After Brad Pitt Online Scam, Ex-Scammer Turns the Tables

A jaw-dropping Brad Pitt romance scam that drained a French woman of about $850,000 didn't unravel because of police—it was cracked by a former-scammer-turned-digital-bloodhound on the Champs-Élysées. In Air Mail, Mark Seal details how 29-year-old Marwan Ouarab and his tiny firm, Findmyscammer.com, traced an elaborate "sentimental scam" that used AI-generated Pitt videos, bogus news reports, and a whole cast of fake "agents," "relatives," and even "FBI" officials to convince "Anne," a divorced interior designer in her 50s, that the movie star loved her and needed money for a cancer operation.

After French TV show Sept à Huit aired Anne's story, she was publicly mocked as "stupid" and left depressed and suicidal, forced to move in with a friend as she fights to get her money back. The show's producers brought in Ouarab. Using phone numbers, email addresses, and a booby-trapped "payment" link he sent to the fraudsters, he uncovered their IP data and GPS coordinates—not in Hollywood but in Nigeria, where a three-man crew allegedly sat on a bitcoin wallet worth about $29 million. Ouarab has turned over his results to African and French authorities, though there have been no arrests yet. And Anne still has not gotten her money back. The case, Seal writes, shows just how industrialized celebrity romance fraud has become. Read the full story.