Football season opened and so did the floodgates. The FBI and NCAA issued a joint warning in August: athletes' public NIL profiles, the same visibility that attracts brand deals, are now being weaponized by scammers, phishers, and sextortionists. The more visible your athlete is, the bigger the target on their phone.
This isn't hypothetical. It's already happening, to real kids, this year.
A rising sophomore in Florida got a late-night call from someone claiming to be Arizona State head coach Kenny Dillingham. The pitch: a scholarship offer, out of nowhere, from an 818 area code. When the kid pushed back, the caller cursed him out and hung up. NCAA rules already prohibit coaches from contacting rising sophomores, so any real call would have been a violation. But a 15-year-old doesn't know that at 10pm.
That wasn't an isolated case. A fake Maryland staffer ran the same playbook across multiple states, cycling through fake identities on X (Maryland, Michigan State, Ole Miss, Miami) offering scholarships in exchange for $30 CashApp payments. Multiple families paid before coaches caught on and started warning people publicly.
In April, NC State quarterback CJ Bailey, a $2.1 million NIL valuation, had his Instagram hacked. The account was used to push scam links to his followers. If a quarterback at the top of the market can get compromised, the kid with 400 followers and a new NIL profile is not somehow safer.
The FBI advisory spells it out plainly: athletes' public NIL profiles give criminals a ready-made dossier. Contact information, sponsor relationships, schedules, training locations. Every piece of public-facing NIL activity is a data point someone can use to craft a convincing approach.
Urgency. Flattery. A request that doesn't quite make sense if you slow down for ten seconds. A "coach" calling outside business hours. A "collective rep" asking for money upfront. A DM from a verified-looking account that leads to a login page that isn't real.
The noise doesn't announce itself as noise. It shows up dressed as opportunity.
This is the specific problem Shield was built for. Not replacing a family's judgment, but filtering the contact before it reaches the athlete's phone in the first place. Unsolicited calls, unverified DMs, outreach from contacts outside a family's trusted circle: Shield catches the noise before it becomes a conversation anyone has to evaluate under pressure at 11pm.
The scams aren't slowing down. Football season guarantees more visibility, more profile traffic, more contact attempts. The question isn't whether your athlete will get one of these calls. It's whether that call reaches them directly, or gets caught first.
NextSigned is not a law firm or a compliance office. This article describes real scam patterns reported in public news coverage. It is not legal, compliance, or security advice. If your athlete receives suspicious contact, report it to your school's compliance office and local law enforcement. Sources cited include public FBI advisories, ESPN, Yahoo Sports, and BroBible reporting from 2026.