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Crazy, stupid love, especially online
The Statesman
|January 28, 2025
Love makes you stupid. When you fall in love (or think you have), three chemicals team up to make you lose your mind, overriding rational thought and logic and making you do things you would not ordinarily do.
Now, if scientists, poets and people who regularly post emo messages on Facebook know this, you can be sure that scammers do as well. And they use this to their advantage.
Meet Anne, a well-to-do 51-year-old French woman who was going through a difficult divorce with her millionaire husband. Anne was an avid Instagrammer and so, when she went on a pricey ski vacation she naturally posted the pictures online. Soon after, she was messaged by a woman claiming to be Brad Pitt's mother. That's right: the mother of world-famous Hollywood star, Angelina Jolie's ex-husband Brad Pitt.
A day later she gets a message from someone claiming to be Brad himself, who starts by telling Anne that he heard about her from his mother (like a good desi boy) and wanted to chat with her.
At this point, Anne was wary and quite rightly wondering why the idol of millions was messaging a random middle-aged lady on Instagram. But the faux Brad was so charming and empathetic that Anne, who needed a shoulder to cry on given her ongoing divorce, took the bait.
This story is from the January 28, 2025 edition of The Statesman.
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