For more than a year, a woman believed she was having an affair with Ioan Gruffudd.
She had hundreds of pictures and videos to prove it.
None of them were real.
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The Fantastic Four star, 53, says he met the fan at a convention last week, where she showed him what a scammer posing as him had been sending her.
He shared the warning with fans today (9 Nov), as reported by Creatorzine, and says he has reported it to police.
How the Ioan Gruffudd scam worked
The meeting is believed to have taken place at Comic Con at the Chattanooga Convention Center in Tennessee, which ran from 7 to 8 Nov.
Gruffudd appeared on both days.
“Something incredibly distressing and disturbing has been brought to my attention,” he said.
“A woman came to a convention I was recently attending and she was under the impression that she was in an extramarital relationship with me for over a year.
“She showed me hundreds of AI images and videos that someone claiming to be me had sent to her.
The images were explicit and disturbing.”
The scammer found her through Facebook, then moved things somewhere quieter.
“She was targeted from an Elsbeth Facebook page by this person who sent her a cell number and asked her to communicate via Telegram,” he said.
“They began sending AI images and videos to ‘prove’ that it was me.”
‘This is not me’
Gruffudd says he runs one social account, @ioangruffudd, and will never ask anyone for money.
“If you believe you are speaking to me via message, Telegram, any social media pages that aren’t this page (@ioangruffudd), or any other means, this is not me,” he said.
“I will never give out my cell number to anyone that I don’t personally know.
Please do not engage and never send money.
“I urge you to ignore and block all contact from anyone that claims to be me.”
He asked anyone else targeted to report the person and their number to police. “I have done the same,” he added.
He also published one of the phone numbers he says the scammer used.
From Mr Fantastic to Hollywood’s messiest divorce
Gruffudd played Reed Richards in the 2000s Fantastic Four films.
Pedro Pascal has the stretchy suit now.
Off screen, he spent years at the centre of one of Hollywood’s messiest divorces, from Alice Evans, his wife of 13 years.
It was finalised in 2023.
He went public with Bianca Wallace in 2021 while the split was still going through, and the pair have since married and recently had a child.
Why It Matters
Fake celebrity profiles used to rely on stolen photos.
AI means a scammer can now generate fresh “proof” on demand, including explicit material the real person never made.
For actors and creators with loyal fanbases, the “this isn’t me” post is turning into part of the job.
It only works on the fans who follow the real account.
Romance scams built on famous faces are nothing new. The tools just got a lot better.
Gruffudd has gone to the police.
Whether anyone can trace a Telegram account back to an actual person is another question, and somewhere a woman is still working out what the last year was.
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