Scammer Uses AI-Generated Brad Pitt Image on Facebook to Defraud French Woman of $850k
53-year-old French woman paid $850,000 to scammer after believing she was dating actor Brad Pitt, image was generated by AI.
This isn’t the first time Brad Pitt’s identity has been used in an online scam.
According to Newsweek, scam started in 2023 when a woman named Anne received a message on Facebook from a scammer.
At first, the scammer introduced himself as Pitt’s mother. Later, she received a text from someone who claimed to be Pitt himself. This was when the “affair” began. At the time of the scam, Anne was already married to a millionaire.
According to BFM TV, the scammer asked Anne to marry him and she divorced her husband.
Anne initially sent the scammer $9,000 when he said he bought her gifts. Scammer tell her that he needed the money to send the gifts through customs, which the victim sent immediately.
Then the woman was scammed into sending more than $800,000, which she received through her divorce settlement. The scammer claimed to need money for cancer treatment, sending AI-generated images and videos of Brad Pitt lying in a hospital bed to convince her that he required medical care.
The post, which contains images created using AI on the X network, has been viewed more than 22 million times at the time of publication.
The woman only communicated with the scammer through text messages and said they were not available for phone calls. The scammer told the woman he could not use his own money due to his ongoing divorce proceedings with the actress Angelina Jolie.
The 53-year-old woman finally realized she had been scammed when she saw a photo of Brad Pitt with his current girlfriend, Ines de Ramon. In 2024, the scammed woman reported the incident to the police and has been in a clinic for severe depression ever since.
Sentiment online was split. Some expressed sympathy for the victim, with one user writing, “This is so sad. Cruel actually,” while another user wrote, “Romance scams are the cruelest.”
But not everyone was sympathetic, with one user commenting, “Natural selection,” and another writing, “There’s better AI-generated images available for free.”
As reported, police have not found the scammer at this time.
This is not the first time the identity of Brad Pitt has been used in online scams. According to The Latin Times, five people were arrested in Spain for scamming two women into paying more than $330,000 in a scam related to the actor.
AI scams are on the rise and many people could be vulnerable to them. According to the online marketing firm Authority Hacker, Americans lost over $108 million to scams that involved AI in the last year and 45 percent of AI fraud scams led to financial losses, with an average loss of $14,600.
