How COYOTE Almost Got Slopped by AI

If I wasn’t such a nerd about social security numbers, COYOTE probably would have gotten scammed.

Until the system changed in 2011, the first three digits corresponded to the place you were living in when you (or your parents) requested it. It’s like an extremely unromantic and bureaucratic zodiac sign. My cousins and I have numbers in the 318-361 range because we were all born and raised in Illinois, for instance. In Marge Simpson voice: I just think it’s neat!

Maybe not so coincidentally, I also run payroll for COYOTE.

So back in October, when I started to onboard a new freelancer who was going to write a piece for us, my nerd antennae perked up at the social security number on his W-9. The first three digits were 721. 

Up until that point, the freelancer, who introduced himself as Scott Nover, seemed fairly normal. Three of our collective members (including myself) chimed in with excitement over Nover’s pitch, which included details about informal networks of gig workers who were organizing for better working conditions in the Bay Area. There’d be dispatches from WhatsApp group chats and IRL meetups in addition to expert analysis. 

It was a juicy story, especially for a baby publication like ours. It had everything I wanted to see in a local outlet: the elevation of working class people’s voices, an under-covered aspect of culinary labor, and an underlying message of hope and agency in rough times. I quickly volunteered to take point on this story and see if we could work with the freelancer on refining the scope of the pitch.

When I emailed Nover to ask about the extent of his access to people doing that gig work organizing, he responded quickly that his strongest relationships were with people working with food delivery and rideshares. And while the sources were hesitant for professional reasons, they would be open to sharing proof of employment and doing photoshoots that obscured their faces. It’s something we’ve done before when covering immigration stories, so that made sense to me. We even had a brief and normal-seeming phone call. We agreed to go ahead with the article, setting a cushy deadline of Dec. 3 with regular check-ins sprinkled along the way.

Back to 721. Within the Social Security Administration’s system, that area number doesn’t correspond to any state. In fact, it doesn’t apply to any actual place at all: 721 is squarely within the range of the Railroad Retirement Board, a federal body that administers benefits to American railroad workers. I guess there was a chance that Scott Nover was a freelance writer and railroad worker — like Jack Kerouac, for example. But between 1963 and 2000, the government stopped issuing social security numbers in the 700-728 range.

If Nover was 25 years old or younger, that would sort of make sense. But according to his W-9, he’s 44. I punched the full number into one of those shiesty verification websites, which responded that the number was real and was issued at some point between 1935 and 1950. There was simply no way.

More digging showed that the street he claimed to live on — “Ocello Street” — didn’t exist, at least in San Diego, his stated city of residence.

The last pustule of doubt burst when I reached out via email to the only Scott Nover I could find in the journalism world — a freelance journalist and media reporter for the Washington Post.

“I did not pitch any story to COYOTE,” he responded. Furthermore, he noted that his name was not at all common: “I'm aware of one other Scott Nover and he is not, to my knowledge, a journalist.”

Other Scott stopped responding to my emails after I asked about another phone call. The number was disconnected. No story draft ever materialized.

It finally became clear to me and the COYOTE team that we’d been bamboozled. Someone had fabricated an identity and put our call for pitches into a large language model like ChatGPT, just to make a fake story that we’d feasibly pay for. When I started asking too many questions, that someone evaporated.

There’s been a lot of rightful pushback against the “Stop Hiring Humans” aspect of all this “AI” business. Last year, leaders of media corporations like Business Insider and Vox used their pivots toward AI to whitewash layoffs — and the former has even gone full-throttle into using generative AI to put together articles. Politico’s union and management recently clashed over the question of whether AI-generated content necessitates fact-checking or other editorial checks before publication.

What’s less known is the way scammers have used large language models — LLMs — to target publications with “tailor-made” pitches, all in an attempt to squeeze out commissions with, one can only assume, AI-generated slop. When COYOTE’s call for pitches was shared in a few big freelance writer mailing lists like The Writer’s Job Newsletter, which boasts of more than 10,000 subscribers, we got a flood of suspicious pitches that stank of AI. Last year, Wired, SFGate, Business Insider, and other publications all learned that they’d published work generated by the same fake freelancer — and all of the claims, sources, and anecdotes in those stories were completely made up. It’s a huge waste of our time and also, potentially, a waste of money. 

The reputations of our publications and staff are at stake, too. “For journalists, credibility is everything,” wrote the real Scott Nover in our email exchange. “When our credibility is undermined or eroded, our jobs — which require us to convey factual information — become much, much harder.”

I’m soft-hearted; I don’t want to think that fake Scott was out to be malicious. Maybe, uhh, scamming indie publications out of a few bucks is the only way this person could figure out how to pay rent. Maybe the companies behind LLMs like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Grok make it all-too-easy to believe that they’re the quickest, most painless solution to the terrifying work of thinking thoughts.

But frankly, this whole thing is just so demeaning. Is it too cringe to say that my heart hurts a little from being treated so cynically, like some kind of bug in a jar?

This person used AI to dangle hope in front of me. And I bit.

This story has been updated to clarify how social security number prefixes are assigned.