"It was a really really scary situation" - Paige Spiranac on incident at recent golf tournament

Paige Spiranac, a former pro golfer-turned content creator, has reminisced her harrowing experience at a recent golf tournament.

She plays golf quite a bit. Much of her social media content is about golf, and she's very well known and has a lot of fans. However, not everyone that comes up to her is a genuine fan.

Athletes and content creators often get hassled or even harassed in public, and Spiranac learned that the hard way.

She recently recounted a terrifying situation, where a disgruntled and 'unhinged' fan came up to her demaning money. The fan initially came up and asked for a picture, which is not uncommon. However, moments later, the man accused Spirinac of scamming him for $10,000 and began threatening Spiranac.

Recalling the incident, the golfer said:

“There was some guy … and he comes up and asks me for a picture, it’s fine at first. And then, he goes into how I scammed him out of $10,000, and he started threatening me. It was a really really scary situation."

As things turned out, the ex-golfer was the subject of an online scam, and the fan wanted to collect the money from her which he lost to the scam: Spiranac added:

“As it turns out, this man was scammed by a fake profile that someone created and it had a fake number, he was unhinged. It was a very scary situation, and luckily I had my team there, so I called my agent over and he was trying to handle it.”

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"I have been dealing with these security issues for a while" - Paige Spiranac

2022 American Century Championship - Round One

With the proliferation of social media and the internet, there have been rising cases of scams where people lose money to fake profiles and numbers appearing to be that of a celebrity.

Paige Spiranac has been dealing with these issues for a while, especially recently. She said:

“I’ve been dealing with these security issues for a while, and they have been increasingly worse in the last couple of months, where these men are getting scammed by these fake profiles, fake numbers, meeting on Google hangouts, whatever you can think of, it’s happening."

The people who get scammed in the name of Paige Spiranac demand money they got cheated of or try to follow up a 'relationship' they think they have have with the ex-golfer. She added:

“And then, they come and find me or reach out to me, and they’re very hostile, very angry because they’ve been scammed out of lots of money, or they think we were in a relationship and I had ghosted them."

Paige Spiranac also said that the most challenging part is that such fake accounts that scam people are anonymous and difficult to stop. Unfortunately, it seems these issues will persist for a while, and Spiranac will need to learn to tackle them.