After a French woman was duped out of €830,000 by scammers posing as Brad Pitt, a romance scam expert is encouraging the public to look beyond the headlines.

Fraudsters used AI to convince a woman she was in contact with the actor and claimed he required money for cancer treatment.

The victim, who is known as Anne, went public with her story in order to raise awareness about romance scams.

Romance scams see fraudsters adopt a fake identity and develop a relationship with victims in order to exploit them.

On Lunchtime Live, Keanu Reeves Is Not in Love with You author Becky Holmes said victims of romance scams are not taken seriously enough.

"We’ve seen the pictures and thought 'that’s a bit unbelievable' but at the same time it doesn’t mean that we can mock this woman," she said.

"The reality is [romance scams] rob people of their savings and sometime their lives."

Victims

Ms Holmes said victims of romance scams are treated unfairly compared to victims of other crimes.

"We talk about people 'falling' for a scam but we never talk about people 'falling' for a burglary or 'falling' for an assault," she said.

"That’s because we still view those as crimes that happen to you - not as crimes that you walk into.

"[With] fraud and particularly romance fraud, we think people blindly walk into it – that's not the case, fraudsters are very good at coercive control."

Ms Holmes said it is important to remember that celebrities "do not contact people out of the blue".

A person uses a phone and a laptop while notifications visually pop up, Alamy

Common tactics for scam artists include pretending to be celebrities, offering fraudulent meet and greet packages or claiming they are raising money for charity.

AI has put fraudsters "one step ahead", Ms Holmes said.

"It’s not necessarily that people will be generating people falsely and using that," she said.

"It’s that people they will be able to use somebody’s face on another image - or they will be able to use an existing image and make that image talk."

Ms Holmes said the human desire to love and be loved is "very tricky to counter" when it comes to romance fraud.

You can listen back below:

Feature image: A young woman takes a video call on a laptop with a man, Alamy.