Faux Brad Pitt –
An investigation into fraud has been opened in France
The complaint was filed by the victim on Reunion Island. The scammers obtained 830,000 euros from him.
Brad Pitt regrets that his image was used to defraud fans.
Evan Agostini/Invision/AP/Keystone
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An investigation has been opened on Reunion Island to try to identify the perpetrators of a scam which made it possible to extract 830,000 euros from a French woman convinced to help American actor Brad Pitt financiallywe learned this Friday from a police source.
At this stage, no suspect has been identified and the police officers from the financial brigade, responsible for the investigation, are seeking to locate the accounts which received the transfers from this woman who filed a complaint in Réunion, French department of the ocean Indian.
IA et faux selfies
In the program “Sept à quatre” broadcast on Sunday on the private channel TF1, a woman, named Anne and aged around fifty, said she had paid 830,000 euros to scammers posing as the American star by sending him fake selfies, falsified identity documents and using artificial intelligence to dispel his doubts.
Pretending to need money to pay for an operation for kidney cancer, the fake Brad Pitt managed to extract this large sum from this woman, who is now ruined and has made three suicide attempts.
-Victim of harassment
Since the broadcast of the show, she has been the subject of ridicule from Internet users mocking her supposed gullibility. The report has since been removed from all platforms by TF1, after a “wave of harassment against a witness”.
The matter reached the actor’s entourage, who warned her fans about scammers using her image. “It’s terrible that scammers are taking advantage of fans’ strong connection with celebrities,” a spokesperson for the actor told Entertainment Weekly on Tuesday.
Sentiment scams have been around since the dawn of email, but the advent of artificial intelligence has increased the risk of identity theft, hoaxes and online fraud, experts say.
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