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 rest of his assets to her.
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.)
Claiming that some stranger "has issues" and encouraging them to "get help" is just denigrating them instead of mocking their behavior.
We don't know anything about this person besides what facts have come up in the story, and none of us are directly engaging with them anyway.
It's much less presumptive and much more socially constructive to directly critique their behavior for being plainly misguided, so that others can learn from it, than it is to make any kind of judgment about the person themselves.
Agreed. Most of these scams entail an immoral dimension on the part of the victim. After all, it's not great that for helping out bail out an embattled Nigerian prince, that the victim would take an exorbitant fee (which was probably stolen from Nigerian tax payers). Even with that, those victims, just like the woman in this story, deserve a level of empathy. In this case, €830k is a lifetime of savings for most people and these guys will move on and do the same to someone else.
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.
There are always explanations for why the invented persona needs cash, and the scammer also presents sophisticated evidence chains for it. Most people are susceptible to it; see the massive success of spear phishing in corporate environments.
He pretended he was sick and his money was frozen because of his divorce and needed a lot of money for expensive operations which failed one after another.
That’s the whole point. Of course he’s rich, there’s just this thing with the bank right now, but this other bill is due immediately, so he just needs a loan, but don’t worry, he’ll pay you back, I mean he’s Brad Pitt, everyone knows he’s loaded, it’s not like some bum asking you for change…
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."
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 rest of his assets to her.