French woman who lost Rs 7 crore to conman posing as Brad Pitt faces severe trolling online

The 53-year-old said she thought Brad Pitt was in love with her.

A French woman has revealed that she was fooled into paying Rs 7.4 crore to a scammer pretending to be Brad Pitt. The woman believed she was in a long-term romantic relationship with the actor for more than a year. But as the news spread, the interior designer, identified only as Anne, faced such trolling online that a television programme about her had to be withdrawn.

The 53-year-old opened up about the incident on Seven to Eight programme on France's TF1 television channel on Sunday. Anne said she thought Pitt was in love with her. So when the scammer posed as Pitt told her he needed financial help for cancer treatment because his accounts had been frozen during divorce proceedings with Angelina Jolie, Anne willingly transferred the money. She found out later that she was conned.

Elaborating on how she was trapped, Anne said that the scam dated back to February 2023, when she was married to a wealthy entrepreneur and joined Instagram to share pictures of a skiing holiday in the French Alps. She added that the person used fake social media and WhatsApp accounts and AI-generated images to send her what appeared to be selfies and other messages from Pitt. “I was in love with the man I was chatting to,” she said on the show. “He knew how to speak to a woman.”

It was only when she saw the Hollywood star's pictures with his partner, Inés de Ramon, in the media a few months ago, she realised she had fallen for an elaborate scam.

“I ask myself why they chose me to do such harm like this,” Anne said. “I’ve never harmed anyone. These people deserve hell.”

Meanwhile, the TV programme featuring Anne went viral and resulted in a wave of online gags causing the channel to withdraw the programme from its websites on Tuesday, The Guardian reported.

The channel stated that Anne had experienced mental health difficulties following the trolling and had also had severe depression. The show's presenter Harry Roselmack wrote on social media: “For the protection of victims, we have decided to withdraw [the segment] from our platforms.”