They Created a Fake Black Woman to Steal Your Money And AI Made It Easy
- Michael Routhier
- 4 days ago
- 7 min read
I need you to sit with what I'm about to tell you, because it is one of the ugliest things I have written about on this platform.
And I have written about a lot of ugly things.
This is the story of how artificial intelligence is being used to manufacture fake Black people, Black women, specifically, crying on camera, pleading for your support, telling you they are struggling, that their small business is all they have, that buying from them means everything, so that you will purchase cheap, mass-produced goods at a massive markup, and feel good about yourself for doing it.
The person crying is not real. The business is not real. The struggle is not real. But the money you spend is very real. And it is going directly to the people who built the lie.
What The Verge Found
In late May 2026, The Verge published an investigation documenting dozens of TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook accounts using AI-generated avatars, overwhelmingly portraying Black women small-business owners, to sell dropshipped products sourced from cheap Chinese suppliers like Shein.
One account, called "Aliyahsbuckles", sells belt buckles for around $40. The same buckles are available on Shein for a fraction of that price. The account's most popular video has 6.5 million views, from people who watched a Black woman cry about her small business and wanted to help her.
She does not exist.
The videos follow a recognizable script; an emotional backstory, tears, a plea for support, a statement about what this business means to the family, a product that looks handmade and meaningful. The AI personas are so convincing that even trained researchers at AI detection organizations describe being momentarily fooled.
Jeremy Carrasco of Riddance.ai, an organization that detects AI-generated accounts, told The Verge his team finds up to 100 such accounts per day, across TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook.
One hundred accounts. Per day.
What This Actually Is
Researchers have a name for it, digital blackface. And they have a name for the emotional hook, empathy bait.
Digital blackface is not a new concept; it describes the practice of non-Black people adopting Black personas, Black cultural expression, or the image of Black suffering for their own benefit. What is new is that AI has industrialized it. What once required a human actor willing to participate in the deception now requires only a prompt, a generative AI tool, and a dropshipping account.
The same scripts, researchers note, are replicated across avatars of different races; Black women, Indigenous women, women with disabilities, calibrated to whichever demographic the algorithm determines will generate the most emotional engagement from the target audience.
They are not choosing Black women because they care about Black women. They are choosing Black women because the data tells them that image, a Black woman struggling, asking for your support, reliably converts to sales with the audiences they are targeting.
They are monetizing the image of Black suffering. With a machine. At scale.
And I need you to understand; this is not a rogue bad actor doing something the platforms don't know about. The Verge found these accounts. iHeart media reported on ABC News investigations into the same networks. YouTube users have been documenting it since at least March 2026. Riddance.ai is filing 100 takedown reports per day.
The platforms know. They are moving slowly. And the accounts keep coming.
The Virtuous Machine Question
I ask it about every technology we cover here; What is this actually for?
The generative AI tools being used to create these personas were built by some of the most well-funded technology companies in the world. They were marketed as tools for creativity, for productivity, for human connection. They are being used to manufacture synthetic Black women sobbing about their small businesses so that a dropshipper can collect $40 for a belt buckle that costs $3.
That is what the tool is actually for, in the hands of the people who built this operation.
And here is where the Stoic lens cuts through everything for me. Epictetus, who was himself enslaved for much of his life, wrote this:
"It is not the things that disturb us, but our judgments about things."
He was right. And I want to be careful that my judgment here is clear-eyed rather than just furious. Because fury without precision is useless.
The precise judgment is this; the people running these operations have looked at the image of a struggling Black woman and decided that image is a conversion tool. Not a human being. Not a representation of real pain that deserves real response. A tool for extracting money from people whose instinct to help is genuine and good.
That instinct, your instinct to support a small business, to help someone who is struggling, is not naïve. It is admirable. They are exploiting something good in you to do something that is purely and deliberately bad.
Marcus Aurelius wrote; "The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane."
The insanity here is a system that has made it free, fast, and low-risk to manufacture human suffering for profit. And the escape from it; the rational, Stoic, grounded response, is to see it clearly, name it precisely, and refuse to be moved by something that was designed specifically to move you.
How to Spot It and Stop Funding It
This is not about becoming cynical. This is not about stopping yourself from supporting real Black-owned businesses, real small businesses, real people who are genuinely building something. Those businesses exist, they are everywhere, and they deserve your support fiercely.
This is about learning to tell the difference. Here is how:
1. Watch the video twice, slowly. AI-generated faces have tells; slightly unnatural blinking, mouth movements that don't perfectly sync with audio, skin texture that looks just a little too smooth, backgrounds that are too clean. Watch the hands. AI still struggles with hands. If something looks subtly wrong, trust it.
2. Search the business name before you buy. Search "[business name] + scam" or "[business name] + real". If it's a legitimate small business, there will be a real website, a real social presence, real customer photos. If the only presence is a TikTok account with crying videos, stop.
3. Reverse search the product image. Screenshot the product. Drop it into Google Images or TinEye. If the same item appears on Shein, Temu, or AliExpress for a fraction of the price, you've found your answer.
4. Look for a real person behind the brand. Real small business owners show their workspace. Their packaging. Their mistakes. Their actual hands making things. They tag their location. They respond to comments with specificity. A script-generated sob story with no real-world detail attached to it is a red flag.
5. Check the account age vs. the follower count. Accounts that are three weeks old with 200,000 followers and 6 million views on a single video were manufactured for virality. Real small businesses build slowly. Viral overnight growth on emotional content is the signature of a coordinated operation, not a kitchen-table craft business.
6. Report the account. On TikTok: tap the share arrow → Report → Fraudulent/Spam. On Instagram: tap the three dots → Report → It's a scam. On Facebook: tap the three dots → Find Support or Report. Riddance.ai is filing 100 reports a day, adding yours matters.
7. If you want to support Black-owned businesses, go directly. Use directories like the Official Black Wall Street app, the Support Black Owned website, or simply search "[your city] + Black-owned business". Give your money to people who are actually there.
The Bigger Picture
This is not an isolated scam. It is part of a pattern we have been documenting on this platform for months.
AI is being used to manufacture fake human emotion at industrial scale; fake Black women crying, fake struggling shop owners, fake testimonials, fake reviews, fake deepfake celebrities endorsing products that don't work. The FTC reported that Americans alone lost $2.1 billion to scams originating on social media in 2025; an eightfold increase since 2020. UK consumers lost an estimated £9.4 billion to fraud in a single nine-month period.
And the tool being weaponized against you, the specific weapon in this specific operation, is human empathy. Your decency. Your instinct to see someone struggling and want to help.
The Stoics had a word for the discipline of not being manipulated by false appearances; phantasia, the impression. And the practice they recommended was simple; pause before the impression captures you. Ask what is actually there. Not what it looks like. What it is.
What this is, is a lie. A racially calculated, deliberately manufactured lie, built on the stolen image of Black pain, designed to extract money from good people.
See it for what it is.
Michael Routhier is the founder of Tech 4 Grown-Ups, a platform dedicated to honest, unfiltered digital literacy for adults 55 and over. The Virtuous Machine is a series exploring the ethics, power, and human cost of artificial intelligence. Find everything at tech4grownups.com.
The Verge / Shopifreaks - Investigation: AI-generated Black avatars selling Shein dropship products on TikTok through fake small-business sob stories, May 2026
EveryCorer AI / The Verge summary - "AI grifters are creating fake Black people to sell Shein junk," May 2026
YouTube / ParkrosePermaculture - "You think you're supporting a Black-owned business? Surprise, it's an AI Scam," March 2026
iHeart / ABC News - "Businesses Using AI To Trick Customers By Pretending To Be Struggling Shops," May 2026
Axios - "Racist AI fakes are now a business and a political tool," December 2025