The most-followed woman in golf, Paige Spiranac, with 4 million on Instagram alone, surpassing Tiger Woods, has watched her identity transform from a personal brand into a commodity that scammers exploit at will.

First, it was fake accounts. Then fake subscriptions. Then scammers play online Scrabble to build intimacy. Now they’re posing as her family members and agents. On January 21, 2026, she dropped another 50-second warning video on X.

“If anyone is reaching out claiming to be a friend of mine, family, or an agent or a manager, ignore them. They are scammers and impersonators,” Spiranac said in the video. “There are so many out there, and just please be super aware, and if anything seems fishy, that means that it is fishy.”

She also addressed the platforms scammers use to target her followers. “I do not have a Telegram or a Google Hangout or anything like that at all. I’m not playing online chess or wars with friends,” she clarified, before urging fans to “report and block all impersonators.”

The warning carried a sharp escalation from previous alerts.

Back in October 2025, she posted on X: “I DON’T HAVE A TELEGRAM! Please stop talking to people on there claiming to be me, a family member, or someone from my team.” Three months later, the problem has only deepened.

This unfortunate pattern traces back years.

In 2016, a fraudster edited a screenshot of her head onto someone holding a sign that read “I love you, baby.” In 2018, another scammer fabricated a driver’s license with her photo to swindle people. By July 2025, Spiranac shared a screenshot of two fake accounts conversing with each other, impersonators talking to impersonators, and noted the situation had become “out of control.”

The consequences aren’t confined to the digital realm. In a 2025 interview, Spiranac revealed the physical toll.

“I’ve had people come up at events and like…try to kiss me because they think that we’re together, which is really scary,” she said.

She also described victims losing staggering sums. “They’ll scam people, and then those people get really, really angry because they’ll lose, like, you know, $100,000,” she added, calling the landscape “the wild, wild west of social media.”

The gendered dimension compounds the problem. A McAfee 2024 study found that eight of the top ten most impersonated celebrities were women, with 52% of male victims falling prey to romance scams involving fake female celebrity accounts. Spiranac isn’t an outlier—she’s the template.

And through it all, she is left to manage the fallout largely on her own.

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Why Paige Spiranac keeps fighting a battle platforms won’t

The gap between how fast impersonation spreads and how slowly platforms respond has widened into a structural failure. X’s shift from identity-based verification to subscription-based verification—the $8 Blue Check—means bad actors can purchase immediate credibility. Instagram’s moderation struggles with “fan pages” that repost legitimate content while slipping scam links into Stories. Reporting an impersonator often requires being the person impersonated, which drags takedowns to a crawl.

Spiranac isn’t alone in shouldering this burden. Nelly Korda pinned a warning on Instagram stating she would “never ask any of my fans for money.” Charley Hull clarified she doesn’t have a TikTok account and would “never ask for money or gift cards in exchange for meet and greets.” Michelle Wie West and Jennifer Kupcho issued similar alerts. The pattern spans women’s golf.

For fans, the protocol remains straightforward. If the message isn’t from a verified handle, it isn’t her. She will never ask for money via direct messages. She doesn’t use Telegram, WhatsApp, or Google Hangouts. When in doubt, report and move on.

But the warning Spiranac posted on January 21 won’t be her last. The scammers adapt faster than the platforms moderate, and the tools grow more sophisticated—AI-generated deepfakes now mimic her voice and face. For now, the cycle continues, and Spiranac remains both the target and the only line of defense her followers have.