Living alone on a sun-drenched French island—your wealthy husband gone, your daughter working in another city—you find yourself adrift. The days are long, the nights even longer. In 2023, you join social media, a rank amateur with a thrilling new world suddenly at your fingertips.
It starts innocently enough. You post photographs of yourself on vacation. Then you tap the Like button on a Brad Pitt fan page. Almost immediately, someone identifying themself as the mother of Pitt is corresponding with you online. Days turn into weeks, weeks into months. You feel you have found a friend, a friend who eventually tells you that her son needs “a woman like you.” You laugh it off. Surely it’s a joke. But then another message arises from the ether of the Internet, someone initially identifying himself as “William Bradley” but soon revealing that he is … Brad Pitt!
Now you appear to be communicating with Pitt himself. Doubts creep in. Could this really be happening? But over the course of almost a year, the messages keep coming—hundreds of them. Tender texts. Emotional e-mails. Poignant photos. Poems, love notes, even videos. He is persistent, relentless. And slowly, impossibly, you begin to believe.
“Brad” eventually confesses that he needs you not only for love but also for cash. He is stricken with kidney cancer, he says—for proof, he sends photos of himself languishing in his hospital bed—and explains that he desperately needs funds for a kidney operation since his fortune is tied up in his unending divorce. Urgent messages from his agent, family members, financial advisers, and others convince you that the fantasies flashing across your screen are real.
At first, it’s small. A few thousand for customs fees on the lavish gifts he says he sent, nothing you can’t spare. But then it grows. Tens of thousands. Then hundreds of thousands. Until there’s nothing left. Eight hundred and fifty thousand dollars, gone. Every cent to your name—in what the Daily Mail will call “the biggest celebrity impersonation scam in history.”
You have unknowingly put your trust in the hands of thieving snake charmers who have sucked up your life and your money over your computer and iPhone, joining the ranks of the millions of people scammed online each year. Along with the financial losses comes the humiliation: your first name, face, and story plastered across headlines around the world, followed by a massive online audience erupting in a vicious tide of ridicule.
You are no longer just Anne, a 53-year-old woman navigating a divorce. You are a cautionary tale. The man you believed was Brad Pitt is a fake, a lie, a thief, and now he—or whoever he is—has taken everything.
Who ya gonna call?
Scam Busters!
A Mission from the Ether
A young man emerges from the shadows into the swirling bright lights of the Ladurée tea salon on the Champs-Élysées, in Paris, where he works from an undisclosed location to prevent scammers from finding him and ending his scam-busting reign.
His name is Marwan Ouarab, and if you’ve been scammed out of your cash, love, and dignity online, Ouarab is ready to help. His weaponry consists of an iPhone, a laptop, and an arsenal of monitors glowing in the night, through which he infiltrates the worlds of cyber-criminals, exposing their schemes and bringing them to justice.
Findmyscammer.com, reads the logo on his shirt, beneath the figure of a cat in a detective’s trench coat peering through a magnifying glass. The company is made up of Ouarab, 29, and a cyber-sleuthing team that can handle practically every variety of scam being perpetrated on the crime-infested badlands of the Internet.
“All during the scam, Anne was suspecting something,” he says over a vanilla flan, a sweet treat for a very determined guy. “But every time, the crooks had fine words, the right words. They were really poetic. They knew what words were right for her. They really understood Anne’s psychological profile.”
It was a classic “sentimental scam,” says Ouarab—a carefully produced, all-encompassing “theatrical event” that uses love as the bait to hook the target and then envelops them completely in the con. (In this case, the divorced interior designer, Anne, whose last name has not been made public, and a convincing facsimile of Brad Pitt, achieved via A.I., deepfake technology, and, according to Ouarab, “ridiculous photoshop tools to create pictures of the fake Brad in his hospital bed.”)
In the autumn of 2024, a journalist for the popular French TV show Sept à Huit received an astonishing tip from a relative in the Ivory Coast: a woman had been defrauded online by scammers posing as Brad Pitt, according to the show’s editorial director, Philippe Pecoul. The journalist tracked down the woman, Anne, who was interviewed on-camera over two days in her home on the French Indian Ocean island of La Réunion. Pecoul knew that cyber-fraud was a booming, multi-billion-dollar business. “It’s a real industry, a real Mafia, a real social problem,” he would later say.
He also knew about a case in Spain, where, in 2024, five people, masquerading online as Brad Pitt, were arrested for scamming two women out of $362,000. But this was even bigger than that, a con so enormous that the victim, Anne, suffering from depression, checked into a hospital “the day after our two days of shooting, on October 21, 2024, exactly,” says Pecoul. “She left the hospital by Christmas.”
The segment finally aired on January 12 of this year, complete with Anne telling her story on-camera to the show’s TV audience of 3.5 million viewers: “I was in love with the man I was chatting to. He knew how to speak to a woman.”
And: “I ask myself why they chose me to do such harm like this. I’ve never harmed anyone. These people deserve hell.”
Hell was delivered when the Sept à Huit producers enlisted Ouarab to appear on Anne’s segment as a cyber-fraud expert. Ouarab says he began working on Anne’s case even before her segment aired on Sept à Huit and began whiplashing the world, leaving Anne upset over how she was portrayed in the TV segment and on the Internet, which was erupting with reports such as this from the Daily Mail:
She’s been branded ‘dumb’, ‘naïve’ and ‘stupid’ and harassed so mercilessly online that she’s deleted all of her social media. The TV program in which she was interviewed has also been taken off air. She’s been left, she says, with ‘severe depression’ since the scam and is now homeless, penniless and living with a friend as she tries to recover her money.... She has tried to take her life three times.
(Anne was not available to comment for this story. Currently alternating between her home and a hospital as part of a recovery program, according to her representative, she is planning to write a book about her experiences.)
“The television producers put me in touch with Anne, saying she would pay my fees, but she didn’t have the money,” says Ouarab. “I talked with Anne, and she sent me screenshots of her bank accounts, showing she had nothing. I decided to help her anyway. She gave me the phone numbers of the fraudsters and the e-mail addresses and the transaction details.”
Soon, Ouarab was sifting through the endless trove of e-mails, messages, and deepfake videos of Pitt professing his love for Anne from his hospital bed. “They were really active in their communication—100 or 200 messages a day,” he says. “They were saying they were Brad. They were saying they were his agent. They were saying they were the F.B.I. They were saying they were the mother of Brad Pitt. It was a real digital-theater scene.”
An all-encompassing digital-theater scene for an audience of one. Anne soon succumbed, lost in an online romance on a level that, Ouarab says, “you only see in fairy tales.” It involved realistic facsimiles of Pitt speaking the words of the scammers; fake newspapers reporting on his new girlfriend (a Frenchwoman named Anne); a fake newscast in which the anchor reports the scoop of Pitt’s “exclusive relationship with one special individual … Anne.”
Who could have orchestrated such a ruthless, diabolical, and calculated act of deception? Was it the brutes from the scam mills of Myanmar, a nightmarish underworld exposed by a 2023 New York Times investigation (“Seven Months Inside an Online Scam Labor Camp”), where crime syndicates lure desperate job seekers with false promises, only to abduct them, torture them into submission, and lock them in a small room with a desktop computer?
Did the puppet master hail from the ranks of Nigeria’s infamous “Yahoo boys”—silver-tonged predators who weave intricate webs of deception, seducing their marks by masquerading as potential online lovers, business associates, or long-lost benefactors, siphoning millions across borders? Or did the scheme originate in one of the world’s cyber-crime capitals—Russia and Ukraine—where hacker networks are adept at phishing, widely described as impersonating legitimate entities, and tricking their targets into revealing sensitive information that costs them a fortune?
Ouarab and his team were about to find out.
A Scam Master Scamming Scammers
“There is a French expression, ‘Hunger justifies the means,’” says Ouarab.
And for a teenager growing up in the Paris suburb of Ris-Orangis, Marwan Ouarab was very hungry. The Internet provided the answer, a gateway to his dreams of having money, and he began a career as a scammer when he was in his early 20s, frequently extracting more than $1,000 a day from dupes by impersonating “a lawyer, an insurance broker…. I did everything. I created a network of fake concert tickets that really worked”—until he sold a bloc of tickets to someone who turned out to be a cop. “I got arrested,” he says, and convicted. While his sentence was suspended, Ouarab was placed on probation and ordered to pay $11,000 in restitution to his victims. “Witnessing the disrespectful manner in which the police treated my family” was what convinced him to go straight. He was 25.
Ouarab founded Findmyscammer.com in May of 2023 and now receives between 50 and 150 requests for assistance each month from the growing millions of victims of scams, the majority of which go unreported.
His cases run the gamut. One was a Tinder romance that devolved into a financial arrangement in which a would-be Romeo invested in a crypto scam perpetrated by his online Juliet. (“For a fee of 2,500 euros, Ouarab identified the fraudster and tracked her down to Dubai,” CNN would report in a lengthy February 2025 profile.) Some companies hire Ouarab to attempt to scam them in order to find holes in their cyber-security systems. Divorces, financial frauds, and much more … With the cops and courts overwhelmed, it often takes a cat in a trench coat to find the scammers.
Then came the case that would go global: Anne, who awoke to the magnitude of her scam upon seeing a news report with the real Brad Pitt accompanied by his real girlfriend, Ines de Ramon. By then Anne had been contacted online by someone purporting to be an F.B.I. agent, who “said he would help her get her money back,” as the Daily Mail reported, “but he needed 4,200 pounds to unblock the funds. She nearly fell for it, but at the last minute realized she was being duped—and finally went to the police.”
“I was really touched by her story,” says Ouarab. It was a story that, he knew, many others would have fallen for, as he looked through the entrails of the cyber-crooks’ deception: the months of evidence on Anne’s devices. He says he “found” the culprits in 48 hours.
“I cannot explain all of my secret recipe,” Ouarab says, but adds: “We analyzed phone numbers and e-mail addresses. We just made some open-source investigations on the phone numbers, and we see they’re attached now to crooks acting like the actor of the John Wick movie, pretending to be Keanu Reeves. So we just sent a booby-trapped link like this … ”
He holds out his iPhone, which shows the e-mail that he and his team sent to Anne’s scammers:
“Dear Sir. You will find here all the papers related to what we discussed on the phone,” below which, in an inviting shade of blue, is a link labeled “Payments Document.”
Now Ouarab was the scam master, ready to scam the scammers. “Mark, you have to know one thing: these people, even if you only have 20 euros in your bank account, they’ll take your last 20 euros,” Ouarab says.
But why would even a half-ass scammer click an obviously suspect link? I ask.
Because he is able to “disguise” the link “as a payment link to effectively entice the scammers to click, leveraging their greed,” Ouarab replies.
Sure enough, he says, the scammers clicked the link, and a line of I.P. addresses instantly spooled down Ouarab’s screen, complete with everything he needed: online activity and, best of all, the actual G.P.S. coordinates of where the scammers were doing their dirty work.
The location was a far cry from Brad Pitt’s Los Angeles address, or his winery, in Provence. It was in a country that’s become the capital of love scams: Nigeria.
“It was a group of three scammers, between 23 and 27 years old,” says Ouarab. “They live together. We tracked a bitcoin [wallet] that had $29 million in it. We made a full report—29 pages—and we sent it to Anne and the cyber-criminality police. Anne was happy to see that she had the final word.”
Thus far, no arrests have been made, and no charges filed. One of Anne’s lawyers throughout the case, Laurène Hanna, has been allegedly working to get Anne’s funds back from her bank. Police in France and Africa are reportedly working to bring the cyber-criminals to justice, and producers at Sept à Huit continue to field inquiries. “Since the show was aired, high-level and multiple investigation sources provided us with a much more complicated scenario: money followed all over the world, international crime organization,” says Pecoul. “But I can’t tell you more.”
Meanwhile, Ouarab is on to his next case. “They pretend to be Tom Cruise, Mick Jagger, Timothée Chalamet,” he says. “We have a man who thought he was in a relationship with Shakira. We have a woman who thinks she’s a couple with Bono. Elon Musk is the best-seller, because Elon Musk can give you financial advice and make you fall in love with him. They just create some fake accounts on social media and approach people en masse. So of 100 messages they send, they will absolutely have one person who trusts that it’s Mick Jagger.”
And the real Brad Pitt? His representatives issued a warning in the wake of the scandal: “It’s awful that scammers take advantage of the strong bond between fans and celebrities. This is an important reminder not to respond to unsolicited online messages, especially from actors who are not present on social networks.”
In January, Anne told the Daily Mail, “I had doubts in my heart. I doubted so many times. I am a sensible woman. If you had been in my shoes, you would have fallen into the trap.”
You may very well be next. Sitting alone when your screen lights up with a tantalizing message from afar, inviting you into an enticing world of love, romance, and riches beyond your wildest imagination. And when your hopes and dreams go up in Internet smoke … Who ya gonna call?
Scam Busters!
Mark Seal is a special correspondent for Vanity Fair and the author of many nonfiction books, including The Man in the Rockefeller Suit and Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli