Download it now<\/a>!<\/p>\n\u201cI said to myself, \u2018Well, maybe it\u2019s the way they do things\u2026 I\u2019ve never been in contact with an actor\u201d. So she made an initial payment of $30,000, then a further $20,000, convinced that their meeting would finally take place.<\/p>\n
A downward spiral<\/p>\n
In late summer 2024, the real Brad Pitt attended the Venice Film Festival to promote his new film with George Clooney. Patricia believed the moment had come. \u201cI pack a little luggage, hoping he\u2019ll tell me to come.\u201d<\/p>\n
He did not. Instead, the scammer sent flowers and a note: \u201cI love you so much baby. I can\u2019t wait to spend the rest of my life with you. Pitt\u201d (sic).<\/p>\n
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A few messages exchanged between the fake Brad Pitt and his victim. <\/p>\n
RTS <\/p>\n
Patricia was caught in what psychologists call commitment bias: after investing so much, turning back becomes emotionally and mentally difficult. The scammer \u2014 or \u201cscrambler\u201d, the term used for romance scammers operating online \u2014 demanded an additional $10,000 for supposed medical fees, then another $10,000.<\/p>\n
A former medical assistant, Patricia was far from wealthy, yet the pressure was overwhelming. \u201cI was under so much stress that I let myself be tricked into going to the bank and paying,\u201d she says \u2013 driven by the false certainty that Brad Pitt loved her.<\/p>\n
The \u201caffair\u201d took an even more tragic turn. The fraud escalated. The scammer urged her to come to the United States. Patricia flew to Los Angeles, where she waited three weeks alone in a hotel, drinking cocktails and hoping to meet her supposed partner. Before returning to Switzerland, she had forked out another $20,000.<\/p>\n
The complaint<\/p>\n
Back home, Patricia read an article about Anne, a French woman defrauded of more than \u20ac800,000 (CHF746,548) by a Brad Pitt impostor. The similarities unsettled her, though she still did not fully recognise the deception. The realisation came days later.<\/p>\n
At the end of her rope, she went to the police. \u201cWhen I arrived and said \u2018I think I\u2019ve been conned\u2019, I couldn\u2019t even pronounce Brad Pitt\u2019s name. The officer asked whether the amount was significant. I said yes \u2013 almost CHF100,000.\u201d<\/p>\n
Patricia filed a complaint, ending nearly a year of believing in a love story that never existed. Now she is trying to rebuild her life. The emotional fallout, she says, runs deeper than the financial loss. \u201cThere\u2019s an indescribable shame. I know I spent almost a year in a relationship that wasn\u2019t real. You think: how could I have allowed myself to be abused in this manner?\u201d<\/p>\n
A case that is not isolated <\/p>\n
This type of scam has been on the increase in Switzerland for some time now. In the canton of Vaud alone, several dozen complaints have been recorded since the start of the year, totalling more than CHF2.4 million ($2.98 million) in financial losses, according to the Vaud police.<\/p>\n
According to Pascal Fontaine, head of the crime prevention division, these figures are probably underestimates: \u201cObviously, we have a lot of victims who don\u2019t dare come forward to lodge a complaint because they feel guilty,\u201d he explained on television.<\/p>\n
And the police officer warns victims that they generally have to accept they will not get their money back: \u201cThis money very quickly changes continents, it leaves the European banking circuit. At that point, we have no chance of getting our hands on it\u201d.<\/p>\n
As for the people behind the scams, they are also hard to track down. Very often, the crooks come from West African countries. Patricia has hired a private detective to try and track down her \u201cscammers\u201d. According to the detective, they are somewhere in Nigeria.<\/p>\n
Translated from French using DeepL\/Amva<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"my fake Brad Pitt. RTS Listen to the article Listening the article Toggle language selector English (US) English…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":169353,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[127,100481,85351,100482,146,632,85,46,20893,37758,85352],"class_list":["post-169352","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-article","tag-beat-best-of-srg-content","tag-content-from-srf","tag-dialogue","tag-entertainment","tag-human-interest","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-law-and-order","tag-production-type-adaptation","tag-rts-and-rsi"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169352","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=169352"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169352\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/169353"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=169352"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=169352"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=169352"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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