Summary: First, criminals preying upon someone apparently vulnerable (after cancer, divorce, and who knows what else). Then, as if that wasn't more than enough for one person, a bunch of Internet people, and even some brand marketers, publicly mocking and harassing the victim.
Your timeline there is a bit off.
When she met this Brad Pitt, she was still married. She started sending money to him; got divorced; got a settlement of €775,000; and proceeded to give all of that as well to Brad Pitt.
Still worthy of sympathy, but no one would question mockery of a married man who started chatting with a fake Angelina Jolie on social media, started sending her money, got divorced, and then gave the rest of his assets to her.
> ... , but no one would question mockery of a married man who started chatting with a fake Angelina Jolie ...
I would hope that noone would mock this person. Anyone doing this clearly has some issues and should not be mocked but encouraged to seek help.
When did so many people become assholes?
Claiming that some stranger "has issues" and encouraging them to "get help" is just denigrating them instead of mocking their behavior.
We don't know anything about this person besides what facts have come up in the story, and none of us are directly engaging with them anyway.
It's much less presumptive and much more socially constructive to directly critique their behavior for being plainly misguided, so that others can learn from it, than it is to make any kind of judgment about the person themselves.
I think the issue I have with it is she divorced her (assumedly) loyal husband, then took (assumedly) half his money in court only to give to another man she was planning on cheating with. Then the schadenfreude cherry on top was it was all a scam and she was too gullible or stupid to know. She deserves to be mocked. If nothing else for what she did to her family.
How why would anybody give money to Brad Pitt? Dude's rich enough already.
There are always explanations for why the invented persona needs cash, and the scammer also presents sophisticated evidence chains for it. Most people are susceptible to it; see the massive success of spear phishing in corporate environments.
He pretended he was sick and his money was frozen because of his divorce and needed a lot of money for expensive operations which failed one after another.
As would be Nigerian princes. Seems just a variation of the same old scam.
And on a very small scale, popular Twitch streamers.
Which makes her more of a ...?
She was paying for his divorce with jolie. She got 770k euros from her own divorce. Not exactly a poor person
A fool and her money are easily parted. You can have sympathy for her while admitting that she s a fool. Not even the first or second one.
Moral of the story is "don't be a fool" because there is no chance that scammers will disappeared
No, the moral of the story is that technology is an exponentially-growing force multiplier for scammers.
Back in the hunter-gatherer days, you could be a fool and still survive by relying on your kinship group to protect you and take care of you. They would find ways to let you contribute to the group without needing to be highly intelligent and skillful.
Now we are living in a techno-jungle swarming with parasites and predators. Let your guard down for even a moment and you could lose everything. Oh, and when the cognitive decline that comes with age catches up to you? You might as well walk out onto the virtual ice floe and unplug yourself from the internet.
Probably true that we are all vulnerable to scams in one way or another, especially as we age. Some of us has more mockable vulnerability, but one way or another it's just a bug in human software.
Even if we aren't vulnerable to scams, we may be vulnerable to falling for false rumors, fake news, myths, or just things that sounds true but turn out to be false.
"Don't be a fool" isn't really much of a lesson, but it is useful to know there are fake Brad Pitt milling around potentially preying on vulnerable women.
I don't see how that validates the response of the public mocking and harassing them.
Unfortunately for her the mocking is to teach other fools not to be one!
Some people are the shipwrecks on the rocks that help others navigate.
I would think that public mocking of scam victims would just encourage them to keep quiet about the crime.
Yeah very commonly people say, "I have identified this as a scam but given that other victims weren't mocked relentlessly enough, I shall part with my money." /s
I think you know that's not what the comment is saying. They're saying people who fall victim to these scams would be less likely to talk about it, knowing they'll be the Internet's lolcow for a day. That hurts everyone, because now a scam is getting less coverage, leading to more people falling for it.
Has nothing to do with recognizing it as a scam in the moment it's happening. They're talking about what comes after falling for the scam.
That's a nonsense argument. Mockery obviously makes people LESS likely to talk about their victimization.
What you're actually trying to say is, "mockery amplifies the signal to get in front of more people's eyes" and my counter to that is: it doesn't need to. The article itself does a perfectly fine job communicating what's going on without making mockery. You're just choosing to layer mockery on top of it for, as far as I can tell, net negative effect.
It's the human condition to teach each other via positive and negative reinforcement.
If she didn't come forward publicly her story would've via the human telephone game. As well fabricated stories on this topic will and are created. So the mob is mocking fiction but in the end in a valuable societal manner to teach the fools.
The lack of morality in the parent post discourages me.
Everyone is a fool in some aspect of life. This person was bad with money and fraud, but maybe she is or was an extremely talented artist. Maybe you understand money and fraud, but are otherwise talentless. Neither of you are fools.
Wrecking your life is substantially worse than not being a good artist.
Most people never had €830k to begin with - are their lives already wrecked?
> She got 770k euros from her own divorce.
The ex husband must be laughing his ass off at this!
She is creating a bad buzz to get helped from detectives, lawyers, media, the public etc. The price she pays is being mocked at, yes
I am beginning to doubt my five Instagram girlfriends
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The article is getting clicks because of "AI" in the title but this is a very generic scam. There's no part of it that wasn't done before AI a million times.
The lack of empathy of the responses here saddens me. I sincerely hope none of your parents or grandparents are scammed. And I hope you are all educating your loved ones on the threat of scams in this new era when AI fakes are so easy and realistic.
Criticising, being realistic, seeing through lies and being empathic are not exclusive. We can do all of those things at the same time.
The fakes were not realistic here, it didnt need any AI and most people who are mocking her here read more about the topic than you apparently
Ah yes. The well known mocking empathy.
Mmm more your ex wife… she was 53, which is pretty much in the age range of HN
Yeah, she's not the best poster-girl for the problem, apparently getting a divorce for her scammer, and having a daughter who warned her after she was duped (much more difficult to accept due to sunk cost and embarrassment).
But her relative age just highlights how you don't have to be 95 to fall for these scams when fakes are getting so good. I should have said, I hope you are warning and educating your parents, grandparents, spouses, children.
Please inform your loved ones why it's important to never trust unsolicited communication.
They lack empathy because doing something about this would likely harm their salary or create regulation.
Lol this article doesn't even include the best part which were the pictures the scammer was sending. It's like 10 low res photos of Brad Pitt in a hospital bed, I think some of them lifted from movies. I don't even think AI really played an important role here.
It's the sad part, not the "best"
calling that AI is very generous.
What's the "best part" of someone with both HIV and cancer who is going through a divorce getting robbed out of every cent to their name and then mocked on the Internet?
Yeah, hilarious. Ell oh ell oh ell.
It's possible for things to be both sad and funny from different perspectives. Hope that helps.
We french are specialists of the tragi-comique
Don't backtrack now. It's only funny to you because you don't know her. I don't find everyday sociopathy as amusing myself.
With the same low level reasoning I would say people are only sorry for her because she is a woman, that needs to be protected. Reverse the sexes in the story and you dont get much of an interesting story
What a blindly judgemental farce. Maybe don't project your own prejudice onto others?
Yeah, so what? That's how a lot of life works. If I had to practice maximal empathy and view every misfortune I hear about through the lens of "Oh my god, what if it happened to me!" I would be catatonically depressed and wouldn't be able to function. It's too bad for this lady. I wouldn't laugh in her face about it of course. But come on, the pictures are funny. It's okay to find humor in dark things. I try to find humor in my own misfortunes as well. That's life.
This isn't the timeline. She decided to get divorced midway through this scam, and used the proceeds to help Brad.
The best part is that there are people so gullible to fall for things like this.
These are the people clicking internet advertisements and funding the web.
Maybe a radical perspective here, but I'd suggest that even dumbasses have a right to live with dignity and not get scammed of their belongings.
Even the biggest dumbass on the planet, in fact, deserves this.
Which part is the best part then?
“She has since told a popular French YouTube show that she was not "crazy or a moron"
She might indeed not be crazy..
Nor a moron.
Solitary people who are groomed and love bombed aren't idiots, they are victims. Abuse of this type works so often because people have weakened defenses due to other events in their life. We're hard wired as a species to value social cohesion and social approvals.
> Anne's daughter, now 22, told TF1 she tried to "get her mother to see reason" for over a year but that her mother was too excited. "It hurt to see how naive she was being," she said.
At least a little bit moron, also was married while this was ongoing
I don't think you realize just how extensively abuse can break your brain.
Edit: I'm talking about emotional and psychological abuse. Separating you from people who care for you, gaslighting you, building dependency, etc are all scamming tactics that are absolutely psychological and emotional abuse.
Why are there so many white knights in this thread? You're literally making up details to try and save face for her.
She never saw face to face any of the protagonists here. It’s all online. They said to her what she was waiting for
Abuse by who? Abuse is not mentioned in the article.
Should society remove citizen’s rights to those helpless people then ? Who should watch over them and be responsible for their acts ?
This isn't a "rights" issue. It's taking a step back and seeing that what happened to her could, to a degree, happen to any of us and she's not deserving of mockery.
We deny people's natural right to be defrauded by outlawing fraud, yes.
sending someone you never met 700k is dumb. she can be a victim too. and you said 'break your brain' which only proves that she wasn't dealing with a full deck.
It would make for an interesting plot twist if her ex was behind the scam.
Why would anyone give a celeb money? Especially a high profile one like Brad Pitt.
Like I get if you believed that Josh Hartnett or Pauly Shore is asking you for money. They haven't worked much in the last decade.
But Brad Pitt? That's almost as bad as Ryan Reynolds or Kevin Hart asking you for money cause they're in so many movies.
As someone who is actually friends with Brad Pitt on Facebook and have given him money, it’s because he wants to know that he’s still a normal person. He wants to connect with real people. He’s tired of the Hollywood world. And he also says he lost lots of his money in the fires. And Jennifer Anniston took all his money. But he’s also too ashamed to let others know. He only trusts that information to a real person not tied to Hollywood.
> As someone who is actually friends with Brad Pitt on Facebook and have given him money
Are you telling us you fell for the same pork butchering scam?
We should start a Fundme campaign to help poor Brad!
> And Jennifer Anniston took all his money.
wait what? If anything I expect Angelina to take his money but not so much that he would be broke.
Guess I know Jack.
The probability that any person would give Brad Pitt money is nearly zero. But obviously it is not zero! We already know that some people believe weird things.
The problem (for the scammer) is to find out, efficiently, _who_ would give (a lot of) money. In the past, they sent email that had typos - I think on purpose: the probability that someone would send money is higher if he doesn't detect that.
With AI, this got _much_ easier, and scales much better: you can generate very convincing text, images, videos and interact with many, many potential victims. The story itself, it seems, doesn't need to be too convincing.
This is heartbreaking
"I understand the comic effect but we're talking about a woman in her 50s who got conned by deepfakes and AI which your parents and grandparents would be incapable to spot," one popular post on X read.
This ignores the fact that her daughter tried to explain it to her for over a year.
To me it seriously raises a question, what should we do with or think about people who deemed capable and are 50+ “YoE” but still unable to real life or a little bit of logic, basically.
Be that as it may but we're not making that person "smarter" by shitting on them. Many people just aren't very "smart" or whatever you want to call it but it's people that are taking advantage of them that are at fault here. If this was someone with a cognitive disability we wouldn't make fun of it (I hope) and the line is sometimes blurry.
It is always shocking to me that someone with those kinds of resources can get duped like that -- with little checks and balances.
From Reddit - https://www.reddit.com/r/UpliftingNews/comments/1i1uvjq/scam...
French start up Find My Scammer carried out the investigation pro bono as the victim has literally no money left in her account, not even a cent.
Victim had no experience whatsoever with social media before creating an Instagram account in 2023 to share holiday pictures.
Victim was targeted after liking pictures related to Brad Pitt on Instagram.
Victim was in the midst of a divorce before being contacted by scammer.
Victim was groomed for months and months by scammer passing themselves as Pitt's mother, agent, etc, in addition to Pitt himself, using American phone numbers, fake articles, etc.
Victim had no knowledge of technologies such as deepfake.
Victim was lulled into a sense of security as grooming lasted for many months before she was asked to send money for the first time, thinking that such a scam would be more immediate.
Victim has HIV and cancer, tried to end her life three times.
French TV program which revealed the story accused of manipulating the subject matter and misrepresent facts to encourage ridicule against victim, has been pulled off all platforms.
Scammer found in Benin, was tricked into clicking a link which gave start up full access to his computer, phone, information, living address, etc. Crypto wallet where the stolen money is stored found. All information in the hands of authorities investigating the crime.
Scammer has over 30 victims. Also poses as fake Keanu Reeves.An important point in the story: while she was contacted by the scammers when she was still married, it is after the divorce that she received most of the money that was eventually scammed - over €700k
> Crypto wallet where the stolen money is stored found. All information in the hands of authorities investigating the crime.
This is great news, and I hope Anne and the other victims can see at least some of their money returned.
Do such links really work so that it’s enough to load the page on your browser and you are done?
Depends. Mostly not. But Pegasus spy software was put on iPhones via silent SMS. So those targets didn't even need to click a link. All they really had to do was owning an iPhone. And made their number known.
My grandpa has a saying that translates to something: "The money bag never hangs in front of the same house for more than three generations".
This is just one of the reasons why.
Yep, the Chinese has exactly the same saying -- even the same number of generations.
I hope she gets some $$ back though.
Let's just ignore thousands of European noble families and wealthy industrial tycoon dynasties.
Any examples? I’m not really aware.
Rothschild
"This" -- do you mean theft and abuse are the reasons why? Or debilitating illness (HIV/Cancer).
It's not an uncommon expression on managing generational wealth. I've frequently encountered it as:
"The first generation makes it, the second generation spends it, and the third generation blows it."
She was tricked. The money wasn't physically taken. She lost the money because, unlike she claims, she is indeed a moron.
They desperately need some comfort or excitement and the scammer provided it to her. Sad.
Love is blind.
In Spanish when somebody says love is blind, another will quickly add “and deaf and stupid/idiot“
Her daughter should have done more to safe her own inheritance. Like, if you safe 800K Dollar in convincing your mother she is not romanced by Brad Pitt, I would handle that as a full time job!
That said this is increasingly common and especially elder people can be easily scammed with AI.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Scams/comments/1df081i/my_mother_an...
> Reading through all of this, apparently lots of elderly people having "relationships" with celebrities. Adding my mother to the mix. She's been corresponding with "Elon Musk" for at least six months. She's not even that old, she's only 67...but extremely gullible.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Scams/comments/15sls1v/my_dad_think...
> My Dad thinks Elon Musk is texting him and has lost over $10K - Help!
I don’t know how we can deal with that in the future. Financial regulation to make it easier that people at risk have more banking safe guards and their children/spouses can supervise accounts better? Or hope it fixes itself when the 4Chan generation who grew up with Nigerian prince scams replaces boomers?
She didn't earn that money. The bigger scam was acted against the wealthy entrepreneur who saw a big chunk of his money going to his ex-wife.
Divorce laws are ridiculous, you are better off not getting married and using a surrogate mother.
To be fair there are different ways to get married in france and some contracts allow for separation of wealth, sort of
Consider that if someone secretly had our modern AI tech 10-15 years ago, they could have easily scammed a lot of people out of money in romance scams.
Now consider that the future isn’t equally distributed and some people are literally still living at the level of 10-15 years ago. Wow, there is a lot of opportunity for scammers out there, though the window will be closing every year as the world catches up, and no one will trust images, videos and voices anymore.
Photoshop existed 10-15 years ago. TFA has no photos but I’m pretty sure even my paint.net imaging skills would be enough to trick such irrational person.
the world catches up, and no one will trust images, videos and voices anymore
The person in spotlight didn’t trust her daughter who tried to “catch her up” for a year. This is not the case of a single person with no source of critical thinking.
If you look at the images from this case, they weren't AI. They could have been done in Microsoft Paint.
Not even scammers.
This is essentially the future of AI models that emulate male sex workers. The "romance scam" is basically what they'll do. Only they will dispense with the Brad Pitt likenesses, because they will have enough information to come up with AI faces and bodies meticulously calculated to maximally interest the, um, "client".
Oh, and they will be legal.
It's amazing and pathetic to me that the overriding sentiment here is mocking the woman for being duped. Just absolute zero empathy.
Some people feel good when someone else appears stupider. They'd like to think that they would be smarter in the same situation, and mocking the weak is deeply ingrained in our collective psyche. Considering all the stories of hackers caught for poor opsec hygiene, as well as the perpetrator of this case who was tricked into clicking a malware link himself, and the fact that this is a very long and extremely targeted ops, I'm not so sure such confidence is warranted.
And she's a woman who got a fortune from a divorce. That probably triggered some as well.
She got the money from a divorce. What comes easy goes easy. I feel bad for the ex-husband.
Maybe the scammer was the ex husband.
That’d be a great plot twist
> She got the money from a divorce. What comes easy goes easy. I feel bad for the ex-husband.
Do you know the full story? Maybe the couple worked together to make a larger amount and then split it upon divorce. Making judgements like this is a problem IMO.
Huh?
Money acquired via divorce is "easy"?
I'd assume it's somewhat easier this way than building a net-worth of €830k through working long hours for decades.
Unbelievable history. We are not talking about an old lady, 95 yo. She is 53, wealthy. While money does not make you intelligent, probably gives access to more or less good information, social relations. I literally think this history is not believable.
Also that she happens to be the 2 worse diseases in popular knowledge.
I don’t know… seems contrived.