This scammer used an AI-generated MAGA girl to scam “stupid” men.

Like many medical School students, Sam was broke.

The 22-year-old aspiring orthopedic surgeon from northern India got some money from his parents, but says he spent most of it subsidizing his licensing exams, and is still saving money in hopes of immigrating to the United States after graduation. So he started looking for ways to make extra money online.

Sam, who requested an alias to avoid jeopardizing his medical career and immigration status, has tried a few things, with varying degrees of legality and success. It was made YouTube Shorts and study notes sold to other medical students. It wasn’t until he started scrolling through it Instagram He came up with an idea: why not put the girl created with artificial intelligence to use Google Gemini Nano Banana Pro And sell her bikini photos online?

But when Sam started posting public photos of a beautiful, scantily clad woman on Instagram, he was dismayed to discover that none of the content was successful. He turned to twin For advice. “If you create a generic ‘hot girl’, you’re competing with a million other models,” according to the text Sam provided to WIRED.

Sam says he gave Gemini a few possible options to help his model stand out, and the chatbot chose one in particular: “MAGA/conservative niche,” referring to it as a “cheat code.” Additionally, she said, “conservative audiences (particularly older men in the United States) often have higher incomes and are more loyal.” (A Gemini representative said: “Gemini is designed to not give a particular opinion unless you ask it to. Instead, it is designed to provide neutral responses that do not favor any ideology or political viewpoint.”)

So, last January, Sam created Emily Hart, a registered nurse and Jennifer Lawrence lookalike. On Emily’s Instagram account, @emily_hart.nurse, Sam posted photos of herself ice fishing, drinking Coors Light, and firing a few shots at the rifle range, with emoji-laden comments like, “If you want a reason to unfollow: Christ is king, abortion is murder, and all illegal immigrants should be deported,” and “POV: You’re assigned smart at birth, but you’re considered a liberal.” “.

Although Sam never lived in the United States, he became a diligent student of MAGA ideology. “Every day I wrote something pro-Christian, pro-Second Amendment, pro-life, anti-abortion, anti-woke, anti-immigration,” he told me.

The fraud seemed pretty obvious, but to Sam’s surprise, he said the account “exploded.”

“Every video I posted got 3 million views, 5 million views, 10 million views. The algorithm loved that.” He claims. Within one month, Emily Hart had more than 10,000 followers on Instagram, many of whom had also subscribed to her AI-generated softcore content on competitor OnlyFans. Fanview. Between Fanvue subscriptions and selling MAGA-themed T-shirts (one typical message reads “PTSD: So tired of stupid Democrats”), Sam estimates he was making a few thousand dollars a month.

“I was spending 30 to 50 minutes of my day, and I was making good money, studying medicine,” he says. “In India, even in professional jobs, you can’t make that kind of money. I haven’t seen any easier way to make money online.”

Emily Hart is one of a slew of hot, AI-generated MAGA influencers flooding social media, thanks to tech-savvy young people like Sam who are capitalizing on pro-Trump sentiment and Americans’ relative lack of digital literacy.

Influencers are created from a specific mold: They tend to be white and blond, with jobs as emergency responders. (Many of them are cops, firefighters, or EMTs.) They also incorporate right-wing viewpoints into all their content, talking about immigration, the Epstein files, or pronouns while posing wearing American flag bikinis or MAGA hats — and often both.