“I Love You. Send Bitcoin.” Inside the Billion-Dollar Celebrity Impersonation Scam
Victims think they’re talking to Keanu Reeves. Or Kevin Costner. Then come the pleas for cash. The brazen AI-fueled con that fleeces lovestruck fans and has Hollywood finally fighting back.
In November, Margaret climbed into her Toyota Camry, left her husband of 10 years at their comfortable brick home in the rural South and drove an hour to a hotel where — she was sure — Kevin Costner was coming to meet her.
By this point, Margaret, 73, had spent months making weekly bitcoin deposits for Costner totaling about $100,000. He had messaged her that he was using the money to set up a new production company where she would eventually work for him. Margaret knew that some people would find it odd that an Oscar winner and the star of Yellowstone would need financing help from a retired office manager whom he’d met on Facebook, but Margaret wasn’t exactly a nobody. She had achieved some renown for activism she’d done, even delivered a TED talk. She was special, and Costner saw it. She also was lonely and restless as her marriage was failing, her career had ended and her kids and grandkids were busy with their own lives. Costner’s messages represented some welcome male attention, a fantasy to drop into when real life got too real. In one photo he sent, the actor leaned against the wooden headboard of a bed in a white T-shirt, holding a piece of paper that read, “it’s really me Kevin Costner I love you so much MARGARET i can’t wait to meet you MARGARET.”
There was some discussion of flying Margaret out to L.A. before they settled on a hotel in her home state as their meeting place. By the time she got in her car, Margaret had already had her suitcases packed for weeks, ready for the moment when she and Costner would finally be together.
“Her thing is, ‘I just want somebody to love me,’ ” says Margaret’s sister, Carol, in one of many phone conversations we would have over a period of several weeks this spring and summer as her worries about Margaret grew. (Both women’s names have been changed to protect their privacy).
As Margaret waited there in the room on pins and needles, Costner sent her a photo — a picture of a mangled car. He said that he’d been in an accident and wouldn’t make it after all. As she stared at the photo, all the warning signs that Margaret had been willfully avoiding over all these months of buildup and bitcoin payments began to creep into view.
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Online scams take many forms, but the ones weaponizing celebrity fandom are getting intense notice in Hollywood right now. With scammers aided by such rapidly evolving tools as AI, cryptocurrencies and messaging apps that make it easy to disseminate fakes and operate undetected, stars and talent agencies find themselves in an escalating game of Whac-A-Mole, hiring companies to scan the web for fakes and getting those accounts shut down. Some 400 performers, including Scarlett Johansson, Common and SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher, have signed on to support legislation making its way through Congress called the No Fakes Act, which seeks to create protections for artists’ voices, likenesses and images from unauthorized AI-generated deep fakes.
“Celebrities just have so many images out there,” says Nick Berta, a supervisory special agent in the FBI’s economic crimes unit. “The ease with which scammers can use their tools to manipulate voice and audio and video, it’s very difficult for [public figures] to protect themselves.”
The scammers prey upon the goodwill and implicit trust their victims have for their favorite artists, with grifters increasingly using celebrity likenesses not only for romance scams like the one that targeted Margaret but also for fake investment opportunities, false product endorsements and bogus political messaging. “The enemy behind this is super-skilled,” says Erin West, a former prosecutor from Santa Clara, California, who specializes in high-tech crimes. “The psychological hold they have over people is like nothing I’ve ever seen. It is cult-like. It absolutely overwhelms any type of reasonable thought. They’re able to overcome what humans would normally discern to be a ridiculous situation.”
Americans reported $672 million in losses to confidence and romance scams in 2024, according to the FBI, with people over 60 filing the most complaints and losing the most money, averaging $83,000 per victim. Those figures don’t even include people like Margaret, who will never tell law enforcement what happened to them out of shame, fear of their scammers or the tiny lingering hope that, just maybe, they’d had a real relationship with a movie star.
To better understand how celebrity scam victims like Margaret are ensnared, I decided to make myself look like an ideal target, creating a fake social media profile of a woman I named Linda. I used AI to age up one of my selfies and invented a beloved dead husband named Bob and a scruffy terrier mix named Milo. I then followed a bunch of pop culture accounts.
Within 90 minutes, an account named Keanu_Reeves68667 was DMing me, wanting to know how long I’d been a fan (“Since Speed,” I answered). Within two hours, four more Keanus had slid into my DMs, as had two Kevin Costners, a Charlie Hunnam and a Jonathan Roumie, the actor who plays Jesus on the Christian TV series The Chosen. Although I followed accounts for Dolly Parton, Oprah Winfrey and Sandra Bullock, most of the scammers who targeted me over the next six weeks were impersonating male stars over 50 — Reeves is 60, Costner 70 and Roumie 51 — which experts say is the demographic of celebrity most likely to be imitated in these types of scams.
Criminals, an efficient group, exploit the broadest gender stereotypes of peoples’ ideal partners. When targeting older men, they typically create a profile of a beautiful — but not famous — younger woman. She’s probably located in another country, might be in need of some sort of help and definitely thinks his golf trophies are impressive. For older women, they follow a different template, creating a man she “already respects, already trusts, already has romantic desires about, already has a personal connection to,” says Marti DeLiema, an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota’s School of Social Work who studies elder fraud.
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