A scammer is using Keanu Reeves to trick unwitting older women

Lots of people, regardless of sexual orientation, would kill to date Keanu Reeves. It’s understandable; he’s unproblematic, very nice to look at, and seems extremely chill. But Reeves has been in a relationship with artist Alexandra Grant—who illustrated his books Ode To Happiness and Shadows, and co-founded the publishing company X Artists’ Books with him—since 2019. Apparently some fans missed the news, because a scammer pretending to be Reeves has been successfully hoodwinking older women on social media into thinking they’re in an online relationship with the actor.

The LA Times interviewed a woman named Molli Hermiston, whose aunt fell for the scam and who still refuses to believe she’s not romantically involved with the John Wick star. (The aunt wouldn’t speak for the story.) Hermiston’s aunt is so invested that she’s trying to sell her home in Little Rock, Arkansas to move to LA to be with Reeves. The scammer is said to have sent the aunt a necklace and earrings; she wears them both every day. The fake Reeves also asked the aunt for $10,000—though Hermiston doesn’t know if her aunt actually sent him the money. The poor woman somehow didn’t question why a man whose net worth is reportedly $360 million would need cash from her.

Hermiston told the publication that out of curiosity—to see how the scam worked—she made a fake Instagram account, pretended to be a well-off older woman, and followed some Reeves fan accounts. “Very quickly, five different people saying they’re Keanu Reeves approached me online,” she said. One of scammer even asked for the conversation to be moved to Google Hangouts and wrote a message that read, “Due to my profession and career, I want this to be a secret between you and I.”

The fake Reeves then sent her “the sort of questions that reveal a person’s wealth and status, or that might come up as part of a bank’s security queries to confirm a customer’s identity.” Hermiston kept the conversation going for a few days, until the fake Reeves asked if they could meet at a celebrity event and said it’d cost her $2,000 to attend… and that she’d have to send him the payment in bitcoin. The moral of the story is this: if you get a DM from an unverified Instagram account claiming to be Keanu Reeves and it seems to be too good to be true—it is.