Faced with the scale of the affair, TF1 backtracked. This Tuesday, January 14, 2025, the channel removed from all its platforms a report broadcast in the show Seven to eightin which a woman said she was scammed on the Internet by a fake Brad Pitt.
“The report broadcast this Sunday (January 12) sparked a wave of harassment against a witness. For the protection of victims, we have decided to remove it from our platforms”indicates a message published on the account X of the show and spotted theAgence France-Presse (AFP).
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€830,000 taken from the victim
Named Anne and filmed on camera, the victim, aged around fifty, says she paid €830,000 to crooks who posed as Brad Pitt by sending him false selfies, falsified identity documents and using montages made by artificial intelligence ( deepfakes ).
Read also: Here are two methods for spotting “deepfakes”, these ultra-realistic video tricks, in real time.
Pretending that he needed money to pay for an operation for kidney cancer, the fake Brad Pitt managed to extract large sums from this woman, who is now ruined and has made three suicide attempts. According to the report, she filed a complaint and is currently hospitalized in an establishment specializing in severe depression.
Mockery from Internet users
Since the broadcast of the report, she has been the subject of taunts from Internet users mocking her supposed gullibility. The Toulouse football club (Haute-Garonne) posted on X a message accompanied by a photomontage calling out to the victim and ironically about his fate: “Hello Anne, Brad told us he would be at the Stadium on Wednesday […] And you ? ». Under fire from critics, the Ligue 1 club then backtracked by presenting its “sincere apologies”.
The video-on-demand service Netflix also alluded to this matter by posting a message on X listing four films available on its platform with the American star in the cast. “Four films to see with Brad Pitt (promise), it’s a gift”we can read.
