Ohio Man Claims Emma Watson Defrauded Him For Hundreds of Dollars on Instagram

A person pretending to be Emma Watson conned hundreds of dollars out of a 32-year-old Ohio Man on IG.

We often hear tragic stories of elderly people defrauded out of thousands of dollars by celebrity imposters on social media.  This story, however, is hard to understand for many reasons.  First of all, there are lots of confusing moments and red flags from the very start.  Secondly, the victim wasn't elderly.  He was only 32 years old.

Get our free mobile app

A Brea, Ohio man recently reported this alleged fraud case to the local police, the FBI, the Federal Trade Commission, and the U.S. Secret Service.  This weird fraud case began when someone who claimed to be the personal assistant to actress Emma Watson slid into the victim's IG DMs in April.  The person claiming to be Emma's personal assistant asked the victim to contact the actress by calling her on WhatsApp. The Watson imposter explained that he would have to help her with a job opportunity by buying Bitcoin according to Cleveland.com,

...he would have to establish accounts with cryptocurrency exchanges Binance and Robinhood to buy the bitcoin. The man gave her his banking information, including his account number.

This very complicated and confusing con dragged on from April through July and it involves the man receiving a check to only burn that check and receiving multiple credit cards, using them, and then canceling them.  So many red flags.  Somehow the man was only conned out of $665 in total.  You can follow the full breakdown of the scam at Cleveland.com.