The Con Queen of Hollywood

Since 2013, an intricate scheme has plagued the entertainment industry, with a single scammer posing as Hollywood’s most esteemed high-level executives…

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The Master was a film in production through the latter half of 2016. Unlike the critically-acclaimed Paul Thomas Anderson film of the same name, this was a Chinese film, set to star Donnie Yen, the famed actor and martial arts expert from Hong Kong. Yen was also in-line to produce the film through his Super Hero Films, a production company he had established alongside his wife a few years prior.

According to Alex Ritman of The Hollywood Reporter, who first broke the story, The Master had a budget somewhere between $60 and $70 million, was going to start filming throughout Asia in November of 2016, before wrapping up in December of that year (when star Donnie Yen would have to begin a promotion circuit for the Star Wars film he was starring in).

In the summer leading up to this shoot, multiple makeup artists from Europe - primarily the UK - began to receive inquiries from a woman working on the film: a woman named Li Duan Zhao, who referred to herself as "Leslie." She represented herself as a production manager for the film and was looking for skilled artists to work on The Master. In her inquiries - which began as emails but soon stretched out into lengthy phone calls - Leslie would claim that she was looking to avoid larger names, and was instead looking for (what The Hollywood Reporter described as) "emerging talent". These were young artists looking for a big break, who Leslie claimed had come highly recommended by people they had worked with in the past.

Dozens of makeup artists were directly contacted by this woman and people representing her and were asked if they would be willing to work on this film. Many were, as they considered this a big break; a chance to make a name for themselves in the often-cutthroat entertainment industry. For many, this was a chance to move from lower-paying TV and independent film work to a full-scale movie production. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that would require these individuals to book passage to Indonesia, where they would meet a driver that would escort them to the filming location.

Leslie, the intermediary that recruited many of these young artists, made sure to provide many legitimate-looking documents: PDF's of budgetary breakdowns, filming schedules, location shots, etc. They even had an IMDB page with several big names attached, and concerned artists would look up the project online to see that Donnie Yen himself had announced the project years prior, back in 2013 (when he launched his production company). Everything seemed to look legitimate. And that facade caused many of these artists to pull the trigger and commit.

Many men and women, fearing that they wouldn't get an opportunity like this again in their lifetime, bought a plane ticket to Jakarta and hopped on a flight. Once they arrived at the airport, they were met by a driver; having to provide them with approximately $1200 in cash, which would soon change hands to a third party. They would get caught up in Jakarta's infamous traffic, which would delay them for hours, putting them seriously behind schedule. In the days that followed, they would get put up in cheap-looking hotels as they struggled to make their way to the filming location.

Dozens of makeup artists, photographers, and other lower-level crew members on film and TV projects would end up making this trip, but none of them would ever actually arrive at a filming location. After being jerked around for hours - if not days - they would all eventually wisen up and realize that they were being taken for a ride, before deciding to cut the cord... instead of sinking more money into a presumably lost venture.

You see, the production of this entire film was a scam. As highlighted by Alex Ritman's October 2016 article in The Hollywood Reporter, this film had been announced by Donnie Yen when he launched his production banner back in 2013. But in the years since, that venture had folded, and The Master was put on the back-burner. However, that hadn't stopped someone from using this information to scam young artists out of thousands of dollars, by tricking them to travel to a different nation, bilking them out of cash, and then stalling for time until they gave up.

Originally, the scheme primarily targeted young women; who, after a few hours of stalling, began to fear that something nefarious was going on. Especially since they were being driven around by a stranger in a foreign nation with no end in sight, and were being coaxed along by a mysterious entity on the phone (the aforementioned Leslie, who - it turns out - operated under dozens of pseudonyms).

Those involved in this months-long endeavor would end up clearing tens of thousands of dollars, but even after being exposed by those they had scammed, would remain unidentified; with authorities being unable to launch investigations in foreign nations, especially since so few had been affected (and their net losses were rather-insignificant when it came to international fraud). However, this scam would continue to evolve over time, with the mysterious person at the other end of the phone becoming known as the "Con Queen of Hollywood."

In February of 2018 - more than a year later - Deadline began reporting on a continuation of this scam, which had evolved significantly. It was no longer targeting makeup artists in particular but had expanded to other professions: minor league Hollywood players who had established careers but were looking to take the next step into larger projects.

In this article (written by Mike Fleming Jr.), it was revealed that numerous individuals were taken in by this scheme: including former military members, who acted in or provided security for film and TV productions.

One such case involved Andrew McLaren, a former-Marine who had since become a security expert (in addition to starring in programs such as Discovery's 'Chrome Underground'). He had been contacted by a woman claiming to be a high-level Hollywood executive, who wanted him to scout out filming locations in Indonesia and provide security. He would have to pay his own way while waiting for a 5-digit wire transfer, which would be delayed several times over before ultimately being canceled.

Another person affected, as reported by Deadline, was Mike Smith, a former-stuntman-turned-stunt-coordinator and 2nd unit director (who had worked on numerous film projects). Smith had been contacted by a woman claiming to be Gigi Pritzker, a billionaire and film producer who claimed that he had been recommended through a producer that had worked with him on the film Nightcrawler. Smith was then offered his dream job: working as a director on a feature film with a large budget.

While Smith was never scammed out of any money, his conversations with the scammer would begin to take a weird left turn into sexual territory, when she began to attempt to solicit phone sex from him. That was when he knew that something was wrong, and began to suspect that she wasn't who she claimed to be.

These are just two such examples of individuals deceived by this caller, who had reportedly swindled dozens of young and aspiring artists at this point but was nowhere near finished developing this scheme.

Months later, in July of 2018, Scott Johnson of The Hollywood Reporter would pen the definitive article about this story. Titled "Hunting the Con Queen of Hollywood," this cover story not only gave a name to this nefarious scammer but detailed the vast intricacy of their scheme - which had been carrying on for years at this point.

Their scheme, which had been perpetrated by persons unknown, was centered around impersonating high-level Hollywood executives; primarily female producers and directors. Under this guise, they would lure in (mostly) young men; many of whom were former-military, who had since become stuntmen, security experts, and actors, who were offered roles/jobs that they would consider dream gigs. Some others lured in by this scheme were entertainment professionals such as photographers, artists, and others that worked in lower-paying film & TV roles.

Oftentimes these calls would call from intermediaries: well-known producers or executives that the individuals didn't directly know, but who claimed to have heard of them from people they had previously worked with. This was later determined to have been found via internet databases such as IMDB, which could be used to track what projects they had worked on previously and with whom.

Masquerading as these intermediaries, the scammer would then get their victims in-touch with these supposed high-level female executives. In reality, the scammer would just go on to impersonate these figures as well, which included Amy Pascal, Kathleen Kennedy, Stacey Snider, Sherry Lansing, Lesli Linka Glatter, and Gigi Pritzker. Whoever they were, they seemed to have a good knowledge of these women - referencing their spouses and personal lives with ease - and seemed to have a working knowledge of their professional lives. On multiple occasions - while impersonating film producer Amy Pascal - this scammer referenced her ongoing saga following her break with Sony Pictures.

This scam artist had definitely done their research and had carefully crafted email addresses and websites to direct their victims to. They were able to slip into accents and dialects at will and spoke to their victims several times a day (often staying on the phone for hours at a time). They knew what buttons to push to get people on their side, and were able to come up with intricate excuses on the fly when things didn't work out (such as failed wire transfers and lack of repayment).

This individual had also had the foresight to get their victims to sign non-disclosure agreements at the onset of their communication, using the cover of these NDA's to further coerce their victims (since they didn't believe that they could discuss the projects with their loved ones or confidantes without breaching the agreements). This added a sense of maliciousness to these relationships, which the scammer undoubtedly used to twist the screws, threatening to ruin anyone that rebuffed them or pushed back against their demands.

In a town like Hollywood - which ran on reputation - that had the potential to make or break someone's entire career. And this scammer undoubtedly used this to their advantage.

In at least one case, this scammer had so expertly manipulated one young man (a freelance photographer in his late 20's), that he ended up draining his life savings on a wild goose chase that never panned out. But even after draining this young man's life savings - which he had obtained after years of working in conflict zones throughout the world - this scammer continued to harass him, demeaning and verbally abusing him simply because they enjoyed it.

By the time many of these young men broke and decided to directly contact the offices of these Hollywood executives, they discovered that they had fallen prey to a scammer... who had been so calculated and crafty in their work, that they had ensnared dozens of others (if not hundreds) in an identical scheme, netting them hundreds of thousands of dollars. In return, the Hollywood executives began reaching out to security experts, eventually hiring the private firm K2 Intelligence to investigate the matter.

Following the publication of this article in The Hollywood Reporter in July of 2018, investigations would be launched by both the FBI and the NYPD, who began focusing their efforts on separate jurisdictions. The FBI's investigation was spanning multiple continents, while the NYPD began investigating a specific scammer: possibly a male that had been disguising their voice to sound feminine.

The identity of this scam's main culprit - the individual that is believed to speak to all of the victims over the phone - remains of the utmost interest to investigators. They believe that by tracking down this person, they can bring down the entire scam, as this individual is undoubtedly integral to it.

Originally, it was believed that this person was a woman, due to the way that they spoke and the roles that they typically took on: those of dominant female figures in the entertainment industry. I'll let you hear this person's voice for yourself, as several clips have been shared online of this person in conversation with their victims (whose voices are distorted to protect them). These two clips are dated back to 2015 and 2016, respectively, when this scheme was primarily targeted at makeup artists in the UK.

In this first clip, this scammer was pretending to be a female executive and uses an American accent to berate an artist for missing a flight.

In this second clip, this individual dons an English accent to speak down to the agent of a hairstylist: someone that had actually followed through with a trip to Indonesia.

In the wake of their 2018 cover story, The Hollywood Reporter would recruit two separate linguists to examine the voice. One, an Indonesian language instruction from UCLA, would agree that the speaker was likely female; while the other, a forensic linguist from Delaware, believed that the speaker was born in or lived in Asia.

Carole Chaski, the forensic linguist from Delaware (who heads the Institute for Linguistic Evidence) spoke to THR reporter Scott Johnson for his follow-up article, stating:

"The accent sounds to me like Asian English, possibly from Malaysia, Indonesia, or the Philippines. The traces of British accent could be due to age, with the person having been educated in a British-dominant country before the 1990s when American English became more common in schools in Asia, or it could be due to having lived in the U.K."

In early 2019, it was reported by Buzzfeed News that this scam had started to expand even further: moving out from those directly involved in the entertainment industry to those with relatively high profiles. This included, in particular, photographers with significant social media followings; especially those that posted a lot of travel pictures on Instagram and similar sites.

In an article published in January of last year (2019), Buzzfeed News reporter Tanya Chen reported that numerous people had been lured in by a plot almost identical to the one reported by The Hollywood Reporter and Deadline the year prior. However, due to those in the Hollywood having been warned of this scheme months earlier, the scammers had likely moved on to a separate industry; one that wasn't protected by agents or management, where the victims could be contacted directly by the scammers without any kind of organizational filter.

One of the victims was Carley Rudd, a photographer that had approximately 60,000 followers on Instagram. In January of 2019, she had been contacted by someone claiming to be Wendi Deng Murdoch, a Chinese-born investor that had once been married to media tycoon Rupert Murdoch. The scammer claimed to be working on a project for the 2022 Winter Olympics being held in Beijing and was hiring photographers to travel to Asia to shoot separate locations for an extensive exhibit.

Even though Rudd was initially suspicious, she was ultimately taken in by an almost-identical scheme: she was flown to Jakarta, where she met a sketchy driver at the airport, to whom she had to hand over $1400 in cash (which was soon handed over to a third party at a gas station). She was then stalled in traffic for hours, before arriving at a pre-booked hotel. What would follow were days of whirlwind travel and roadblocks, in which a series of setbacks would lead Rudd to the crummy realization that she had been conned.

Carley Rudd would later publish the details of this scam in a blog on her website - in which she uploaded scanned images of the legitimate-looking documents provided by the scammer, as well as a picture of the driver who met her at the airport.

Unfortunately, none of this seems to have deterred the scammer in any measurable way.

In July of 2019, the FBI would announce that they were officially investigating this case of widespread fraud, and - in a press release - disclosed that they were looking for additional victims of this scheme that had ensnared "writers, stuntpeople, make-up artists, security providers, and photographers."

Additionally, the Bureau released an online questionnaire (which you can find by visiting fbi.gov/IndonesiaShowbizScam), which victims can fill out and send in. Investigators were hoping to use this information to fill in gaps in the investigation; which, by now, dated back to 2013 (roughly 3 years before The Master scheme, which I detailed in the episode introduction). It was estimated that around 100 victims had been identified at this point - each having lost anywhere between $3000 and $150,000 - but that the true number of victims could be three times that high.

Within days of this announcement from the FBI, Scott Johnson of The Hollywood Reporter would release another follow-up article, in which he reported that the entertainment angle of this scheme had been carrying on ever since his original cover story was published... but had begun to transition to something else entirely.

The scammer had continued to impersonate high-level female executives - among them, Victoria Alonso and Sarah Finn, who worked at Marvel - and was using their names to coerce young men into engaging in phone sex (for seemingly no financial motive). This provided a weird angle for investigators to follow up on, as it was now believed that this mysterious caller might be getting some kind of sexual gratification out of fooling people.

Under the guise of being a female executive that was "auditioning" young men over the phone - to get them to say and do improper things - this bizarre sex grift had started to increase in frequency throughout 2019 and seemed to have no sign of stopping anytime soon.

The following month, it was reported that this scammer had started to impersonate several male executives in the film and TV industry, including comic book-writer-turned-producer Geoff Johns. Using these names and identities, they had begun to lure in other stuntmen and performers.

That same month (August 2019), Vanity Fair reporter Julie Miller would publish a comprehensive article about the story, in which she expanded upon certain aspects of it. This included the lengths to which this caller would go to hoodwink their victims: weeks, if not months of contact, through emails and lengthy phone calls, extensive document forgeries, and fake wire transfers (as well as learning a comprehensive knowledge of Hollywood's power players and most - if not all - of their past and present projects).

In that article, Miller also reported that producer Deborah Snyder had become a recent victim of impersonation by the scammer, who not only sexually harassed numerous security experts but alleged domestic abuse by Deborah's husband, Zack (the director of 300 and Man of Steel). This allegation was patently false but had the potential to create ripple effects in gossip-heavy Tinseltown.

This is still very much an ongoing saga, with some of the recent developments coming just weeks ago (as of April 2020).

A lot of the speculation about this story has been centered around the mysterious caller: the person at the other end of the phone, who seems to have spoken with almost everyone directly affected by this scheme. It is believed that one person has been behind the dozens of impersonations that led to hundreds of people being deceived.

Even though the scammer often uses English and American accents, experts have picked up on slight markers in their voice that point to them being of Asian ancestry. Because of the location of the scheme - which is centered around Jakarta - they likely live in Indonesia, as that's the only place that victims have ever been sent to and where the money is exchanged.

Investigators deem it likely that the scammer has children, as they have had to silence them during phone calls with potential victims. It's also possible that they have worked as a makeup artist in the past, due to the scam originating among artists in the UK throughout 2015 and 2016. Earlier incarnations of the scam have been dated as far back as 2013, but those details have not been publicly disclosed as of yet.

While a lot of the early reporting, in this case, identifies the caller as a female - hence the nickname the "Con Queen of Hollywood" - it has been reported recently that the caller may in fact be male. Due to their cadence of voice when making certain sounds - paired with the ease in which they transition into male tones - it is believed that they are a man simply impersonating a female.

Even though multiple people seem to be involved in this intricate scheme - bagmen and petty criminals spread out among the world - it is believed that the originator of this scheme is the unidentified caller. They are likely the one that does all of the necessary legwork: researching Hollywood projects, learning how to impersonate high-level executives, communicating with the victims, arranging travel and the transfer of funds, etc. If so, they must be spending close to every waking minute on some aspect of this scheme.

Nicolette Kotsianas, a senior director with K2 Intelligence, has been spearheading a private investigation into this case since 2017 when Hollywood executives started to realize that they were being impersonated. Nicolette quickly realized that this wasn't a simple scam operated by a large group of people: this was likely a scheme orchestrated by someone with obsessive tendencies, who went above and beyond in their approach to not only scam people out of money, but their dignity and sense of self-worth, as well. Speaking to Vanity Fair last August, she stated:

"We're really only dealing with one person. There are the helpers in Indonesia who collect [the targets'] money. But we have a really, really strong degree of certainty that this has been one person who played many roles, male and female; furnished the documents; designed the approach; and tailored it to each individual victim and person they're impersonating... There have been some victims who have months-long back-and-forth communications. Sometimes it goes into writing a screenplay, and there will be notes and storyboarding sessions, and really intense work put into it - all in facilitation for money getting exchanged in Indonesia. But a lot more effort went into [these] instances than have probably been necessary to get that money."

It is believed that the scammer continues to touch base with their victims long after they had drained them of their assets; which hints at this being not only a money-making scheme but a bizarre obsession for them. Paired with the dozens of times this scammer attempted to solicit phone sex from young men, it paints the portrait of an unusual individual - who is likely mentally deranged and obsessed with entertainment culture.

In an article published in Marie Claire just a couple of months ago (February 2020), Nicolette Kotsianas indicated that there may be hundreds of victims that have yet to be identified; men and women that are either unaware that they fell prey to a long-running scam that has ensnared countless others, or are too embarrassed to come forward.

Until such a time that the mysterious "Con Queen of Hollywood" is unmasked and identified, this story will remain unresolved.

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Episode Information

Writing, research, hosting, and production by Micheal Whelan

Published on on April 19th, 2020

Producers: Maggyjames, Roberta Janson, Ben Krokum, Quil Carter, Peggy Belarde, Laura Hannan, Damion Moore, Amy Hampton, Scott Meesey, Steven Wilson, Scott Patzold, Marie Vanglund, Astrid Kneier, Lori Rodriguez, Victoria Reid, Gabriella Bromley, Jessica Yount, Aimee McGregor, Danny Williams, Sue Kirk, Sara Moscaritolo, Thomas Ahearn, Sydney Scotton, Marion Welsh, Seth Morgan, Alyssa Lawton, Kelly Jo Hapgood, Patrick Laakso, Meadow Landry, Rebecca Miller, Tatum Bautista, Michelle Guess, and Jo Wong