Did prominent Americans like Elon Musk, Caitlin Clark, Stephen Colbert, and Joy Behar each pay down $667,000 of schoolkids' lunchroom debts? No, there's no evidence that's true: In the case of FBI Director Kash Patel, the gift was inflated to $979,000, which would be more than five times his FBI salary.The posts making the claims include no evidence by which to verify the stories of largesse, with no specific names of recipient schools. Posts share the phrase "... a victory greater than ..." And the Facebook pages posting the celebrity stories are almost all managed from Vietnam, home of several busy social media scam networks in 2025. Among others said to be paying off school lunch debts with $667,000 bequests were other frequent characters in Vietspam campaigns, such as musicians Micky Dolenz, Morgan Wallen, Gene Simmons and Neil Young and athletes like Terrell Davis and J.J. Watt.
The Patel claim a November 15, 2025 Facebook post (archived here) on the Stars & States page under the title ""THE SILENT MIRACLE: KASH PATEL CLEARS $979,000 IN STUDENT LUNCH DEBT -- THEN POSTS ONE CRYPTIC LINE.'
Kash Patel quietly erased $979,000 in school lunch debt across 103 schools, giving thousands of kids the chance to eat without fear, embarrassment, or overdue notices sent home in their backpacks. No announcement. No photos. No stage.
👉 FULL STORY HERE: https://sport247.topnewsource.com/.../the-silent-miracle.../
But after the donations cleared, Patel posted one cryptic line a hint about why he did it and now the internet is buzzing with speculation about the story he hasn't fully told. Full story below 👇👇👇
#KashPatel #fblifestyle #foxnews #viral
This is what the Patel post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of post at Stars & States Facebook page.)
This is what a selection of the copy-and-paste posts looked like:
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshots arranged for display in a gif to illustrate similarities among the posts.)
The accounts posting the stories of largesse share several elements of the classic engagement bait campaigns being used to drive traffic to made-for-advertising pages:
- Page managers based in Vietnam;
- celebrity "news";
- cheaply-produced and nearly identical AI-written narratives.
The chart below shows examples of the page transparency information from Facebook and the nearly identical lead lines, plus repetitive dollar amounts:
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshots of Facebook transparency pages, matched with the fake stories, arranged in a graphical display of examples.)
The Vietnam connection alone does not mean the stories are fake. But, in recent weeks Lead Stories has debunked many other fake stories originating from Facebook pages managed overseas, mostly including Vietnam. The pages link to low quality fly-by-night websites which could be characterized as "made-for-advertising" or MFA sites, which profit by using low-cost AI-created content to attract traffic to celebrity stories, which can generate income from social media platforms' traffic incentives and from advertising, which is automatically placed on high-traffic pages.
Content on the websites is quickly swarmed by pop-up ads and come-ons for other websites seeking personal information.
Here's how the "... a victory greater than ..." phrase gets reused:
Lead Stories submitted the full-length website story teased by the Patel post to an AI detection tool, GPTZero, which found no human-written text and the rest was either AI-written or "mixed":
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of analysis report by GPTZero.)
Other signs of inauthentic or rule-bending content:
Homoglyph headlines: Several online tools, like this one, help malicious users evade filters by substituting "homoglyphs", or letters from other languages, that look like the English/Latin alphabet. This is useful in phishing αttαcks, domain spoofing and efforts to bypass AI detectors. Here's the headline of the fake story about a $667,000 gift by rocker Micky Dolenz, which uses the Greek or Cyrillic "H" character where English's Latin text would use an "N":
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of article at www.daily.feji.io, the site linked to by the Facebook post about Dolenz.)
Clumsy errors:
The post claiming Boston Celtics star Jayson Tatum was one of the $667,000 donors links to a webpage article in which he is quoted saying the gift-giving feels better than scoring a touchdown, nonsensical given that the Celtics are a basketball team:
Lead Stories wrote to the FBI press office for comment and will update this fact check when they reply.
Lead Stories also wrote to the Department of War press office duty officers about a similar claim of a $667,000 gift by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth. We will update this fact check when they reply.
