Trending Now: ‘I would never reach out to you for money’ – Fans React

Recently, American actress Reese Witherspoon raised awareness and cautioned fans regarding online scammers who are impersonating her.

She shared a video on TikTok, letting fans know that they must be careful and not give their personal information to scammers, who are using her pictures to ask for money or anything for that matter.

“Hey, this is important. I want to tell you what I’ve been dealing with for the past 24 hours. There are multiple people on TikTok and Instagram impersonating me.

“And they go into people’s DMs, and they try to build a relationship, they try to extract personal information, plan meet-up times – I want you to know this is not me,” she said.

The 49-year-old added that it upsets her so much that scammers are using her name and pictures to manipulate vulnerable people.

She further said that she wants her fans to be aware that she will never ask for anything, let alone manipulate them.

“I want you to know that I would never ever manipulate you. I would never reach out to you for money, for private information, and to create a meet-up time.”

Witherspoon also said that whenever people receive such DMs, they should do a safety check and make sure that the account is verified.

“So please look at these accounts that are doing this and make sure they are verified.”

Unfortunately, celebrity impersonation scams have always been around, and the “Legally Blonde” actress is not the only celebrity who has spoken up against these scammers that target vulnerable people.

Here’s the list of celebrities who warned fans to be aware of scammers who are impersonating them:

Miss SA first runner-up, Luyanda Zuma, also found herself facing the same predicament with a social media user who was using her name to exploit funds from fans after she was crowned the first runner-up.

This user shared their own personal banking details, claiming that the money sent to her account will go towards Zuma.

Somizi Mhlongo warned fans about scammers who are impersonating him to ask for funds, and he stated that people should know that he would never ask for them for money.

Connie Ferguson is also another celebrity whose pictures are constantly used to scam people. She spoke up and told people not to fall victim to these scams.

Sandra Bullock urged fans not to engage with the accounts that are pretending to be her on social media.

In 2025, Brad Pitt warned fans about online impersonators after a woman revealed that she was tricked into believing that she was in a relationship with the actor.

The woman shared that she gave the scammer nearly half of her life savings, which were approximately $850,000 (around R13 million), because the scammer told her that he needed money for cancer.

Furthermore, these scammers are now becoming extremely dangerous, especially because they are using AI to manipulate people by cloning their voices and faces as well.

This is what we call “deepfakes”, and they combine existing images, video or audio of a person in AI-powered deep learning software, which allows fraudsters to manipulate the information into fake pictures or videos, according to an online report.

Here’s how to spot deepfakes:

1. These pictures or videos usually have an unnatural eye movement – whether it is the lack of blinking or through the video, they are not looking straight into the camera.
2. The lack of emotion – what they are saying to you does not reflect what their face is saying.
3. If the video has weird lighting, discolouration of the video and misplaced shadows means it’s fake
4. The face looks eerie – there is a huge difference between a natural face and a face made by AI, which looks weird, and the texture is too smooth
5. The texture of the hair – if there aren’t hair strands in the picture or video, it’s fake. Another thing is that the texture of the hair always looks almost cartoon-ish, and the hair moves in one direction at the same time.
6. The hands are always a giveaway because either the fingers are not five like ours or the nails constantly change colour on a video