desire to return to the steelers was not fulfilled, instead of responding with anger or anger, the former player chose to retire and join the Pittsburgh police department to” wear the colors of Pittsburgh again. a Pittsburgh Steelers fan account with 11,000 followers claimed by a post earlier this week. The post did not mention the named player but was accompanied by a seemingly AI-generated image of former football wide receiver Adam Thielen in a police uniform. Thielen recently announced his retirement, and played briefly for the Steelers last year. He did not share any plans to join law enforcement in Pittsburgh.

Another such account, a Denver Broncos fan account with more than 6,000 followers called “Wild Horse Warriors,” found a victim not in a player, but in Broncos reporter Cody Roark. A post with an AI-generated image of Roark holding a child said he died after a domestic violence incident and left behind a 5-year-old child. Not only is Roark alive and well, he doesn’t even have children to begin with.

“Usually you see that happen with, like, high-profile celebrities,” Roark said The Denver Post. “For that to happen to me is very unusual.”

The account was first created in November and has now been shut down by Meta after The Denver Post reached out for comment. In its two-month existence, the account reportedly spread several false information posts about Broncos players, including a false claim that wide receiver Courtland Sutton refused to wear an LGBTQ+ solidarity armband during a game. But even though “Wild Horse Warriors” are a thing of the past, similar accounts continue to proliferate on Facebook. One such account, called “Broncos Stampede Crew“made the same LGBTQ+ armband claim about Broncos quarterback Bo Nix. The phone number attached to that account appears to be based in Vietnam.

What do these accounts gain from AI-generated fake news about football players? While it’s not certain how these specific accounts operate, the pattern seems to match what has long been used by spam accounts on Facebook. Each post by these fake fan accounts links to an article from a website pretending to be a reputable news organization such as “ESPNS” or “NCC News.”

“Spam Pages largely use the attention they get from viewers to drive them to domains outside of Facebook, presumably in an effort to generate ad revenue,” Harvard researchers wrote in a study from 2024. These websites are often “lots of ad-filled content farm domains—some of which appear to consist primarily of text composed by AI.”

Some pages may try to gather an audience and good algorithm status by using these fake shock-value clickbait news first, before completely changing the purpose of the page.

“It could be bad pages trying to build an audience and later pivot to trying to sell things or link to ad-laden websites or maybe change their topics to something political,” said Georgetown researcher Josh Goldstein. NPR in a 2024 interview about Facebook’s AI spam account.