Fraudster posing as 'sick Brad Pitt' scams French woman out of £700,000
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A French woman was defrauded out of €830,000 (£700,000) by a scammer using AI-generated images of Brad Pitt who said they needed the money for cancer treatment. The woman, Anne, aged 53, was scammed out of the money in a scam where the Hollywood A-lister’s images were faked to make it look like he was seriously ill, French media reported.
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She uncovered the fraud after reading media reports of his separation from Angelia Jolie and seeing reports of his romance with a new partner. The interior designer told a French documentary show that she believed she and Pitt had fallen in love online - with the fraudster even persuading her to divorce her husband so that they could be together.
Anne has since started a crowdfunding page to cover her legal costs in a bid to recover the funds she sent to the scammer. She told French programme Sept à huit that the ordeal began in February 2023 after she created an Instagram account to share pictures of her Alps skiing holiday.
A woman who went under the name of Jane Etta Pitt – the real name of Brad Pitt’s mother – then allegedly messaged her, saying: “My son needs a woman like you.”. The ‘son’, the scammer using Brad Pitt’s photos, then also reportedly messaged her the next day, asking her for more information about herself.
