A barely believable story. For a year and a half, Anne, a 53-year-old interior designer, believed she was having a long-distance relationship with Brad Pitt. For many months, she interacted online with scammers who posed as the Hollywood star and who managed to extract the sum of… 830,000 euros from her.
It all started in February 2023, when Anne, then on a ski vacation, signed up for the first time in her life on Instagram to publish photos of her vacation with her husband and daughter. She was then contacted on the social network by a certain Jane Etta Pitt, who claims to be the actor's mother. “It’s a woman like you that my son needs,” the stranger told him.
The next day, she receives a message from a man claiming to be Brad Pitt, claiming that his mother told him about her. It is from this moment that Anne falls into the trap of the “grazers” (feeling scammers who try to extract money on the Internet). She then begins to form a relationship with the fake Brad Pitt. Over the course of the exchanges, the messages become more and more intimate, at a time when Anne is going through a difficult period emotionally with her husband.
“He knew how to talk to women”
“I had someone in front of me who was interested in me and my work because my own husband wasn't even interested in my work,” she confides. She also receives love poems which do not leave her indifferent. “There are so few men who write you this kind of thing. I loved the man I was conversing with. He knew how to talk to women,” she admits.
To gain his trust, the “grazer” sends him fake selfies of Brad Pitt and even brings in the actor's relatives like Shiloh, his daughter. To reassure Anne, he also sends her false proof of his identity such as a photocopy of his passport, or that of Rob O'Malley, his understudy.
“He would send me photos and when I searched, I didn’t see them. So, I said to myself: These are photos he took for me », Explains Anne to journalists from Sept à Huit.
-AI-generated photos
Plus, fake Brad Pitt always finds a way to dodge Anne's calls. He instead sends her an AI-generated video to reassure her. The scam reaches a new level when the crook asks Anne to marry him. The victim divorces and receives the sum of 775,000 euros… which will quickly go into the pockets of the “grazer”.
The latter claims to have kidney cancer and asks Anne to advance due to lack of access to his accounts, supposedly blocked because of his divorce from Angelina Jolie. “It costs me to do it, but I tell myself that I will perhaps save a man’s life,” regrets today the fifty-year-old who receives false photos of the actor on his hospital bed.
Sometimes consumed by remorse and doubts, the victim blocks the number of the fake Brad Pitt, around forty times in total. But she keeps diving back in and paying him money – 830,000 euros in total – until the day she learns from the celebrity media that the actor, the real one this time, is in a relationship.
After losing everything, leaving her house and selling her furniture, the woman who only had 40,000 euros of savings left decided to file a complaint. “I wonder why I was chosen to hurt me like that. I have never hurt anyone in my life. These people deserve hell,” she confides in the report. Staying with a friend, Anne, who has attempted suicide three times, is currently hospitalized in a specialized establishment for serious depression.
