AI Brad Pitt dupes French woman out of €830k | Hacker News Reader

AI Brad Pitt dupes French woman out of €830k

bbc.co.uk

70 pointsmonkeydust127 comments

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.

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

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.

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.

I don't even know what argument you're trying to make here.

We don't need to spread the story because it'd do it by human telephone? We do, and it needs mockery? The stories are fake and the mob is mocking a fake story?

How about: Don't be a bully to people on the Internet?

Human telephone game ... you tell your story to one person that person tells it to another and to another and so on. Then someone writes about it and her story is out. She didn't have to stand up in public per say and tell her story it gets out anyway. Her story and the mockery from it teaches other fools not to be such.

I, myself am not one to ever bully a person or an entity online. It's just not good energy to put out there.

As for my belief that not all of what we see on the Internet is real (in the media too).. i won't go down that rabbit hole. Your point is do not bully people online whether they are really real people or not.

I would think that public mocking of scam victims would just encourage them to keep quiet about the crime.

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?

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.

> 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

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.

How why would anybody give money to Brad Pitt? Dude's rich enough already.

Which makes her more of a ...?

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.

As would be Nigerian princes. Seems just a variation of the same old scam.

And on a very small scale, popular Twitch streamers.

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.

That’s the whole point. Of course he’s rich, there’s just this thing with the bank right now, but this other bill is due immediately, so he just needs a loan, but don’t worry, he’ll pay you back, I mean he’s Brad Pitt, everyone knows he’s loaded, it’s not like some bum asking you for change…

> ... , 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?

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.

I don't currently think this is a convincing argument that the person should be mocked.

Where did the assumption about the loyal husband come from? (It seems to be presuming the cause and fault of the divorce, and rest is arguably built atop that.)

By "half his money", was "half the family's money" meant? (This could just be a way of phrasing, but it can also sound like prejudice towards the matter.)

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.

Really? Let's hypothesize that some rando on the internet contacted you and said he was Jensen Huang, and he offered to sell his NVDA stock to you at $50/sh (currently trading at $135). Looking for a quick flip, you wire your family's entire savings to a random account number he sends you - or, even better, to some BTC address.

You later find out, SHOCKINGLY, that this rando is not actually Jensen Huang. You would, rightly, be a fair target of mocking for your S-tier gullibility.

This isn't "I fell for a well-designed phishing scam"-tier, or "SBF promised me 9% yields"-tier. This is a whole other level that is rightfully deserving of mockery.

The fact she wrecked her marriage in the process is just the cherry on top.

Agreed. Most of these scams entail an immoral dimension on the part of the victim. After all, it's not great that for helping out bail out an embattled Nigerian prince, that the victim would take an exorbitant fee (which was probably stolen from Nigerian tax payers). Even with that, those victims, just like the woman in this story, deserve a level of empathy. In this case, €830k is a lifetime of savings for most people and these guys will move on and do the same to someone else.

As posted elsewhere in this thread, Find My Scanner did some research[0] and the "Victim was in the midst of a divorce before being contacted by scammer." Also relevant, "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."

[0]: https://old.reddit.com/r/UpliftingNews/comments/1i1uvjq/scam...

Also all the pictures are bad photoshopped images, that I've seen, no AI images.

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.

Edit: Here https://x.com/PopBase/status/1879197931129163782

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.

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.

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?

Would you have shared / commented on the story and participated in the buzz of a story where the two sexes were reversed ?

Obviously. Why would I give a damn what's between the legs of someone that was a victim of fraud? It's just as sad when guys are catfished for scams and I feel the same empathy for them.

It’s not obvious to me this story would have reached you and me with the same strength, allowing us to talk together here

Fair enough, but I personally consider it a problem regardless of the gender of the victim.

This isn't the timeline. She decided to get divorced midway through this scam, and used the proceeds to help Brad.

Which part is the best part then?

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.

It's the sad part, not the "best"

calling that AI is very generous.

I'll mention something that we all probably know: The crumminess is the point.

Anyone with any intelligence would pass over this as a scam. The scammers don't want someone with any intelligence. Hence, the more obviously that it's a scam, the better. Same thing with those Nigerian Prince email scams being garbage English. It's a crude, but effective, filter.

Scam could have been done with Photoshop.

Meh. The only thing to make AI interesting was IF some box in a university basement decided to scam a rando with BrandPit while sorting email traffic.

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.

They lack empathy because doing something about this would likely harm their salary or create regulation.

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.

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

I've thought about this and probably should, especially since my parents got divorced recently. But I haven't really thought of a way to bring it up tactfully without being patronizing. Any ideas?

My parents responded well starting from a discussion of "Have you seen how good AI imitations are these days? Voice, images, even video..."

I don't think safety rules themselves are patronizing, especially considering how good the tech is: "Never trust a conversation you didn't initiate no matter who the other party claims to be or how good, bad, or urgent it sounds." Generally this doesn't count known communications with friends and family through known channels. It would take a lot more security failures to mistrust known good channels (but it can still happen! eg spoofed caller ID).

Another rule of thumb is to ask yourself, "How would I go about addressing this directly if I hadn't been contacted about it." E.g. the website, app, support line from the main site, etc. Always best to go to known channels, especially for anything financial. Even better not to even answer/respond to unknown contacts if you can avoid it. (Not always possible with work / kids school / etc.)

I agree, I wouldn't use this article as an example, because it does include a lot of poor judgement along the way. But there are plenty of examples of how good AI imitation has become lately.

I am beginning to doubt my five Instagram girlfriends

"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.

That is my question, essentially. Are cases like this (a year of repeating illusion impenetrable by relatives) a naive mistake or an undiagnosed cognitive disorder? Shouldn't people like her be at least partially taken care of?

My buddy had a similar case with his sister. She would take a loan, be late on payments and then give loan sharks anything they asked for, without any checks and balances. Could take family money, etc, only to get rid of them temporarily. She was clearly unwell and so impassable that the whole family had to part with her (legally splitting apartments and even taking a kid).

I'm not suggesting anything here, just thinking about it. Probably nothing generic enough could help here at all.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

Should society remove citizen’s rights to those helpless people then ? Who should watch over them and be responsible for their acts ?

We deny people's natural right to be defrauded by outlawing fraud, yes.

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.

> 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.

Abuse by who? Abuse is not mentioned in the article.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

We should start a Fundme campaign to help poor Brad!

> 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 pig butchering scam?

I thought my over-the-top response made it clear it was satire and a comment on the absurdity of someone thinking they're "actually friends with Brad Pitt and he needs my money"

She got the money from a divorce. What comes easy goes easy. I feel bad for the ex-husband.

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.

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.

It's in the story. She married a wealthy real estate developer. Dumped her husband, took his money, and sent it to "Brad Pitt".

Now claiming to have done this to save his life but surely she wouldn't sent this money to random bloke "Tim Johnson".

Making endless excuses to deny women agency and accountability is a far larger problem IMO

I was so proud of my 63 year old mother the day she told me about a slightly similar scam (involving "borrowed" Antonio Banderas photos) that she not only did not fall for, but actually somehow managed to trace the scammer down (through some Google reverse image searching and other Internet "sleuthery" that I would not have imagined her doing on her own). Not only that but she then proceeded to send her conclusions (that it was some French scammer scum and his wife perpetrating all this, and she had proof of who it was) to her little circle of online "friends" that were actually in the act of falling for the scam and sending gifts, money, and whatnot to this dirtbag French scammer couple. Why, I'll never know... Who sends money and gifts to online strangers pretending to be celebrities? Hell, who sends gifts to random celebrities for that matter? Worst part of this story is that most of the "old biddies" actually ridiculed my mother and called her "paranoid" and proceeded to happily get scammed, thinking they were actually conversing online with Antonio himself... Some people are just bound and determined to stay stupid, I guess. Sadly, "A.I." audio/image/video generation has not made this situation any better these days.

This is heartbreaking

It is always shocking to me that someone with those kinds of resources can get duped like that -- with little checks and balances.

They desperately need some comfort or excitement and the scammer provided it to her. Sad.

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.

> 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.

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

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.

"This" -- do you mean theft and abuse are the reasons why? Or debilitating illness (HIV/Cancer).

She was tricked. The money wasn't physically taken. She lost the money because, unlike she claims, she is indeed a moron.

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."

Let's just ignore thousands of European noble families and wealthy industrial tycoon dynasties.

Any examples? I’m not really aware.

Rothschild

Just a google search away, but the most obvious, british, spanish, dutch royal families, Habsburgs, Thurn und Taxis, hundreds more, also from business life. This "wealth switches hands often" thing is a wise-sounding dumbness, wealth gets more and more concentrated in the world, and is usually only redistributed in event of war and conflicts.

In English we have "shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations".

Love is blind.

In Spanish when somebody says love is blind, another will quickly add “and deaf and stupid/idiot“

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

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?

A lot of the comments here are really mean to that woman, for talking to Brad Pitt. Ha ha ha.

At least he exists in real life, not like some entity they themselves may be talking to on Friday, Saturday or Sunday (or another day where communication with deities is the clearest).

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.

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.

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