Yahoo Boys Allegedly Used Deepfake Technology to Impersonate Brad Pitt and Defraud French Woman of $850,000 in Romance Scam
January 12, 2025
Three Nigerian "Yahoo Boys" scammers allegedly used AI-generated image manipulation tools, along with fake social media and WhatsApp accounts, to reportedly impersonate actor Brad Pitt and convince a French interior decorator, Anne, that she was in a romantic relationship with him. Over 18 months, they allegedly fabricated selfies and messages, reportedly leading Anne to divorce her husband and transfer $850,000 under the false pretense that Pitt needed money for kidney treatment while his accounts were frozen.
- Alleged deployer
- yahoo-boys, scammers-impersonating-brad-pitt, brouteurs
- Alleged developer
- unknown-deepfake-technology-developers
- Alleged harmed parties
- general-public-susceptible-to-ai-enhanced-scams, brad-pitt, anne-(french-interior-decorator)
Source
Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/901
Data source
Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).
When citing the database as a whole, please use:
McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.
Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide
We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.