Last month, my colleagues and I published a investigation into the start-up of an oil refinery in TexasAmerica First Refining, which had secretly obtained investments from Donald Trump Jr. We uncovered a saga involving the Trump administration’s tariff policies, sanctioned Russian oil and the private zoo of an Indian billionaire family.
At the center of the story was the CEO of the refining company, Texas businessman John Calce. We had spent weeks examining Calce – looking at old lawsuits, property records, company filings – and had painted a picture of what appeared to be an obscure serial entrepreneur who had tried for years without success to obtain financing for his long-term refinery project.
Then, shortly before our article was published, we decided to do a cleanup on a separate company he had incorporated called Brownsville Energy Storage Terminals.
Pull up the company’s websiteI felt a brief flash of panic: had we somehow missed the existence of a major corporation owned by the man at the center of our next story?
“From Houston to Rotterdam, from Jurong to Fujairah. Our network connects the world’s most vital energy markets with fast, secure and accurate bulk oil storage,” announces the front page of the company’s website.
According to the website, Brownsville Energy Storage Terminals had more than 850 employees and 28 million barrels of oil storage capacity across six global hubs. It was confusing: Our reporting had led us to believe that Calce was having trouble raising enough money for a single project in the United States, without overseeing a massive multinational oil storage company.
Were we wrong?
We turned to Google to learn more about the company’s top executives. Its CEO, Sarah Jenkins, had more than 20 years of experience with large energy companies. And its chief technology officer, David Chen, “built the company’s proprietary inventory management portal and integrated AI-driven predictive maintenance systems,” according to his biography. But we couldn’t find any trace of them online. Put it down to common nouns?
We then Googled one of the most distinctive names: Vice President for Sustainability Dr. Sofia Rossi, who had “led the Fuels of the Future program,” preparing assets for biofuels and hydrogen. But again, nothing. The links to their LinkedIn profiles were dead.
When we looked up the company’s phone numbers in Texas, we found the same numbers listed online for a Houston baklava caterer, a Dallas-area taxi service, and an OB-GYN office.
We called the Texas numbers: dead. We then tested the numbers from the company’s facilities in the Netherlands, Singapore and China. Also dead.
We were beginning to suspect that this company didn’t actually exist, at least as described on its website.
What was going on with this website? We looked at the source code and noticed a strange notation: “This feature is not implemented yet, but don’t worry! You can request it in your next prompt!”
We checked the site’s domain registration and got our (apparent) answer: it was created this year and dates back to a company called Hostinger which offers an AI website builder for $2.99 per month. “Describe it and AI builds it,” its homepage says. “Automatically appears on Google and AI search.”
Indeed, Google’s “AI Overview” search response, now offered by default to users more and more regularly, seemed to confirm the company’s good faith:
When I searched for an award the company claimed to have won on its website, the Google AI Overview indicated that “notable recent recipients include Brownsville Energy Storage Terminals, recognized for their rapid expansion in the independent oilfield operations and terminals sector.”
The Brownsville energy storage terminals are a real SARL. But everything on his website — from his company historyto its job offers, a diversity and inclusion policy – appears to be fictitious. But perhaps more troubling is that Google, the owner of the world’s leading search tool, has deployed AI previews that can indiscriminately capture fake material and authoritatively spit it out as real.
In response to questions, a Google spokesperson said in a statement: “AI Previews are anchored in our core search ranking systems, surfacing reliable, high-quality information for the vast majority of queries. For uncommon search terms like these, there may not be high-quality information published that matches the query – and we use these examples to improve our search systems.”
After contacting Hostinger, the company shut down the site. “After receiving your request, we conducted an internal review. Based on the violations identified, we have suspended the website and the account behind it, in accordance with our terms of service,” a spokesperson said in a statement.
What we encountered is a particular species of a larger problem that is beginning to be better understood. In April, the New York Times reports an analysis which found that Google’s AI insights were accurate about 9 times out of 10, noting that this represented “tens of millions of incorrect answers every hour” given the vast search volumes. (A Google spokesperson told the Times that the study had “serious flaws.” The company acknowledged that AI previews “can make mistakes.”)
Learn more
A BBC journalist wrote a fictitious article claiming to be the best technical journalist eating hot dogsand Google’s AI and ChatGPT quickly picked it up and reproduced it.
And the source material for the AI previews also looks eminently playable, even if it’s not actual fiction. “It’s trivially easy to use Reddit to manipulate search AI, research suggests,” said a recent title in 404 Media.
The mysterious website is ultimately just one paragraph of our story. But the broader implication is obvious: fakes, forgeries and frauds that would have required considerable effort just a few years ago can now be produced almost instantly.
While preparing this article, we contacted Calce to ask questions about the site. A lawyer for his company, America First Refining, responded to us with a letter dated June 24 that he sent to Hostinger. The attorney also addressed the letter to several email addresses listed on the Brownsville Energy Storage Terminals website.
“I am writing to demand the immediate removal from the brownsvilleenergyterminals.com website of all unauthorized references to the America First office address on your website,” the letter states. “As you know, America First has no connection or affiliation with the website brownsvilleenergyterminals.com and has not authorized the use of its business address there.”
I’m left with lingering questions about the website: What was it for? Was it set up by a bad actor who simply found the company’s LLC records and decided to create a website? Was this a testing site put online by mistake? Or could it have been designed to be consumed by someone who was supposed to think it was real?
We do not know, and our emails to the press contact indicated on the site, [emailprotected]bounced back.
