A spokesperson for Brad Pitt has warned the actor’s admirers against scammers using his image, after the broadcast of a French television report on a woman defrauded by people posing as the Hollywood star.
• Also read: She was cheated out of $1.2 million by a fake Brad Pitt with whom she thought she was having a relationship
“It’s terrible that scammers are taking advantage of fans’ strong connection with celebrities,” a spokesperson for the actor told Entertainment Weekly on Tuesday.
“This is an important reminder not to respond to unwanted online solicitations, especially from actors who are not on social media,” like Brad Pitt, he added.
In a program on the TF1 channel, a woman named Anne, aged around fifty and filmed on camera, said she had paid 830,000 euros to crooks who pretended to be Brad Pitt by sending him fake selfies, falsified identity documents and using artificial intelligence to dispel 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.
According to the report, she filed a complaint and is currently hospitalized in an establishment specializing in severe depression.
AI-generated images/Taken from Twitter/@PopBase
After the broadcast of the show on Sunday, she was 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”.
Online, some criticized the network for failing to protect the victim, who may not have been aware of the consequences of going public with her story.
Sentiment scams have been around since the beginning of email, but the advent of artificial intelligence has increased the risk of identity theft, hoaxes and online fraud, experts say.
Spanish police arrested five people in September, accused of extracting 325,000 euros from two women by posing as Brad Pitt online and on WhatsApp.
The suspects came into contact with their victims on a website dedicated to the actor’s admirers, authorities said.
Brad Pitt was at the center of the news last month when he and Angelina Jolie signed a divorce agreement, a turning point after an eight-year legal saga between the two actors.
