French interior designer Anne Deneuchatel reveals how scammers posing as Brad Pitt defrauded her of £700,000.
French interior designer Anne Deneuchatel has revealed how she was defrauded of more than £700,000 by scammers posing online as Hollywood actor Brad Pitt.
In her new book, Je ne serai plus une proie (“I Will No Longer Be a Prey”), Deneuchatel described how the fraudsters seduced her into a 14-month digital romance, complete with love notes, poems, and even a marriage proposal.
Police investigations later traced the scheme to three men living in a villa in Nigeria, exposing another chapter in the country’s long-running saga with “Yahoo Yahoo” cyber scams.
“I detached myself from my usual personality to live out a total fantasy,” she wrote, admitting the scam freed her from an unhappy marriage.
The impostors even used AI-generated images of Pitt in a hospital bed, claiming he had kidney cancer. When demands escalated to private jet fees, Deneuchatel reported the case, ending what she now calls both a nightmare and a warning.