The bait is always the same: a familiar face, a shiny claim, a link you are dared to click. In early February, as winter sports clips and medal counts began trending for the Milano Cortina Olympics, another phrase started ricocheting across Facebook and Telegram feeds: ‘Pinay Gold Medalist.’
The posts did not feel like sports coverage. They felt like gossip — often paired with insinuations of a ‘viral video,’ a ‘scandal,’ or a ‘leaked clip,’ the kind of loaded phrasing designed to short‑circuit judgement. And at the centre of it, repeatedly, was the name Zyan Cabrera, also known online as Jerriel ‘Cry4zee’ (sometimes spelled Cryazee) and similar usernames.
Here is the part that matters: Zyan Cabrera is not a gold medalist. There is no credible record of an Olympic medal, gymnastics title, or any official sporting achievement attached to her name, because the ‘gold medalist’ tag is the hook — not the truth.
Why Zyan Cabrera’s Name Is Being Used
LatestLY, in a detailed warning, described the phenomenon as a phishing campaign that hijacks public curiosity and pushes users towards malicious links that can compromise accounts, particularly Facebook logins.
The pattern is depressingly engineered: posts or pages with generic names share a split image — one side a harmless clip of Zyan taken from social media, the other a blurred or explicit thumbnail meant to provoke panic or intrigue. That is the bait-and-switch. It implies that if you click, you will see the ‘full’ scandal video — except there isn’t one, and the link’s real purpose is to steal your credentials or spread malware.
A Filipino-language warning site, Brabo News PH, echoed the same conclusion, describing ‘Pinay Gold Medalist’ as a phishing scam and pointing to how public posts and images are repurposed without consent to create a fake scandal narrative. That is what makes this trend so cynical. It does not just target victims who click; it targets the person whose name and face are used as the lure.
Here are more photos of Zyan Cabrera — better known online as Jerriel ‘Cry4zee’ — the young Filipina whose face has been repeatedly hijacked by the ‘Pinay Gold Medalist’ phishing trend.
Olympics Timing and the ‘Leaked Video’ Trap
The timing is not accidental. The Olympics are a predictable surge in search traffic, and scammers thrive on predictable surges.
The official Olympics site notes competitions at Milano Cortina 2026 begin on Feb. 4, with the Opening Ceremony on Feb. 6 and the Closing Ceremony on Feb. 22. That window is a perfect environment for opportunists, because ‘gold medal’ becomes a high-volume keyword, and people are primed to click anything that sounds like a breakthrough or a controversy.
LatestLY explicitly links the scam’s ‘Gold Medalist’ framing to Winter Olympics hype, describing it as a tactic to ride trending searches. NewsX similarly warns that it is not proven Zyan Cabrera is a gold medalist and that the ‘scandal’ framing is manufactured, often pairing innocent videos with adult thumbnails that are unrelated or possibly AI-generated, solely to drive clicks.
This is what cannot be ignored: the scam does not rely on sophisticated hacking alone. It relies on ordinary human reflexes — curiosity, nosiness, even protective concern when the post looks like ‘someone’s been exposed.’
For Zyan Cabrera, it is a grim kind of virality. She may be a young content creator, but the viral ‘persona’ circulating now is an identity built by strangers to exploit other strangers.
