Earlier this year, e-commerce site Dailyprodtrend recorded a $5,000 order from a customer in Luxembourg for 100 desktop humidifiers and 120 USB-powered cup warmers.

It was the latest in a long list of purported sales at the seemingly thriving Shopify-powered website that broke some basic rules of internet marketing. Dailyprodtrend doesn't appear in Google search results, and its web address is a random string of numbers and letters.

In fact, it isn't meant to be seen by shoppers at all. A Barron's investigation found that Dailyprodtrend appears to be built on a ruse that uses Shopify, a leading platform for creating and running web shops, to mislead website proprietors into thinking they own successful online businesses.

An internal dashboard for Dailyprodtrend shows a long list of orders. Barron's analysis suggests they are fake. The buyer for the humidifiers and cup warmers doesn't actually exist.

"Who needs 100 humidifiers and 120 cup warmers?" says the person who lives at the address where the items were supposedly sent.

The arrangement that clients now call a scam was organized by a 24-year-old burgeoning entrepreneur named Mohamed Coulibaly. It has largely victimized professional athletes, who are offered ownership of the bogus websites as a place to invest cash from their lucrative careers. The athletes, in this case, seem to have ignored red flags, urged on by an internet culture of get-rich-quick schemes.

Coulibaly's social-media feeds project an aura of wealth, success, and influence with a powerful network of athletes, entertainers, and executives. In his Instagram feed, he boards private jets, rides on yachts, and relaxes in a limited-edition two-tone Maybach.

It's been a draw for a vulnerable group. Athletes earn the bulk of their lifetime income when they're young and are lacking in financial experience, says Jon Hayes, managing director of MAI Capital Management in Cincinnati.

"You haven't yet had your hand next to the stove to know that it's hot," says Hayes, who works with athletes as clients. "But yet you have millions of dollars."

An Ernst & Young report in March found that athletes had been defrauded out of nearly $1 billion over the two decades through 2024.

Players are being victimized at ever increasing rates as more money flows into professional sports through surging fees for media rights, merchandising campaigns, and partnerships, the study found.

Earlier this year, a former Morgan Stanley investment advisor was convicted of defrauding NBA players out of more than $5 million by marketing them life insurance policies at inflated markups.

One former athlete who lost money with Coulibaly told Barron's that the apparent scam had caused distress among players who had been counting on him to grow their nest eggs.

"Everybody doesn't know if they're going to get their money back," says the athlete, who owned a now-defunct Shopify site called LuxeLane through Coulibaly. "People are scared."

Three former NFL players interviewed by Barron's -- including the Dailyprodtrend and LuxeLane owners -- collectively say they lost more than $1 million across separate investments with Coulibaly.

Barron's reviewed the Shopify interface for Dailyprodtrend and confirmed that an online order appeared on the site's dashboard without triggering a shipment. The effort appears to use a Shopify tool that allows merchants to create manual entries in the software's ledger for occasional offline transactions. Seemingly fake entries include sales of motorized water guns, hand-held electric fans, and smartphone cases.

Shopify declined to comment for this article.

Zach Edwards, a cybersecurity expert who reviewed the dashboard at Barron's request, says the site has all the signs of a scam.

"Nothing about this passes the smell test," says Edwards, an online-threat investigator at digital security firm Infoblox. "It's a really clever way to use Shopify's good reputation to launder a fraud."

It isn't clear whether or how many other investors have been duped by similar fake sites, but the names of about two dozen current and former pro athletes and other public figures are named as clients on a pitch deck viewed by Barron's that Coulibaly has circulated to potential investors.

The athlete owner of LuxeLane says Coulibaly had what appeared to be $25 million in a business account that Coulibaly showed him on a cellphone screen.

In a recent interview with Barron's, Coulibaly described his e-commerce operation, Motion Ventures, as one part of his business. He wore sweatpants with a logo from Motion Apparelz, a fashion label he sells online.

Professional athletes "invite me around because they like the energy that I bring," Coulibaly says. "The business portfolio that I have makes it a lot easier for these guys to want to be around me as well."

The three athletes who spoke to Barron's say they were reassured by their peers' connections to Coulibaly, as well as the involvement of Steve Keim, a former general manager of the Arizona Cardinals football team, who is operations chief of Coulibaly's e-commerce venture.

"Because why would someone of Steve's stature get involved with something that wouldn't be real?" the Dailyprodtrend owner told Barron's.

When contacted by Barron's in May, Keim initially declined to comment without first securing Coulibaly's permission. He later said in a text that he had received the entrepreneur's approval but hasn't responded to subsequent messages.

Coulibaly's circle has also included executives at Fanatics, the $31 billion private firm that sells collectibles and sports league apparel, and runs a sportsbook where Coulibaly has placed bets.

Coulibaly says the company has hosted him at special VIP events attended by athletes.

"It's kind of just being part of their ecosystem," he says of his embrace by Fanatics.

Asked about the company's relationship with Coulibaly, a spokesman said he was a user of its gambling platform and didn't respond to follow-up queries.

Barron's sought comment from all of the individuals identified as clients on Coulibaly's e-commerce pitch deck for whom contact information was available, either directly or through an agent. All either declined to comment or didn't respond to messages. It wasn't clear whether they know they were included in the deck.

In a report submitted earlier this year to federal and state authorities, two of the players interviewed by Barron's allege that Coulibaly sold them an unregistered investment for a business that generates no actual income, seemingly relying instead on new participants to pay existing ones.

The report, sent to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Philadelphia office, and the Pennsylvania Department of Banking and Securities, was filed by Barry Minkow, a convicted fraudster turned freelance investigator of financial scams.

Minkow is working the case for a share of any recovered funds above the investors' losses, according to the report, which was viewed by Barron's.

The SEC, the FBI, and the Pennsylvania banking regulator declined to comment.

Barron's examined the mechanics of the alleged fraud through conversations with the former athletes and by viewing contracts and Shopify merchant dashboards.

In exchange for investments of at least $50,000, Coulibaly offered the athletes the opportunity to become the owners of ready-made e-commerce sites. He guaranteed investors a return of their principal after six months, plus 80% of any profits from the sites.

After the investment was made, Coulibaly provided shop owners with Shopify login credentials to access their stores' internal dashboards. The dashboards, filled with fake entries, gave the appearance of healthy businesses.

The websites became the first phase of a longer recruitment process. The Dailyprodtrend owner says his store's seeming success primed him to place an even bigger bet with Coulibaly when the entrepreneur presented him with what he described as a yet-more lucrative opportunity involving Dubai investment firm Middle East Venture Partners.

The returns from that deal haven't materialized.

Coulibaly told Barron's his investors haven't gotten returns from the deal because he himself hasn't received expected funds from Middle East Venture Partners.

"We're trying to figure out, 'Hey, what's going on with you guys?'" he says of the firm. "We're not really sure if they're going through some financial issues currently."

Middle East Venture Partners didn't respond to requests for comment.

In his Instagram feed, Coulibaly poses with athletes including Nakobe Dean and Jalen Carter -- both members of the Philadelphia Eagles' 2026 Super Bowl championship team.

An Instagram account for Motion Apparelz features Dean and the multi-platinum-selling rapper YG promoting the brand's designs.

Dean and Carter, along with fellow former Eagles champion Terrell Edmunds, have also been frequent commenters on Coulibaly's Instagram images, posting sparkle emojis and other flattering reactions to his posts.

Mark McKenzie, who played for the U.S. men's national team in this year's World Cup, has also posted on Coulibaly's feed.

Coulibaly says he met Edmunds, now with the Raiders, by chance, when the two were waiting for food deliveries outside an apartment building where they both lived.

Edmunds introduced him to Dean and other players.

"As soon as we clicked, it was like one of those things," Coulibaly says. "It was like a match made in heaven."

Edmunds, Dean, Carter, McKenzie, and YG are named as clients on the pitch deck for Coulibaly's e-commerce venture.

An agent for Dean declined to comment. Representatives for Carter, Edmunds, McKenzie, and YG, whose birth name is Keenon Jackson, didn't respond to messages.

Dom DiSandro, an Eagles official whose wide-ranging portfolio with the team encompasses player security, vetted Coulibaly when he began socializing with players and afterward extended him an "open-door policy, " Coulibaly says.

Coulibaly says he met Keim, the former Arizona Cardinals manager, through DiSandro, who is known locally as "Big Dom."

A person familiar with the Eagles told Barron's: "Claims regarding Dom DiSandro facilitating access to the team and other individuals for the purpose of pitching investment opportunities are completely false and contrary to the purpose of his role with the team."

Keim had spent 10 years as general manager of the Arizona team, later becoming an executive with Klutch Sports, which was founded by superstar sports agent Rich Paul and is now part of United Talent Agency.

Keim no longer works for Klutch, a spokesman told Barron's.

In his chief operating officer role with Motion Ventures, Keim coordinates with factories and vendors, as well as helping vet potential new clients, says Coulibaly, who told Barron's he owns factories in Shenzhen.

The LuxeLane owner says Keim joined a video call last November with Coulibaly, in which the two persuaded him to invest $200,000 as part of the deal with Middle East Venture Partners. He says he has interacted with both men seeking long-overdue returns from the deal.

The two other athletes who spoke to Barron's say that they participated in separate video chats on which Keim joined Coulibaly to promote the Shopify store venture.

An Instagram account with Keim's name and photo -- skeim72 -- left a comment on an August 2025 photo from Coulibaly's feed showing the entrepreneur on a tarmac with a Gulfstream private jet.

"Rich rich," the skeim72 account wrote.

In his reply, Coulibaly seemed to include Keim in his success. "we*," he wrote.

Another photo on Coulibaly's feed, from March 2026, finds him with an arm draped over the shoulder of Michael Hermalyn, president of the Fanatics' VIP program for its top users. Other images show Coulibaly at what appears to be the same event with rapper Travis Scott and the comic known as Druski.

Coulibaly described Hermalyn to Barron's as his main contact at Fanatics, whom he met through a friend, a "big gambler."

In May, Coulibaly attended the Fanatics-sponsored NFL Rookie Premiere event with the NFL Players Association, he says. The Los Angeles event included a party at the home of Fanatics founder and CEO Michael Rubin, he says.

The Fanatics spokesman didn't respond to questions about Coulibaly's participation in Fanatics events or his interactions with executives.

Over 10 days in mid-April, Coulibaly posted on X about a series of wagers made on the Fanatics' sports-betting platform. Screenshots of his betting slips showed more than $800,000 in payouts from roughly $7,000 wagered across several baseball and basketball "parlay" bets.

The images of the betting slips were reposted by Fanatics Sportsbook to its 200,000 followers on X.

"Home Run KING," the betting platform wrote in one post. "GENERATIONAL RUN," it said in another.

Coulibaly told Barron's he placed the bets with credits that Fanatics awarded him as a member of its VIP program. "I rarely bet with my own cash," he says.

The retired NFL player who owns the Dailyprodtrend store told Barron's that he connected with Coulibaly in June 2025 after a referral from a friend.

He says Coulibaly sent him the pitch deck for Motion Ventures, which -- according to the document -- runs online storefronts for clients, handling everything from social-media marketing to manufacturing store inventory.

In multiple identically worded contracts viewed by Barron's, investors are told that their stores will be "run with Facebook ads, TikTok ads, and Influencer campaigns, X ads, Pinterest ads, and Instagram ads."

Buried in Dailyprodtrend's administrator menus, a trove of analytical data suggests no traffic has come from such sources.

The dashboard shows 90 visitors to the site between March 2025 and February of this year; more than 360 orders were recorded over that time.

All of those transactions were entered manually into the store's sales logs by someone with access to the site, then marked as having been paid for minutes later.

Shopify's manual-entry feature is for rare situations where customers don't use the platform's online ordering and payment systems and instead, for example, phone in a purchase or pay by check, says Edwards, the cybersecurity expert.

In this case, the feature appears to have been weaponized to mislead investors, Edwards says.

Shopify didn't respond to questions from Barron's about the manual-entry feature and its potential for abuse.

Barron's sent messages to multiple email addresses entered for customers on the sales logs. All bounced back with "mailbox unavailable" errors.

Barron's also interviewed the current resident of the Luxembourg home listed as the shipping address for the humidifiers and cup warmers purchased from Dailyprodtrend in February. The resident, who replied to a mailed letter from Barron's, said he had never made such a purchase.

Coulibaly said purchaser details are "masked" online to protect his customer list. In May, this reporter used his own name and Barron's New York City address to place a test order -- $14.99 for a waterproof smartphone bag -- on Dailyprodtrend. Barron's then used the owner's dashboard to check the sales log. This reporter's name and address appeared without alteration.

As of this article's publication, the smartphone bag hadn't been delivered to Barron's; it remains marked "unfulfilled" on the site's order log.

The investor in LuxeLane says a pair of cake molds that his wife paid for on the site hadn't arrived after two months, so he brought the matter up with Coulibaly.

"A couple weeks later, I get one cake mold at the door," he says.

As the orders piled up on the fake sites, Coulibaly told his athlete investors that the business had attracted new interest. Middle East Venture Partners had agreed to purchase his Motion Ventures for $215 million, he said, once it had grown to operate 175 online stores.

Cash from the deal would be disbursed as more stores were established, he told investors, offering them a big cut of those proceeds in exchange for funding blocks of new sites.

As evidence of the deal's legitimacy, Coulibaly showed the athlete a contract between him and the Dubai firm. That contract, viewed by Barron's, named a JPMorgan Chase wealth advisor as escrow agent, complete with a signature.

Chase said in a statement to Barron's that the escrow contract didn't come from the bank. The signature in the document doesn't match the advisor's signature, it added.

Another mismatch: Coulibaly shared a letter of intent tied to the deal that was dated a month before Pennsylvania records show he incorporated the business. That inconsistency is also cited in the report prepared for the SEC and other agencies by Minkow, the former felon turned fraudbuster.

"Institutional private-equity firms do not issue nine-figure acquisition commitments to entities that have not been formed," Minkow wrote.

Before investing, one of the athletes interviewed by Barron's had a contract for the deal reviewed by an advisor at Florida-based Matador Financial, which markets itself on its website as a specialist in athletes' finances.

After reading the document, the advisor said "everything was, to his knowledge, legit," the second athlete told Barron's.

Hayes, the advisor who separately reviewed the contract at Barron's request, said that its grammatical errors, terminological inconsistencies, and guarantee of a 100% return after two months should have been red flags.

"Wow," Hayes said in an email. "Our vetting and due diligence would have revealed enough that we would have advised against any participation in this scheme."

Matador didn't respond to messages from Barron's.

The Dailyprodtrend owner and his friend say they invested $925,000 -- new cash plus returns they believed they were owed by Coulibaly -- to set up 18 stores.

They were told to expect double that amount back when the deal paid out in December 2025.

As that date approached, however, Coulibaly persuaded them to accept increasingly complicated new terms that obliged them to invest nearly $300,000 in additional cash.

In exchange, they were told they'd receive a dramatically larger return -- about $4 million -- which would be released in increments, with the bulk of the payout coming in March 2026.

The two say they became suspicious when the first of those disbursements didn't arrive, and began working with Minkow.

In a February text message to an investor viewed by Barron's, Coulibaly blamed the delays on a banking glitch. The exchange suggests that banks may have had concerns about his use of his accounts with them for his businesses.

"Bro we had Chase but they were bullsh -- tting us because of the amount of money we'd move so we switched to Wells," he wrote in the text. "And they bullsh -- tting us too."

The Chase spokeswoman said the bank doesn't maintain accounts for Coulibaly or his businesses, but was unable to share additional account details due to privacy rules.

A Wells Fargo spokesman had no comment.

Late last month, the LuxeLane owner says Coulibaly again promised him a payout from the Middle East Venture Partners deal. This time he attributed the delays to hostilities between Iran and its Middle Eastern neighbors. The payment has yet to arrive.

Write to Jacob Adelman at jacob.adelman@barrons.com

This content was created by Barron's, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. Barron's is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

July 15, 2026 11:09 ET (15:09 GMT)

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