Brad Pitt romance scam

[TwistedWonder]

https://news.sky.com/story/amp/french-woman-faces-online-mockery-after-being-conned-out-of-700-000-by-fake-brad-pitt-13289657

First of all I want you to say that no one deserves to be scammed and I’m sorry this woman lost money but come on, how naive does someone have to be to fall for this?

The photos are so poor that surely anyone with eyes can see they’re fake. And since when did a A+ celebs mum contact randoms on SM?

To seriously think Brad Pitt can’t afford medical treatment and needs money sent to his American doctors Turkish bank account - words fail me.

Where does the learning disabilities line come from? None of the articles (eg BBC) has mentioned this. She was an interior designer married to a wealthy man. She said she wasn’t used to social media. BBC also report that she was the one who came forward to highlight the scam because she’s not alone. Otherwise no one would have known about it. Although she clearly wasn’t expecting harassment and ridicule.

Men do it too. When they go bald with a belly paunch and potato ruddy face they think they are gorgeous.

An op-ed in newspaper Libération said Anne was a "whistleblower": "Life today is paved with cybertraps... and AI progress will only worsen this scenario."

This. I would be very cautious of thinking smugly, that this could never happen to me. Scams will only get more sophisticated, and harder to detect as mediums advance.

We get them on local groups. Sometimes what is clearly the same person posts anon on a couple and it’s always be same story. They can’t access food banks because of xyz. Their kids will only eat certain brands due to autism. They don’t drive. Etc etc

Copy and paste a week later somewhere else. There will always be a couple of people saying they’ll drop money or food by the house if they pm the address.

Same with the homeless people in town. It’s very small so the council are aware of all and they are all offered help. But people will often fall the the scammers and post online about how they’ve given x person £20 and then the councillor will reply with the background story.

The irony.

The surgery photo. I mean come on 🤣

Yes, vulnerable people get scammed and that’s terrible, however there are so many multiple levels of stupidity to this particular one that it boggles belief.

This is not a vulnerable individual with learning difficulties - this was a successful interior designer, married to a millionaire who really should have had the common sense to know better.

• why would Brad Pitt contact a random on social media?
• a simple google would have shown Brad wasn’t in hospital with kidney cancer
• those photos!
• why would Brad Pitt not ask one of his millionaire besties for the money?
• Why would Brad Pitt be using a Turkish bank account?

It's scary that people you would generally expect to have been successful in life to have accumulated that amount of wealth, can end up falling for these scammers.

With that being said, when MIL was in the earlier stages of dementia no one could persuade her that she was wrong about anything and someone could very easily have scammed her as she would not accept advice from anyone.

Thankfully it was lower level legal 'scams' like Foot Painter Xmas cards, all the charity chuggers that kept trying to set up DD's etc and we would cancel all the stuff she was bullied into setting up directly with the bank (yes, we have POA).

A woman is in hospital due to the scammer’s actions - whatever we feel about their victim, that’s not ok. Her family must be so worried.

Scammers demand our attention whether we invited them to engage or not, wasting our precious time. For most of us it’s a brief round of blocking them on social media occasionally, but for a minority of people and their families it causes real world pain.

People who are taken in are more likely to be emotionally vulnerable, or maybe closer on the spectrum towards learning disability.

What a headache these scammers must present for the families of learning disabled adults, who are functional enough to want to participate on line like the rest of us, as is their right, but can’t apply discernment in the same way.

I suppose when you're in the middle of a messy divorce her self esteem will be on the floor then to suddenly have "Brad Pitt" contact you must be a huge ego boost for her to cling to, she might have seen red flags and chose to ignore them, who knows? Either way it's very sad.

Absolutely. If scammers are this successful already with 'shallow fakes' such as the Brad Pitt hospital pictures, how much more might they 'achieve' as deep fake technology advances?

I could have got scammed by a man in a van trying to sell me a customer-returned mattress from his van. I was thinking of buying a mattress so it would have been great timing. What stopped me was being on my own in the house and not wanting this man there so I declined.

My mate did get caught up in this. Right thing, right time - and he unpacked a box containing and old mattress having been shown a properly wrapped one.

If it were so easy to identify and refuse scammers, they wouldn't exist. There would be no 'market' for them. Anybody can be conned. Anybody.

Do you know how incredibly easy it is for a groomer to spot how vulnerable a person is?
Doesn't matter who the vulnerable person is and/or how they are groomed it happens.
Before you know it the grooming is in full force and you can't get out - you are trapped, this women is now in a mental health unit.
I was groomed, I'm a vulnerable person, I nearly successfully killed myself ( groomed in a different way)
So how about stop mocking and taking the piss out of this woman and have a bit of compassion.

Frankly I am bemused by all the people who fall for these scams. I appreciate they are vulnerable/not bright but other people’s stupidity is really not s
deserving of my compassion.

Learning difficulties or not, I hope the bank are not refunding! It sets a precedence and then we all end up paying for the banks losses.

Frankly I am bemused by all the people who fall for these scams. I appreciate they are vulnerable/not bright but other people’s stupidity is really not s
deserving of my compassion.

It's because they want it to be true. Seriously, that's the main driver. You don't have to work very hard to deceive someone who wants to be deceived.

Scarily enough I read a review about a Murano glass factory doing this a few months ago on Tripadvisor. Someone was shown a vase, shop keeper took it out back to "wrap it securely" then when they got home they found it was a cheap knock off.

Don't mock her. A few years back I watched a YouTube video of some US TV programme, where a former CIA high ranking woman officer was scammed by a Nigerian love scammer after the death of her husband. I can't find it now, but if you google enough something like CIA or FBI woman officer scammed out of her money by an online scammer, I am sure it will come up.

Where does it say she divorced her husband because she thought she was going to get with Brad Pitt? It isn’t funny, at all.

It's because they want it to be true. Seriously, that's the main driver. You don't have to work very hard to deceive someone who wants to be deceived.

This is key I think. You see the same kind of psychology at work with cults and pyramid schemes. Some people are more trusting and naïve than others, and if those people really want something to be true, they don’t need as much evidence to convince them.

I think when you see an "obvious" scam like this, it's really easy to be smug - but lots of vulnerable people get caught out by less obvious ones. There are posts on here regularly from people who have clicked links or answered the phone to their "bank" and been conned.

Right thing, right time.

As@LyingWitchInTheWardrobe absolutely has summed it up, with just those words. The woman in the article indicated that "Brad Pitt" was saying words to her, that her husband was not saying. No doubt, those words were her driving motivation in wanting more contact, which came at a heavy price.

Some scams are very clever and I can see how people can be tricked into them. This one should have been pretty easy to spot though.

I think AI can be incredibly dangerous, who knows what's real anymore? It's the same with the Google phones where you can place people in a photo who weren't in the original one, the line between real life and fantasy is becoming blurred...