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AI Brad Pitt dupes French woman out of €830k

bbc.co.uk

111–120 of 136 posts

Re: AI Brad Pitt dupes French woman out of €830k

#111
post #92
post #77

Why would anyone give a celeb money? Especially a high profile one like Brad Pitt. Like I get if you believed that Josh Hartnett or Pauly Shore is asking you for money. They haven't worked much in the last decade. But Brad Pitt? That's almost as bad as Ryan Reynolds or Kevin Hart asking you for money cause they're in so many movies.

As someone who is actually friends with Brad Pitt on Facebook and have given him money, it’s because he wants to know that he’s still a normal person. He wants to connect with real people. He’s tired of the Hollywood world. And he also says he lost lots of his money in the fires. And Jennifer Anniston took all his money. But he’s also too ashamed to let others know. He only trusts that information to a real person no…

> As someone who is actually friends with Brad Pitt on Facebook and have given him money

Are you telling us you fell for the same pig butchering scam?

Re: AI Brad Pitt dupes French woman out of €830k

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a nonsense argument. Mockery obviously makes people LESS likely to talk about their victimization. What you're actually trying to say is, "mockery amplifies the signal to get in front of more people's eyes" and my counter to that is: it doesn't need to. The article itself does a perfectly fine job communicating what's going on without making mockery. You're just choosing to layer mockery on top of it for, as f…

It's the human condition to teach each other via positive and negative reinforcement. If she didn't come forward publicly her story would've via the human telephone game. As well fabricated stories on this topic will and are created. So the mob is mocking fiction but in the end in a valuable societal manner to teach the fools.

I don't even know what argument you're trying to make here.

We don't need to spread the story because it'd do it by human telephone? We do, and it needs mockery? The stories are fake and the mob is mocking a fake story?

How about: Don't be a bully to people on the Internet?

Re: AI Brad Pitt dupes French woman out of €830k

#113
post #51

The lack of empathy of the responses here saddens me. I sincerely hope none of your parents or grandparents are scammed. And I hope you are all educating your loved ones on the threat of scams in this new era when AI fakes are so easy and realistic.

I've thought about this and probably should, especially since my parents got divorced recently. But I haven't really thought of a way to bring it up tactfully without being patronizing. Any ideas?

Re: AI Brad Pitt dupes French woman out of €830k

#114
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... , but no one would question mockery of a married man who started chatting with a fake Angelina Jolie ... I would hope that noone would mock this person. Anyone doing this clearly has some issues and should not be mocked but encouraged to seek help. When did so many people become assholes?

I think the issue I have with it is she divorced her (assumedly) loyal husband, then took (assumedly) half his money in court only to give to another man she was planning on cheating with. Then the schadenfreude cherry on top was it was all a scam and she was too gullible or stupid to know. She deserves to be mocked. If nothing else for what she did to her family.

I don't currently think this is a convincing argument that the person should be mocked.

Where did the assumption about the loyal husband come from? (It seems to be presuming the cause and fault of the divorce, and rest is arguably built atop that.)

By "half his money", was "half the family's money" meant? (This could just be a way of phrasing, but it can also sound like prejudice towards the matter.)

Re: AI Brad Pitt dupes French woman out of €830k

#115
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's just ignore thousands of European noble families and wealthy industrial tycoon dynasties.

Any examples? I’m not really aware.

Just a google search away, but the most obvious, british, spanish, dutch royal families, Habsburgs, Thurn und Taxis, hundreds more, also from business life. This "wealth switches hands often" thing is a wise-sounding dumbness, wealth gets more and more concentrated in the world, and is usually only redistributed in event of war and conflicts.

Re: AI Brad Pitt dupes French woman out of €830k

#116
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your timeline there is a bit off. When she met this Brad Pitt, she was still married. She started sending money to him; got divorced; got a settlement of €775,000; and proceeded to give all of that as well to Brad Pitt. Still worthy of sympathy, but no one would question mockery of a married man who started chatting with a fake Angelina Jolie on social media, started sending her money, got divorced, and then gave the…

> ... , but no one would question mockery of a married man who started chatting with a fake Angelina Jolie ... I would hope that noone would mock this person. Anyone doing this clearly has some issues and should not be mocked but encouraged to seek help. When did so many people become assholes?

Really? Let's hypothesize that some rando on the internet contacted you and said he was Jensen Huang, and he offered to sell his NVDA stock to you at $50/sh (currently trading at $135). Looking for a quick flip, you wire your family's entire savings to a random account number he sends you - or, even better, to some BTC address.

You later find out, SHOCKINGLY, that this rando is not actually Jensen Huang. You would, rightly, be a fair target of mocking for your S-tier gullibility.

This isn't "I fell for a well-designed phishing scam"-tier, or "SBF promised me 9% yields"-tier. This is a whole other level that is rightfully deserving of mockery.

The fact she wrecked her marriage in the process is just the cherry on top.

Re: AI Brad Pitt dupes French woman out of €830k

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the human condition to teach each other via positive and negative reinforcement. If she didn't come forward publicly her story would've via the human telephone game. As well fabricated stories on this topic will and are created. So the mob is mocking fiction but in the end in a valuable societal manner to teach the fools.

I don't even know what argument you're trying to make here. We don't need to spread the story because it'd do it by human telephone? We do, and it needs mockery? The stories are fake and the mob is mocking a fake story? How about: Don't be a bully to people on the Internet?

Human telephone game ... you tell your story to one person that person tells it to another and to another and so on. Then someone writes about it and her story is out. She didn't have to stand up in public per say and tell her story it gets out anyway. Her story and the mockery from it teaches other fools not to be such.

I, myself am not one to ever bully a person or an entity online. It's just not good energy to put out there.

As for my belief that not all of what we see on the Internet is real (in the media too).. i won't go down that rabbit hole. Your point is do not bully people online whether they are really real people or not.

Re: AI Brad Pitt dupes French woman out of €830k

#118
post #50
post #6

Summary: First, criminals preying upon someone apparently vulnerable (after cancer, divorce, and who knows what else). Then, as if that wasn't more than enough for one person, a bunch of Internet people, and even some brand marketers, publicly mocking and harassing the victim.

Your timeline there is a bit off. When she met this Brad Pitt, she was still married. She started sending money to him; got divorced; got a settlement of €775,000; and proceeded to give all of that as well to Brad Pitt. Still worthy of sympathy, but no one would question mockery of a married man who started chatting with a fake Angelina Jolie on social media, started sending her money, got divorced, and then gave the…

As posted elsewhere in this thread, Find My Scanner did some research[0] and the "Victim was in the midst of a divorce before being contacted by scammer." Also relevant, "Victim was groomed for months and months by scammer passing themselves as Pitt's mother, agent, etc, in addition to Pitt himself, using American phone numbers, fake articles, etc."

[0]: https://old.reddit.com/r/UpliftingNews/comments/1i1uvjq/scam...

Re: AI Brad Pitt dupes French woman out of €830k

#119
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should society remove citizen’s rights to those helpless people then ? Who should watch over them and be responsible for their acts ?

This isn't a "rights" issue. It's taking a step back and seeing that what happened to her could, to a degree, happen to any of us and she's not deserving of mockery.

[flagged]

Re: AI Brad Pitt dupes French woman out of €830k

#120
post #51

The lack of empathy of the responses here saddens me. I sincerely hope none of your parents or grandparents are scammed. And I hope you are all educating your loved ones on the threat of scams in this new era when AI fakes are so easy and realistic.

I've thought about this and probably should, especially since my parents got divorced recently. But I haven't really thought of a way to bring it up tactfully without being patronizing. Any ideas?

My parents responded well starting from a discussion of "Have you seen how good AI imitations are these days? Voice, images, even video..."

I don't think safety rules themselves are patronizing, especially considering how good the tech is: "Never trust a conversation you didn't initiate no matter who the other party claims to be or how good, bad, or urgent it sounds." Generally this doesn't count known communications with friends and family through known channels. It would take a lot more security failures to mistrust known good channels (but it can still happen! eg spoofed caller ID).

Another rule of thumb is to ask yourself, "How would I go about addressing this directly if I hadn't been contacted about it." E.g. the website, app, support line from the main site, etc. Always best to go to known channels, especially for anything financial. Even better not to even answer/respond to unknown contacts if you can avoid it. (Not always possible with work / kids school / etc.)

I agree, I wouldn't use this article as an example, because it does include a lot of poor judgement along the way. But there are plenty of examples of how good AI imitation has become lately.

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