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What does Brad Pitt have to do with a €800.000 scam?

How a romance scam costed a French woman a fortune and became viral on TikTok

What does Brad Pitt have to do with a €800.000 scam? How a romance scam costed a French woman a fortune and became viral on TikTok

Last Sunday, while the French were relaxing in front of their televisions, honoring the unspoken rule of every good Sunday to do nothing and enjoy any TV program that comes their way, the show Sept à Huit offered the audience a moment of historical entertainment, if we can call it that, which no one expected. The show aired on TF1 and presented the story of Anne, a 53-year-old French woman who fell victim to a scammer posing as Brad Pitt. It all began in 2023, when Anne decided to install Instagram to share photos of her family vacations. That’s when she was contacted by Jane Etta Pitt, the alleged mother of Brad Pitt, who told her she would be the perfect woman for her son. A few days later, she received the message that officially set this malicious trap in motion: Brad Pitt himself wrote: “Hello Anne, my mother has told me a lot about you. I’d like to know more.” Spoiler alert: it was, of course, not the real Brad Pitt but rather an impostor whose lies would lead Anne headfirst into a fake love story but a real scam story. We’ll tell you her story and how it literally broke the French internet in recent days.

Once the ice was broken and the first message sent, the trap was set for this scammer (or scammers), who ended up stealing no less than €830,000 from Anne. The initial payments were sent once trust was established. “At first, I thought it was fake, but I didn’t really understand what was happening. Then, we started contacting each other daily, and we became friends. I had someone who showed interest in me and my work. I loved the man I was talking to. He knew how to talk to women,” explains the victim. After proving his “love” and “devotion,” the fake Brad told her he had kidney cancer and needed urgent hospitalization. However, his accounts were blocked, so he desperately needed his beloved to make the necessary transfers to cover various medical expenses. To prove his loyalty, the scammer shamelessly sent fake documents: passports, IDs of his “entourage,” and exclusive photos not found on the internet. Then came the pièce de résistance—or rather, the glaringly obvious kilo of cherries that’s hard to believe Anne didn’t notice: photoshopped pictures of Brad Pitt bedridden, in a hospital gown, and even in an operating room.

“I immediately wrote to the supposed Brad Pitt, saying I disagreed, and that’s when he told me his accounts were blocked because of the lawsuit he had against Angelina Jolie, that he had millions of dollars but couldn’t access them,” Anne recounts on Sept à Huit. “Otherwise, he would have paid the taxes himself. So, like an idiot, I paid the €5,000. Every time I had doubts, he managed to dispel them.” Amid her divorce proceedings, Anne received a compensation settlement of €775,000. An astronomical sum that was not spent on vacations or a new house but went straight into the scammer’s pockets. While this part of the story is heartbreaking and evokes immense sympathy for the victim, the photoshopped images have been a source of great amusement on TikTok and Twitter in recent days. Because, in 2025, anyone with access to modern tools like AI and various programs can create credible montages and fake videos. Yet, Anne’s scammer didn’t even try hard. The picture showing Brad Pitt in an operating room with two doctors leaning over him was blatantly taken from a scene in the series Grey’s Anatomy.

Beyond the fact that scamming people this way is both serious and punishable by law, what stands out most from this story (besides the hilarity of the montages, let’s be honest) is that the scammer(s) exploited a person who was financially well-off (otherwise, the scam wouldn’t have made sense) but vulnerable in many ways. Indeed, between a difficult marriage and a particular sensitivity to illness, Anne was the perfect victim. A cancer survivor herself, as she explained in the report, this kind-hearted (if slightly naïve) woman probably saw not only a way out of a chaotic first marriage by imagining a fairy tale relationship with the actor, who, according to her, knew how to comfort and talk to women, but also a way to help someone in distress, as she wished she had been helped when she was the one lying in a hospital bed. Let this testimony serve as a reminder to never place such trust in a stranger, even if they were a part of your cinematic upbringing and you saw their face in Voici throughout your teenage years. But above all, check what your moms are doing online. If they can’t tell that a Facebook video of a cat performing a concert in Korea was AI-generated, they might just as easily fall for a photoshopped image of George Clooney in jail asking for bail money, no matter how ridiculous it seems.