In a shocking tale, a 53-year-old French woman named Anne fell victim to an elaborate extortion scam where she believed she was in a relationship with Hollywood star Brad Pitt. Anne testified on the show "Sept à huit" broadcast on Sunday evening on TF1. She informed that the scammer who pretended to be Brad Pitt had extorted the large sum of 830,000 euros from her.
The saga began in February 2023 during a ski trip in Tignes when Anne, an interior designer, received a message from an Instagram account posing as Brad Pitt's mother, Jane Etta Pitt. Shortly after, Anne was contacted by someone claiming to be Brad Pitt himself.
What followed was a whirlwind of poetic declarations and AI-generated videos that convinced Anne she was truly communicating with the actor Brad Pitt. Despite never being able to speak on the phone, the scammer's smooth words and heartfelt messages led her to believe in a genuine romance.
As their online relationship deepened, the fake Brad Pitt proposed marriage, which prompted Anne to divorce her then wealthy husband. Anne was then married to a millionaire 19 years her senior but whose relationship is going through a rough patch.
The scam took a sinister turn when the impostor Brad Pitt claimed he had sent Anne lavish gifts from luxury brands like Chanel and Hermès but needed her to pay 9,000 euros in customs fees to receive them.
Believing she was helping her fiancé, Anne complied.
TF1 reports that Anne's divorce from her then husband gave her a compensatory payment of 775,000 euros.
This is when the scammer Brad Pitt manipulated Anne into sending additional funds under the pretense of needing money for kidney cancer treatment, claiming his accounts were frozen due to his ongoing divorce from Angelina Jolie.
"It hurts me to do it, but I tell myself that I might save a man's life," Anne thought. To convince Anne, the fake Brad Pitt would send her several photos, always taken by artificial intelligence, of the actor in his hospital bed.
It wasn't until Anne saw real photos of Brad Pitt with his new partner, Ines de Ramon, that she realised she had been duped. By then, she had lost an astonishing 830,000 euros to the fraudster.
Currently hospitalised for severe depression, Anne's story serves as a stark reminder of the dangers of online scams.
This is not the first time that Brad Pitt has been used in such monetary or extortion scams. Last September, five people were arrested in Spain for having extorted 325,000 euros from two "vulnerable" and "depressed" women by pretending to be the star, online and on Whatsapp.
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