A French woman who revealed on television how she lost her life savings to fraudsters posing as Brad Pitt faced a wave of online harassment and ridicule, prompting her to withdraw her interview on Tuesday.

A woman named Anne told TF1’s “Seven to Eight” that she believed she was in a romantic relationship with the Hollywood star, which is why she divorced her husband and transferred $850,000.

Scammers used fake social media and WhatsApp accounts as well as AI technology to create images to send Anne what appeared to be selfies and messages from Pitt.

In order to extract money, they pretended that the 61-year-old actor needed money to pay for kidney treatment, and his bank accounts were allegedly frozen because divorce case with ex-wife Angelina Jolie.

Anne, a 53-year-old interior decorator with mental health issues, spent a year and a half believing she was communicating with Pitt and only realized she had been duped when news broke of Pitt’s real-life relationship with girlfriend Ines de Ramon.

“The story aired this Sunday has resulted in a wave of witness harassment,” TF1 presenter Harry Roselmack wrote on his X account on Tuesday. “To protect victims, we have decided to pull it from our platforms.”

The channel said at the time of the broadcast that Anne was suffering from severe depression and was receiving hospital treatment.

The interview, in which she was openly filmed and even shared family photos with journalists, went viral on Monday.

This sparked a flood of derisive comments and jokes, but some online critics accused TF1 of failing to protect a vulnerable person who may not have been unaware of the consequences of going public.

Toulouse Football Club tweeted that “Brad told us he would be at the stadium on Wednesday” for the team’s next game, before retracting the message and apologizing.

Netflix France too published on social networks promoting “four Brad Pitt movies to watch for (really) free.”

Romantic scams have been a feature of the Internet since the advent of email, but experts say artificial intelligence has increased the risk of identity theft, deception and fraud online.

“These people deserve hell”

Anne told TF1 that she was first contacted by someone posing as Pitt’s mother shortly after she first started using Instagram while on a skiing trip with her family in France.

“She told me her son needed someone like me,” Anne explained.

The scammers messaged her again a few days later, this time posing as Pitt.

“At first I told myself it was fake, it was funny,” Anne explained to TF1. “But I wasn’t used to social media and I didn’t really understand what was happening to me.”

“I wonder why they chose me to do this much damage?” she continued. “I never harmed anyone. These people deserve hell.”

More than 64,000 Americans were ripped off for more than a billion dollars romantic scams 2023—double the $500 million just four years earlier, according to the Federal Trade Commission.

According to the FBI, in 2023, senior citizens were defrauded of about $3.4 billion in a series of financial crimes data. Agency recently warned that artificial intelligence has increased “conviction” or criminal fraud given that it “helps create content and can correct human errors that might otherwise serve as warning signs of fraud.”