When French interior designer, Anne Deneuchatel, sat down to write a book, she was not chronicling a glamorous life in Paris or a flourishing design career. Instead, her book, Je ne serai plus une proie (“I Will No Longer Be a Prey”), lays bare how she was seduced, manipulated, and ultimately defrauded of more than £700,000 by scammers posing online as Hollywood star Brad Pitt.

She reveals in the book how scammers posing as Hollywood actor Brad Pitt swept her into a digital romance that was equal parts intoxicating and destructive and over the course of 14 months, from April 2023 to June 2024.

Her story has a Nigerian twist. Police investigations traced the perpetrators to three men living in a villa in Nigeria , part of the country’s long-running saga with online scams, popularly known as Yahoo Yahoo. For years, the phrase has been shorthand for a generation of mostly young men who deploy technology, social engineering, and now artificial intelligence to part people from their money. It’s a phenomenon so pervasive that it has been referenced in academic studies, Nigerian literature, and even global books on cybercrime.

Deneuchatel admits she was particularly vulnerable. Stuck in an unhappy marriage with a “selfish and manipulative millionaire,” she said she became “addicted” to the fake Brad’s messages, love notes, poems, and even a marriage proposal. “I detached myself from my usual personality to live out a total fantasy,” she wrote. The irony? The scam freed her from her real-life marriage. “My divorce is the only positive thing that came out of this,” she says.

The fake Pitt even sent AI-generated images from a hospital bed, claiming he was battling kidney cancer. When the romance escalated to requests for private jet fees, she finally broke down and reported to the police. The illusion ended, but not before the scammers squeezed every ounce of trust, loneliness, and cash from her.

Her book is more than a memoir of heartbreak; it’s also a warning. The rise of AI has made the “Yahoo Boy” playbook even more sophisticated, extending Nigeria’s notoriety in online scams. As Deneuchatel’s case shows, even wealthy, educated victims are not immune.

In her final exchange with the fake Pitt, the scammers sent one last message: “Love, my Telegram account has been hacked by imposters. I will now do everything in my power to ensure our safety.” For Deneuchatel, the only safety left was to walk away.

(BusinessDay)