They seduced women to better rob them. Five people have been arrested in Spain for having extorted 325,000 euros from two "vulnerable" and "depressed" women by pretending online and on WhatsApp to be American actor Brad Pitt, police announced on Monday.
The suspects contacted their alleged victims on a website aimed at fans of the actor and, over time, managed to make them believe "that they had a romantic relationship with him," the Guardia Civil said in a statement.
The cybercriminals studied the victims' social networks and created a "psychological profile, discovering that both women were vulnerable people, with emotional deficiencies and in a depressive state."
From there, and through WhatsApp, they began a constant dialogue with them until they made them believe that they were in a romantic relationship.
The network required the criminal group to have several bank accounts, all of them opened with false documentation from people from Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal and Sierra Leone.
- The case of the victim from Granada is particularly painful according to the information provided by the Civil Guard. During the course of the investigation, the agents discovered that, apart from and without any connection to the fake Brad Pitt scam, the victim's son had made three fraudulent charges with his mother's bank card and had stolen 17,000 euros from her, for which he has also been arrested.
- The Civil Guard has unraveled the framework necessary for the fake Brad Pitt scams to be successful. Five arrests and 10 investigated is the result of an operation that began in August 2023, shortly after the first case became known.
