Brad Pitt Responds To Story Of French Woman Who Lost $850K To A Catfisher Using AI-Generated Images
Broke would be the wrong word to use on Brad Pitt, seeing as he is filming F1, his most expensive film ever, budgeted at $300 million.
However, he has now been forced to warn fans after a 53-year-old French woman, who wasn’t any the wiser, sent a scammer nearly $1M thinking she was paying for desperately needed cancer treatment.
The story broke on the French network TF1, where the woman, identified only as Anne, confessed to having lost €830000 ($850,000) to the catfishing scheme.
According to the French network BFM TV, the scam started in February 2023 when the woman was contacted on Instagram by someone claiming to be Brad Pitt’s mother, Jane Etta Pitt, saying she thought she would be great for her son.
Anne, then married to a millionaire husband 19 years her senior, quickly fell in love with “Brad Pitt,” who won her over with his charming texts and poems. “There are so few men who write you this kind of thing, I liked the man I was talking to. He knew how to talk to women, it was always very well done,” she told Sept à huit.
Anne, an interior designer who was new to social media, didn’t smell a rat when the scammer always avoided her phone calls and resurfaced with AI-generated videos. She didn’t even figure out that Pitt doesn’t have a single verified account on any social media platform.
The scam peaked when Anne confessed to the scammer that she had secured a €775K payout in a divorce settlement from her husband in 2023. The scammer used AI images and videos to convince her that he had kidney cancer and needed a loan to pay the medical bills since his accounts were frozen as a result of Pitt’s then-ongoing divorce dispute with Angelina Jolie.
“It hurt me to do it, but I told myself that I might save a man’s life,” Anne said. Her story, coupled with the starkly fake-looking AI images of Brad Pitt quickly went viral leading to TF1 removing her interview from the channel. However, the woman’s story has since made headlines on both sides of the Atlantic forcing Brad Pitt to respond to her plight.
“It’s awful that scammers take advantage of fans’ strong connection with celebrities, but this is an important reminder to not respond to unsolicited online outreach, especially from actors who have no social media presence,” Pitt’s spokesperson told E! News on January 15.
Anne wasn’t the only victim of a catfish scheme using Brad Pitt’s image in 2024. In September, police in Spain arrested a gang of five that extorted €320K from two women while posing as the actor.
The scammers met the women on a website dedicated to Pitt’s fans and fooled them into thinking they were in relationships with him and that he was offering them investment opportunities.
In her case, Anne, who had to be hospitalized after suffering severe depression, only realized she had been duped when images of Brad Pitt and his new girlfriend, Ines de Ramon, emerged in late 2024.
“I ask myself why they chose me to do such harm like this,” she lamented, “I’ve never harmed anyone. These people deserve hell We need to find those scammers, I beg you – please help me find them”. Anne’s case is currently under investigation by French authorities.
She said in the interview that the scam left her broke forcing her to move in with a friend. “My whole life is a small room with some boxes. That’s all I have left,” she said. Anne also confessed to becoming suicidal as a result of the depression caused by the scam. Anne has since become the victim of online abuse according to the BBC as her experience has become a sensation in France.
TF1 confirmed that they removed her interview as a result of abuse.
More About:Movie News
Read this Next
