Federal prosecutors say Daejon Love spent years convincing women he played pro football for the San Francisco 49ers in order to scam them into romance and investment schemes. He was arrested on August 24 and now faces two federal wire fraud counts in Oregon, each carrying a maximum of 20 years behind bars. Give him credit for commitment to his fraud.
At some point his fabricated online presence grew dense enough that a Google AI Overview identified him as an actual player, and Love began pointing to that search result as proof. The search engine had not verified anything. It had synthesized a false online footprint into a confident answer, and confidence is what people mistake for verification.
The Philippines spent the better part of a decade building the same kind of machine, aimed at concrete instead of a football career, and it worked for roughly as long as nobody asked it a direct question.
Finance Secretary Ralph Recto told the Senate last year that flood control corruption from 2023 to 2025 may have cost the economy P42 billion to P118 billion. The figure is not a tally of stolen money. It rests on a guess that 25 percent to 70 percent of project costs vanished, which explains the large range. Senators Panfilo Lacson and Sherwin Gatchalian ran their own extrapolated numbers. The result came in above P180 billion in one version and near P79 billion in another, both from Lacson on the same day. Nobody has a confirmed number. What exists is a rough shape of the theft, filled up with decimal points.
The peso estimates above are shaky guesswork. The numbers on how many projects were fake are more solid.
DPWH announced in October 2025 that 421 of roughly 8,000 inspected projects were validated as ghost projects, a finding reached jointly with the Department of Economy, Planning and Development, the police, and the military. By December the count passed 600 out of nearly 10,000, proof the first number was a floor. A February 2026 investigation found a Laguna de Bay project, 70 percent built, that the department’s own transparency portal listed as a flood control project even though the contract never called it that.
The bid data sheet correctly listed the work as flood control, but the contract just never said so, meaning the discrepancy sat inside DPWH’s own files before the public ever saw the Philippine Google Overview portal. Built to check the record against the ground, it simply repeated what an earlier document already had wrong.
President Marcos separately reported that 6,021 projects worth more than P350 billion carried descriptions too vague to specify what kind of flood control structure had actually been built, and that a number of unrelated projects in different locations carried identical contract costs. Some coincidence. Vague paperwork and matching prices are not proof of copied fraud. But they are exactly the kind of pattern a functioning system should have flagged well before a senator had to extrapolate from a sample to guess at the damage.
Marcos also announced that no fresh, locally funded flood control projects would be included in the proposed 2026 budget, arguing that roughly P350 billion allocated in 2025 had not yet been fully utilized. The government has since launched a redesigned transparency portal and continued the investigations. That is a real response. It does not answer the harder question the scandal exposed. Publishing more records does not restore trust on its own when the old records were good enough to certify projects that did not exist. The new portal may make the paperwork easier to see. It still has to prove that the paperwork corresponds to what is on the ground.
In Marilao, Bulacan, a river wall in Barangay Prenza II collapsed on August 10, 2026, roughly two months after it had been declared complete. In Cebu, Governor Pam Baricuatro noted the province had received P26 billion in flood control funding and still flooded severely when Typhoon Tino struck in November 2025. Neither failure proves its own project was a ghost entry in someone’s ledger. Both show a record of a project meeting standards that the real world declined to honor.
Love’s fabricated career survived until federal investigators finally checked it against reality rather than against the record. The Philippines has not finished that same check on its own paperwork, and the next typhoon will not wait for the results.
E-mail me at mangun@gmail.com. Follow me on Twitter @mangunonmarkets. PSE stock-market information and technical analysis provided by AAA Southeast Equities Inc.