Did NBA player Victor Wembanyama, or NFL players Jeremiyah Love, Jalen Hurts, or Micah Parsons, reward Maria Thompson with a pickup truck or SUV after she helped him when he was having car trouble? No, that's not true: This story is a copy/paste clickbait formula which has been circulating on social media. Nearly identical stories mentioning those and other names were published by a network of foreign websites and Facebook pages. There are no news articles about such an event.
One example of the fake story appeared in a post (archived here) published by the Facebook page "Spurs Blueprint" on Feb. 3, 2026. It was captioned:
A hardworking maintenance worker at the Frost Bank Center helped Victor Wembanyama deal with a flat tire after a late-night San Antonio Spurs game -- and the next morning, a white pickup truck appeared quietly in front of her home.
Life had never been easy for Maria Thompson, a devoted arena cleaner who worked long hours at the Frost Bank Center for a modest paycheck. She never imagined that a small act of kindness, offered on a calm San Antonio night just after the game, would change her life. When she noticed Wembanyama struggling with his car, Maria stepped in to help without hesitation -- not knowing she was assisting one of the brightest rising stars in NBA history.
READ MORE: https://crynta.live/.../maintenance-worker-helped-victor...
This is the image included with the Facebook post:
(Image Source: Lead Stories screenshot from facebook.com.)
The Facebook page "Spurs Blueprint" (archived here) which was used to promote the story had a page transparency tab (archived here) indicating it was run from Vietnam:
(Image source: screenshot of the page transparency tab of the "Spurs Blueprint" page on Facebook.)
The Vietnam connection is significant, since fact-checkers, including Lead Stories, have identified a major source of AI-generated false stories coming from a single operation based in that Southeast Asian country. You can see recent reporting and fact checks mentioning that country here.
A Google News search for news articles mentioning "Victor Wembanyama", "Maria Thompson", and "truck" did not return any results (archived here) in that index of the contents of thousands of news sites.
The Facebook post linked to the website crynta.live which redirected to virevo.daily24.blog where the fake story (archived here) was published using many homoglyphs (pictured below). These are text characters which resemble the Latin alphabet, but are letters from another alphabet, often Cyrillic or Greek. Homoglyphs may prevent automated systems such as plagiarism detectors or AI generated content detection, from being able to read the copy. There is no reason why a legitimate publisher would incorporate homoglyphs in their copy.
(Image Source: Lead Stories screenshot from virevo.daily24.blog/posts/maintenance-worker-helped-victor-wembanyama-flat-tire-thao123-team-khoa.)
A search on Facebook for the phrase "She never imagined that a small act of kindness, offered on a calm night just after the game" brought up scores of results with almost exactly the same story but about different celebrities and athletes. Another search for the name Maria Thompson and the word "truck" surfaced even more copies of the fake story accompanied by very similar images showing a woman with glasses and a white or black SUV. Lead Stories found posts (pictured below) including the names of:
- Tom Izzo
- Micah Parsons
- John Blackwell
- Mitch Johnson
- Jeremiyah Love
- Caitlin Clark
- Jalen Hurts
- Patty Gasso
- Ronan Keating
- Katt Williams
- Dolly Parton
- Stevie Nicks
- Declan Rice
- Aaron Rodgers
- Islam Makhachev
- Nikki Sixx
- Nick Saban
- Jim Caviezel
- Kim Caldwell
- Fantasia Barrino
- Sidney Crosby
- Jerry Seinfeld
- Lainey Wilson
- Braden Smith
- Milaysia Fulwiley
- Nick Suzuki
- Jelly Roll
- Lamar Wilkerson
- Patrick Mahomes
- Nick Foligno
- Ronnie Dunn
- Puka Nacua
- Shedeur Sanders
- Marcus Freeman
- Dominik Szoboszlai
- Stephen Curry
- William Nylander
- LeBron James
(Image Source: Lead Stories GIF with screenshots of Facebook search results for the phrase "Maria Thompson Truck".)
Lead Stories has published a primer -- or a prebunk -- on how to identify these kinds of fake posts exported from Vietnam. It's titled "Prebunk: Beware Of Fake Fan Pages Spreading False Stories About Your Favorite Celebrities -- How To Spot 'Viet Spam'"
