A South Wales Grandmother Thought Facebook Was Robert De Niro Selling a £400 Fan Card

“That is not Robert De Niro.” Shannon Rich, 28, said it while she was looking at her grandmother’s phone, and the line is the entire defense. Gina Morgan, 76, of South Wales, had been chatting on Facebook with an account dressed in red-carpet photographs and a username that read like a “Robert De Niro page.” The account offered membership cards. There were three types, a message said, and a manager could arrange one. The top tier, a VIP fan card, was about £400, reported in U.S. coverage as roughly $500. In return the buyer was promised “every access” to the actor: a video call, a voice call, and a visit. Morgan had not sent money. She had not handed over card numbers. She had, by her own account, been having a good conversation.

Rich found the thread because her nan showed it to her. “Nan was showing me the messages on Facebook from a fake Robert De Niro profile, and I couldn’t stop laughing,” she told reporters through Caters News, the agency that moved the story on May 1, 2024. “Some people online were concerned about her, but my nan is smart enough not to give out any personal details.” It still took persuading. Morgan, looking at a photograph, said she was going to show the picture of him, “that is Robert Di Niro… He’s sexy looking. I was having a good conversation with him.” Then the granddaughter’s question landed, and Morgan asked the only question that mattered: “Well, who is it then?” The New York Post account and The Sun’s interview both turn on that exchange. The laugh is what people shared. The laugh is also the part that does not travel.

The scam that fails is the one with a witness

Celebrity-impersonation fraud used to look like a badly spelled email from a prince. The De Niro page was already a step past that. It used real photographs, a fan-club cadence, and a price that sits in the range of a concert package rather than a wire to a lawyer in another country. The ask was still absurd if you know that working movie stars do not sell house calls through Facebook Messenger. It is less absurd if you are 76, you are being spoken to as if you were chosen, and nobody else is in the room. Morgan had a granddaughter who looked. The next person in the same thread does not.

The payment menu is the tell, and it has not changed much since this thread went around. A real public figure does not route you to a “manager” inside a direct message for a fan card. Usernames with “page,” “fan,” a stray symbol, or a slight misspelling are a tell. So is any path that leaves the original app for WhatsApp or Telegram, any insistence on secrecy, any emergency that appears after the flattery, and any request for gift cards, crypto, or a wire. Video, when it shows up, fails in the mouth and the eyes: lip-sync a fraction off, a face that blinks wrong, a background that never quite belongs to a room. None of those tells helped the victims who were mocked for missing them. They help the person who is shown the thread by someone else.

The distance between a £400 card that never got bought and a life savings that did is not a difference in intelligence. It is a difference in script. In early 2025 a 53-year-old French interior designer, identified publicly as Anne, told TF1 she had lost about €830,000 — reported in the United States as roughly $850,000 — to people who spent more than a year pretending to be Brad Pitt. The approach did not begin with the actor. It began with an account claiming to be his mother, Jane Etta Pitt, telling Anne that a woman like her was what her son needed. Then came the actor, or a stack of generated photographs and messages wearing his face. He was too busy to get on the phone. He sent what Anne later understood to be generated poetry and hospital pictures. The money request arrived as medicine: kidney cancer, accounts frozen by a divorce from Angelina Jolie, a customs bill on luxury bags that grew into treatment costs. Anne has said she doubted it, left, and was pulled back through another window, including a fake doctor who claimed the actor had swallowed pills and was in a coma. She realized the relationship was a fiction when she saw the real Pitt photographed with Ines de Ramon. French coverage later described a November 2025 complaint she filed against two banks, arguing they had a duty to flag the transfers. The money, much of it reportedly sent toward accounts in Turkey, did not come home. Pitt’s representatives said he has no social-media presence and does not contact strangers for money. The internet, given a victim who spoke on television, chose mockery. TF1 pulled the segment after the pile-on.

The numbers behind the joke

The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center counted 1,008,597 complaints in 2025 and $20.877 billion in reported losses, the first year the bureau’s tally crossed a million complaints and $20 billion. People 60 and older filed 201,266 of those complaints, about a fifth of the count, and reported about $7.7 billion in losses, roughly 37 percent of the money. Their average loss sat near $38,500, close to double the overall average. Investment fraud was the expensive engine. Tech-support and government-impersonation fraud did the frightening work. AI was tagged on 22,364 complaints and $893 million in losses, a small share of the paperwork and a large share of the dread, because a generated face can now sit on a video call and a cloned voice needs only seconds of audio.

Those figures are a floor. IC3 counts what people report. Shame, and the specific shame aimed at Anne, is a reason the real number is higher. A grandmother who almost bought a fan card is a comedy segment. A woman who financed a fake cancer treatment is a punchline until she is a case file. The scripts are cousins. Both start with a famous man who has suddenly noticed you. Both move to a manager, a doctor, or a crisis. Both ask for money off-platform. Morgan’s thread stopped at the flattery because Rich was in the kitchen. Anne’s thread ran for more than a year because the crisis kept resetting the doubt.

A second scam now feeds on the first. On July 20, 2026, the FBI renewed a public-service announcement, I-072026-PSA, warning that criminals are impersonating the Internet Crime Complaint Center itself. The bureau described AI-generated videos of senior FBI officials steering people to spoofed IC3 websites, and messages on Telegram and similar apps telling earlier victims that an agent can recover the money if they “update” a complaint. The real IC3 does not contact people on social media to get their money back, and it does not run its complaint desk through a look-alike site that dead-ends every link except the form. Anyone who has already been fooled by a De Niro page or a Pitt hospital bed is exactly who that second script is written for. Reporting the first crime at ic3.gov, the real one, is still the right move. Believing a stranger who claims to be the FBI in your inbox is the next theft.

What to do when the famous man writes first

In the United States, AARP’s Fraud Watch Network helpline is 877-908-3360, and IC3 takes the report. In the United Kingdom, Action Fraud is the reporting door, at actionfraud.police.uk, and a bank’s fraud line is faster than either if money has already moved. The practical rule is shorter than any of those phone trees. No public figure sells access in a direct message. No relative in trouble asks for gift cards. No government office asks you to move the money yourself to keep it safe. If a photograph is the proof, search the photograph. If a voice is the proof, hang up and call the person back on a number you already had. If the only proof is that the conversation feels good, show the thread to someone who is allowed to laugh.

Morgan’s case is the rare one that ends on a sofa. Rich has said her grandmother did not give out personal details, and the messages that surfaced were embarrassing rather than expensive. That is worth printing on a flyer, and it is not a personality test. The same week The AEGIS Alliance was covering how typed secrets leave a machine, in the Citizen Lab keyboard-leak reporting, the more ordinary leak was a Facebook inbox. The bureau’s later warnings about phantom-hacker crews who talk retirees into wiring their own savings, and the grandparent-scam indictment that named 25 defendants and $21 million, are the version of this story in which nobody laughs. Romance fraud’s older price tag is in the FTC’s accounting of $1.3 billion lost to online romance scams. More of the beat is in Crime News and U.S. News.

Gina Morgan asked who was on the other end of a handsome photograph. The honest answer is a person running a script, sometimes now with a generated face, who will take £400 if that is what is on the table and €830,000 if the story can be stretched into an illness. The granddaughter who could not stop laughing is not a punchline. She is the control that most of these threads never get.