The man at the center of one of the stranger money stories in sports is dead, and nobody has said exactly how he died.
Mohamed Coulibaly was 24 years old. Over the past month he became known as the guy who allegedly talked NFL players into handing over big chunks of their money for a piece of online stores that looked like they were printing cash. On Friday, July 31, police in New Jersey found him dead in a swimming pool.
His body turned up during a welfare check at a home in Mullica Hill, a small community inside Harrison Township in Gloucester County. Investigators have not released a cause of death, and they have not said whether it is connected to the fraud claims that put his name in the news in the first place.
A Welfare Check That Ended at the Pool
The way police got there matters. Officers did not show up because of the fraud allegations. They showed up because Coulibaly’s own family called them, worried, after they could not reach him. That is a routine call police get all the time. Most end with someone answering the door.
This one did not. When officers arrived at the Harrison Township home, they found the 24-year-old dead in the backyard pool. The Harrison Township Police Department pointed all questions to the Gloucester County Prosecutor’s Office, which is now running the death investigation. So far, that office has stayed quiet on the details.
What we have is a timeline, not an explanation. Body found July 31. Public reports came out August 6. In between, no arrest, no charges, and no word on what actually happened at that house.
The Pitch: Online Stores That Looked Like Money Machines
Here is how the alleged setup worked. Coulibaly presented himself as a young entrepreneur running e-commerce shops built on Shopify, the same platform millions of regular businesses use to sell stuff online. The stores looked real. The sales looked strong. And Coulibaly offered athletes a chance to buy ownership stakes in them.
If you are an athlete with money to invest, this is an easy sell. You are not buying some vague crypto coin or a startup that might exist in five years. You are buying into a store you can log into and watch. You can see the orders coming in. You can see the revenue stacking up.
That was the whole hook, according to a July investigation by Barron’s that first named Coulibaly. The stores appeared to produce steady, consistent income. Investors thought they were putting money into a business that was already winning. Then the payouts never came.
Tae Crowder Says He Put In His Entire $500,000
The most public victim is Tae Crowder, a former New York Giants linebacker. He says he lost his life savings, all $500,000 of it, in one of these stores.
Crowder says he met Coulibaly through a mutual friend, and that is a big part of why he trusted him. “I saw him hanging out with a bunch of different guys that I know, which you know made me feel comfortable,” Crowder said. When people in your circle vouch for someone, your guard drops. That is exactly how this kind of thing spreads.
And Crowder was not being lazy about it. He says he checked on his money. “I would log into the store all the time and just see, like, how it would work and what was going on,” he told Barron’s. He watched the numbers. That is what makes his story sting. He did the thing everyone tells you to do, and it still went bad.
Crowder never got paid back. His message to everyone else was simple: “I don’t want anybody else to get involved in anything like this.”
The Sales Numbers Were Typed In By Hand
This is the part that ties it all together, and it explains why Crowder’s logins never protected him. The revenue those investors kept staring at was allegedly not real. The orders were not real. The sales logs were not tracking actual customers buying products.
According to Barron’s reporter Jacob Adelman, the numbers were manually entered by someone with access to the backend of the stores. In plain English, somebody logged into the admin side of the website and typed in fake transactions. “The athletes and other investors would buy into these e-commerce shops that seemed to be doing really good business based on the sales logs,” Adelman explained, but those entries existed “to make these athletes think that they had these successful investments.”
So when Crowder logged in to watch his money grow, he was watching a screen that had been staged for him. The dashboard looked like a thriving business. Behind it, allegedly, there was nothing. Three former NFL players say they lost more than $1 million between them.
Rappers and Star Players Show Up in the Pitch Deck
Crowder is the only football player who has publicly put his name on a loss so far. But investment materials tied to the operation reportedly listed a bunch of famous names as clients, and that is a big reason this story blew up the way it did.
Names that reportedly appeared in the pitch materials include rapper YG, Las Vegas Raiders linebacker Nakobe Dean, Philadelphia Eagles defensive lineman Jalen Carter, and soccer player Mark McKenzie. That is a serious lineup of recognizable athletes and entertainers.
One important thing to be clear about: showing up in a pitch deck does not mean any of those people actually invested money or lost anything. In YG’s case specifically, the documents obtained by reporters did not establish that he put in money, took a loss, or even knew his name was inside the pitch. Putting a famous name on a document is a classic move to make a pitch look legit. It does not prove that person was ever involved.
Coulibaly Denied Everything
Before he died, Coulibaly pushed back hard on the whole story. He told Barron’s flat out that he was not running any kind of fraud, and that the reporting was “based on a misunderstanding of the technology.”
His explanation for the missing payouts was this: investors had not gotten their returns because he himself had not received money he was expecting. He said a third party was supposed to buy his business in a planned acquisition, that the deal had not closed, and that once it did, everyone would be made whole. In other words, he framed himself as someone stuck waiting on a bigger check, not a con artist.
He did not soften it either. “I strongly dispute a number of the factual assertions and characterizations contained in the Barron’s article and any follow-up reporting that relies upon them,” he said. He denied the accusations right up until his death.
No Charges, No Answers Yet
Here is the piece that surprises a lot of people. Despite all the attention, the named athletes, and the seven-figure losses, Coulibaly was never charged with a crime. There was no arrest and no conviction connected to the alleged scheme before he died.
That leaves the people who say they lost money in a strange spot. There was no criminal case moving through the system, and now the one person who could explain where the money went, or supposedly went, is gone. For investors trying to claw anything back, a defendant who is no longer alive complicates everything.
Some of the accusers are still hoping for resolution, some way to get answers or recover cash. Whether that ever happens is an open question, and the death investigation has to run its course first.
For now, the facts are limited and the loose ends are everywhere. A 24-year-old accused of running a fake online store empire is dead in a New Jersey pool. His family found reason to worry enough to call the police. The prosecutor’s office is investigating. And the athletes who say they trusted him with hundreds of thousands of dollars are left with a story that ended with more questions than it started with.
If there is one takeaway sitting in the middle of all this, it is the thing Crowder kept repeating. He logged into that store constantly. He watched the numbers move. And the numbers were allegedly typed in to keep him calm. A screen full of good news is not the same thing as money in the bank.
