It started, like so many other Hollywood stories, with a call from a manager. Josh’s manager knew another manager, who knew a producer, who knew a fitness trainer who’d gotten himself into a bit of a mess. The trainer thought he’d gotten his big break in Hollywood, but he’d really fallen for a bizarre international scam involving the impersonation of prominent women in the industry and elsewhere—Kathleen Kennedy, Amy Pascal, Donna Langley, Dede Gardner, Deb Snyder, Wendi Deng, Gigi Pritzker. The list went on and on.
Josh’s manager thought the con pulled on this trainer would make a good podcast, and we agreed. For the past year we’ve been making the serialized podcast Chameleon: Hollywood Con Queen about whoever impersonated all of these women. The perpetrator allegedly lured hundreds of Hollywood gig workers—makeup artists, photographers, trainers, actors, stuntmen—to Indonesia to shoot big blockbuster movies with fake names like The Master and Gotham City Sirens. Using their own money, victims flew across the world while the catfishing Pascal or another woman kept in constant contact, sending them elaborate sides of dialogue, asking them to make inspirational mood boards for shoots at Hindu temples, and, sometimes, even asking them to “audition” on the phone with dirty sex scenes. She’d tell them they were just a minute away from meeting the director and producer on set, but every day she’d come up with excuses of why the shoot had been delayed. And in the end there was no job.
For a while we thought a criminal cabal was behind this weird con, but we have identified a lone Indonesian man living in the U.K. as a likely suspect. Hargobind Punjabi Tahilramani, often known as “Gobind,” was born in Jakarta to a privileged background on—of all days—Halloween, October 31, 1979. In the U.K. he is known as a foodfluencer Instagramming under the handle Pure Bytes and ISpintheTales. In social media videos, Tahilramani, who has not responded to multiple requests for comment, has a round face and a warm, welcoming smile. His captions carry the superficial, insipid tone of many influencers, whether he’s talking about vegetarian roti, brat, or taking a “satisfying journey with a coruscating kaleidoscope of colours” at brunch. In a revealing September Instagram video chat with another “gastro connoisseur,” he portrayed himself as just a regular single guy living in London (though he seems to actually now live in Manchester), loving his workouts, CrossFit, and cold showers. He agreed with the host that self-care is paramount. “First thing first is you,” he said. “If you believe in yourself, and you believe that the universe conspires in your favor, you’re gonna get by easily.”
This is ironic because one of the Con Queen’s missions seems to have been crushing dreams and making people feel inadequate—making people feel that not only was the universe conspiring against them, but they were never going to make it in Hollywood. This killjoy sadism was preeminent in the con, even though the Con Queen made money too. Nicoletta Kotsianas, a managing director with K2 Intelligence who was hired by impersonated Hollywood executives to investigate the scam, said that the con probably netted $1.5 million to $2 million in total. Multiple victims said they handed over hundreds of dollars per day for the driver and “driving fees,” and often hundreds of dollars for “photo permits,” “rebooking fees,” or other supposed essentials. The Queen had, according to an Indonesian detective, at least two accomplices on the ground in Jakarta, who collected these fees. Gauging from information from victims we spoke with, notwithstanding any payment to possible accomplices, the Con Queen usually only made a few thousand dollars per victim—aside from those conned by her several times, who traveled back and forth to Indonesia still hoping the big break was on the horizon—but it all added up.
It took us months to figure out who was allegedly behind the Con Queen scam. Our break, in the end, was a falsified passport. Greg Mandarano, a screenwriter victim from Long Island, told us he’d met the scammer—in person, six times. So he had personal details about this man he knew as the producer Anand Sippy (another fake name), as well as four photos of the man, plus a copy of the falsified passport with a different name—Gobind Lal Tahil.
That name, which also turned out to be fake, was a kind of skeleton key. We sent photos and a copy of the passport to Ben Decker, a digital investigator who specializes in investigating misinformation. Decker came back to us the next day with developments. He’d found an old Asian trade magazine story in the internet archive—the original version had been erased from the web—that tied this name, Gobind Lal, to another Indonesian, Rudy Sutopo. It was an announcement that an Indonesian company had acquired the rights to a foreign miniseries called The Black Widow, which would be produced under the creative direction of the two men.
Decker also found plenty online about Rudy Sutopo. He was an experienced financial criminal and con man—a man who’d defrauded a company of millions of dollars while pretending, in public, to be a man of great means, driving foreign cars. Ultimately, Sutopo went to prison for involvement in the defrauding of a company, but while he was there, an Indonesian soap opera star fell in love with him. (One of the things we learned during our reporting is that Indonesian prisons are places where you can do a fair amount of partying and romancing if you have the funds to grease palms.)
