Aspiring players conned by fake Jelavic agent

Peter Conning is not a regular Web user, but the former Weymouth and Yeovil player and now licensed agent has recently realised he has a significant social media presence.

“Myself and several close friends and work colleagues identified that when my name was Googled numerous links highlighted a football agent working to bring players to UK for trials with UK clubs,” says Conning, who represents a number of players in England, including Nikica Jelavic of Everton and Croatia.

Bringing players to the UK for a trial is hardly odd, but Conning realised that people trying to pass themselves off as him were involved in Internet scams. To give themselves credibility, they were stealing his identity through fake profiles on social media sites and trying to swindle unwitting players out of money for non-existent trials.

A frustrated Conning says: “Even though numerous links were primarily to websites that were not household names there was Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts using my name and an old photo. FIFA and the FA have a responsibility to ensure that professional agents are protected and the ambitious footballer is not ‘conned’.”

The scammers are able to do all this is due to a weakness in FIFA’s official agents’ directory, which is published on the Internet.



Since 2001, agents have been licensed not by FIFA but by the national association in the country where they live. That association is then responsible for providing contact details, including a postal address, phone number and email address to FIFA, which publishes the details online in a directory.

For a significant number of agents, there are no phone and email contact details listed. This allows criminal gangs to use this absence of contact information to create false identities on social media that are strikingly similar to legitimate agents.

Typically, the scammers reverse the first and last names of real agents to create a bogus identity. In a bitterly ironic but probably unwitting twist to this particular con, the scammers created a fake agent calling Conning Peter..................................


Read more at www.worldsoccer.com/columnists/aspiring-players-being-conned-by-fake-agents-special-report-by-steve-menary#Wtp25DgAphfI2OKA.99