A 53-year-old woman was scammed into paying hundreds of thousands of euros to a person posing as Hollywood megastar Brad Pitt as payment for hefty medical bills he couldn’t cover due to his divorce.
For more than a year, Anne, a French interior decorator, thought she was in a long-distance romantic relationship with Brad Pitt. This bizarre tale started in February 2023, when the middle-aged woman joined Instagram to share photos from a recent skiing vacation in the Alps. She was immediately approached on the social network by someone claiming to be Jane Pitt, the mother of legendary actor Brad Pitt, who started chatting with Anne and telling her what a good match she was for her son. It wasn’t long before someone posing as Brad Pitt approached Anne on Instagram. They chatted online every day, and before long, Anne fell in love which made her an easy target for a surprisingly effective scam.
Anne said that the Brad Pitt she communicated with on social media seemed thoughtful and genuinely interested in her life, including her passions, her work and her family. He sent her songs, poems, and even selfies that she couldn’t find anywhere else online. She would later learn that the photos had been created with the help of AI especially for her.
“I was in love with the man I was chatting to,” Anne recently told French reporters. “He knew how to speak to a woman.”
Brad Pitt also knew how to ask the right questions and listen to important clues. That’s how he learned about Anne’s divorce from her former husband, a wealthy entrepreneur, and a rather large settlement payment. As soon as he learned that she was worth a lot of money, Brad revealed that he was suffering from serious kidney problems and had been admitted to a hospital. he even sent her AI-generated photos of himself in a hospital bed, to make the story believable.
The person posing as Brad Pitt claimed that they couldn’t take care of the expensive medical bill themselves was because he was going through a messy divorce with Angelina Jolie. Never did Ann have any suspicions that the person she had been talking to for months would leave her penniless. After all, they were in love, and he seemed such a nice man.
Over the course of several months, Anne ended up sending her beloved Brad Pitt more than 830,000 euros ($850,000), including her entire divorce settlement. She only realized that she had been the victim of a cruel romantic scam last summer when the 53-year-old saw on TV that Brad Pitt was in a relationship with Ines de Ramon, but by that time it was already too late.
“At first I said to myself that it was fake, that it’s ridiculous, but I’m not used to social media and I didn’t really understand what was happening to me,” Anee explained. “I ask myself why they chose me to do such harm like this. I’ve never harmed anyone. These people deserve hell.”
The 53-year-old woman has filed a police complaint over the scam, but it is unclear whether police have made any progress in this case. Meanwhile, Anee has been ridiculed on social media and on several TV and radio programs for being so gullible as to think that Brad Pitt was her long-distance boyfriend.
