Hollywood Con Queen | 4. Cat and Mouse
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Campsite Media. Hello? What is this? What do you want me to say? What is going on here? Oh, it's just a chameleon. Chameleon. Okay. You're listening to Chameleon, a production of Campsite Media. Hey, everyone. I just wanted to check in and let you all know that I'm overwhelmed by the support and messages. Photographer Carly Rudd's Instagram post about her trip to Jakarta really raised the profile of the Indonesia scam among creatives in and around Hollywood.

But even before that, entertainment reporters were starting to catch wind of this weird-ass story. That was a good thing for victims. Normally the way you get a lot of attention for a scandal is the press. And as word of this fake movie scam got out, it began to blow up. Big time. Nicole, the private investigator we met last week in Chapter 3, was happy to encourage this. Because usually when a specific scam gets exposed, the scammer gives up. Which makes publicity one of a fraud hunter's most potent weapons.

The first big story in The Hollywood Reporter focused on the fake Chinese movies, like the one Heather thought she was working on. Later, there was some broadcast coverage, like NPR. It's a story that sounds like a Hollywood movie. For several years, creative professionals have been lured to Indonesia on the promise of work from major Hollywood figures. Tricked out of thousands of dollars, the promised work is a mysterious figure known as the Con Queen of Hollywood.

The Con Queen. Reporters liked that nickname for the mastermind, and it began to stick. Here's another story from E! News. "Mel's here with a really fascinating story. It's the Con Queen of Hollywood." "According to the Hollywood Reporter, she has been impersonating high-powered female executives from big studios like Marvel, and she's been..." Vanessa, it turns out, knows this reporter. "Yeah, that's Mel, whose full name is Melanie Bronley. She used to work in magazines.

It's possible that both Josh and I worked right next to her at some point at some magazines that all had offices on the same floor. In this segment, Mel's playing a bit of tape of our scammer. It's one that we've actually played on this podcast already. Mel is a very good reporter. She's got super deep sources in Hollywood.

But in this case, she didn't really get into who was doing what here. She just made a joke. Okay, so guys, that is like the worst British accent I've ever heard in my life. I was about to say. I'm offended for you. This is Chameleon, the story of the Hollywood con queen. And I'm Josh Dean. Chapter four, cat and mouse. That clip on E! News was nice chatter, and stories about the con queen did make the rounds of the Hollywood trades.

But surprisingly, this burst of publicity did nothing to stop the scam or solve the mystery of who was behind it. That was going to require some real grunt investigative work by a hunter with skills. Someone like Nicole at K2. As we said last episode, Nicole had figured out that it was just one person, but she didn't know who. Working for K2 Intelligence, though, she had a lot of support. K2 is a pretty big deal in the investigations world.

It was founded by Jules Kroll, a legend in the industry, and his son Jeremy. Here's Jules. The intelligence business has changed rather remarkably in recent years, and I would attribute it to two factors. One is the internet. The second thing is the globalization of the business, which means the opportunities are international and the problems are international. And here's Jeremy. I think what makes K2 intelligence different from K2

the competitive field as our track record and our experience that's from a promotional video on k2's youtube channel which is why it has the weird music behind it but it's worth boasting

K2 is one of the biggest and most respected corporate investigations firms in the world. And one of their specialties is cyber intelligence and cyber attacks. Here's another K2 investigator from the firm's promotional video. The idea that you can just throw a huge amount of data at us and we can come back to you in a matter of a day or two and say, here are five or ten things that are really notable and that you should be paying attention to is just a radical change from the way other people work.

One funny thing worth noting, Jules Kroll's other son, Nick Kroll, is a famous comedian and a Hollywood star himself. You might know him from The Kroll Show, which ran for three seasons on Comedy Central. He also played that obnoxious DJ on Parks and Rec. The only douche I let clean my douche is the douche. And now he does a podcast with John Mulaney based on their hit Broadway show and Netflix special, Oh Hello. You know when you get to the bottom of a tub of hummus?

And you can't fit your carrot in there, so you gotta use your fingies to scoop it out. So K2 has closer ties to Hollywood than your average white-collar investigations firm. But when we went to visit Nicole at her offices, they weren't exactly Hollywood-looking. I'm not talking about her home office, the one in New Jersey. This was her other base of operations, the one in Manhattan.

K2's headquarters is in Midtown, in a fancy glass building. But the offices themselves are pretty basic. Gray carpeting, dropped ceilings, rows of cubicles. You could easily be at an insurance company. Nicole and K2's public relations rep met us outside a windowless conference room. On the door of the room, the PR person had taped up a handwritten sign that said, "Recording in progress. Please be quiet." In this meeting, Nicole wasn't talking about bath time. She sat across from us at a small table wearing a blazer.

She came off kind of like a CNN anchor, efficient and pleasant. She said that she'd been hooked by the Con Queen case because it was so different.

Having worked a couple of impersonation cases before this one, it was immediately apparent that this was not, we weren't dealing with the same type of person, basically. Nicole does mostly dry stuff for her job. Being a private investigator, it turns out, is a lot of computer work. In that way, it's a lot like her former life. Before K2, Nicole spent 15 years as a journalist. Yeah, I went to K2.

Specifically, she worked in the financial sector. Yeah.

structured finance, CDOs, ABS finance, so things that really nobody had been paying attention to until it all blew up. What a good reporter does, as any of us who do this job can attest, is call people and then call more people and then call even more people. You have to be persistent or, as some people would see it, annoying. Private investigators do basically the same thing.

The more cooperation Nicole got from victims of the scam, the more she was able to zero in on the con queen, particularly when some of them began to share audio recordings of the scammer in action. I started getting recordings of, you know, this assistant or lawyer or a lower-level producer who was going to connect you to this other producer. And once I heard that voice, it was pretty clear that it was the woman. It was the same cadence. It was the same accents.

Nicole knew before anyone else that this was the work of a single person, one twisted mastermind. This enormously important revelation, in theory, should have made the case easier to solve. But this scammer, whoever it was, knew how to stay hidden. The phone numbers were leading nowhere. The emails were leading nowhere. They had done a good job of covering their tracks, as most scammers are pretty well-versed in how to do that. This was tedious work.

Hours of slogging through documents and technical information. Comparing notes, comparing IP addresses, comparing, you know, the PDFs that were being sent. Open source reporting bore little fruit. But with the cooperation of her clients, Nicole was able to play a new card. A suit was filed in California State Court against Jane Doe. California because that's where the women who hired Nicole lived. They were film executives.

And Jane or John Doe is how you file suit against a perpetrator if you don't know his or her real name. And because, in this case, the perp seemed to be a woman, they went with Jane. This lawsuit gave Nicole and K2's lawyers subpoena power. You've heard that term a million times on TV shows. That's a subpoena, not a party invitation. So get us the records or go to jail for contempt.

Here's how an attorney named Keith Davidson explains it in one of his many explanatory, bite-sized legal advice spots on YouTube. Subpoenas are the weapons of choice to go out and find the evidence you need for your case from third parties. These are independent parties who are not a party to your lawsuit. Basically, getting slapped with a subpoena means you absolutely have to talk. The law is now compelling you to do so. Fail to cooperate and you could be jailed.

Subpoenas work on companies too, even or especially when they try to plead that they're protecting the privacy of customers. So Nicole would use the information she got from victims to work within the legal system to get more information. Victims like Heather. She managed to pull some metadata off my emails, which helped...

with the FBI, as I understand it, because they were able to subpoena some people and find out some information. And then we could make requests of some of the entities that were being utilized to set up phone numbers and domains. Having subpoena power enabled Nicole to unlock information hidden away from the public and also to aggressively fight the scammers' tactics. Once a week, we were hearing from a new person who had been to Indonesia, so it was quite disturbing.

and really starting to interfere, I think, in just, you know, what she's trying to do on a day-to-day basis. Nicole means she was interfering with the con queen's setup, the stuff she was trying to do each day. But the con queen was clever, elusive, and very good at mimicking a person's internet presence. Like, one of the powerful women impersonated was Amy Pascal, former head of Sony Pictures. Amy now runs a production company called Pascal Pictures.

So the mimic registered and used the domain name Pascal Productions, assuming, correctly, that no one is going to look at an email from [email protected] and notice that it should actually be [email protected]. I mean, I wouldn't catch that difference. And if I wanted a lucrative job badly enough, I might miss all kinds of red flags. Nicole began to play whack-a-mole.

Every time she heard about one of these fake web domain cases, she'd contact the web host and have that site taken down. These aggressive tactics worked. The con queen actually gave up on Nicole's original client, that producer. Our scam artist was running from Nicole, but Nicole wasn't far behind. Nicole probed for holes in the scammers' operational security. There just weren't any. Scams tend to be pretty simple. They're unsophisticated by nature, built for volume. But this one, it was different.

Accounts were registered in fake names, internet traffic routed through numerous IPs around the world, and very often intermediaries were used. For example, whoever was behind the scam wasn't the one making these slick PDFs for movies that never existed, or designing websites that could conceivably be owned by powerful producers.

That was the work of, like, some freelancer in Greece who assumed that he had been hired by a legitimate producer. So the mastermind asks somebody in Indonesia, get me a translator or whatever. And so, you know, I've talked to those people and said, you know, who are you working for? Hoping that would lead me to them.

And they said, you know, I don't know. I was asked by my cousin. This is all I know. But they always paid me on time. And I just, you know, people would show up. Americans or Brits would show up and I would give them a tour. These people, you know, they exchanged Facebook information. They became friendly. And so then when the victim said, you know, you were working for this scam, they're horrified.

So the con queen isn't just fooling her victims and the investigators and the authorities. Apparently, she's keeping her own subcontractors in the dark too, keeping them quiet and unaware with regular payouts. There's a method to the madness to be able to pull off this scam. You know, it's a full-time job. There's probably Excel sheets tracking, you know, victims in progress, people in Indonesia, people I'm going to call today as this person, new personas.

you're going to pick up this guy at Jakarta today, put the money in the bank account. So there's a lot of moving pieces here, and we know it's only one person. But there's one thing that doesn't make sense. How does she get her hands on the victim's money? For us, it still wasn't adding up. We'll talk about that after the break.

Hey, Chameleon listeners. It's Josh Dean here, your host of season one, Hollywood Con Queen. And I'm here today to talk to you about food, a thing I love. I also love to cook, but I rarely have time, which is why I love Factors. No prep, no mess meals. These fresh, never frozen meals are dietitian approved and ready to eat in just two minutes, which is about as long as it takes me to do this ad twice.

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You're listening to Chameleon from Campside Media. So, yeah, one of the things that kept bothering us was the money. Vanessa and I discussed this part of the scam a lot. It was a sticking point for us and for our friends and spouses and everyone else we told about this story. On the surface, it just didn't make any sense. These small amounts handed over to random people in Jakarta. How exactly was the victim's money finding its way into the scammers' pockets?

We couldn't work it out. So that $15,000 is going to the airlines. Like, there's no way any of that money is going to the scammers unless they own the airlines, which...

As far as we know, they do not. Right. So the people are going over there, they're giving $15,000 and a business class ticket to the airline. Then they're in some cases paying for their hotel. In some cases, the con artist is carrying the hotel. But what we know they're handing over in terms of money is they're giving money to the driver. So every day they're there, they're giving some place between a few hundred dollars to the driver and

$1,000 to drivers, something like that. There will often be some excuse made up where it's like, oh, I forgot to tell you that your flight was changed, so there's a change fee of $500. Or, oh, we need a permit to shoot at that cultural site. Right, exactly. So the driver's driving them to an ATM, and they're taking out the money and handing it over. That much is clear. That's the money that somebody is getting.

So it's in every case just a few hundred dollars to maybe a thousand. And they're under the impression that this will all be reimbursed. It's just like, oh, I forgot to tell you that, by the way, there's this fee for this one cultural site. And if you could just pay for that, we'll of course pay you back along with the rest of your expenses. Just like your $15,000 business class airfare. Right. The money just hasn't hit the account yet. There's always just some glitch in the banking system.

system like international wires take an extra day and oh we put it in too late yeah international wires do take a long time the subject came up every time i talked to a victim too like omri rose that actor we met in l.a the only cash that they ever earn is in the envelope that you hand the cab driver that's again the great mystery is like the only cash they make is envelope driver thousand dollars thousand a hundred what are they making

$500 to $750 tops if you only give $1,000. If you give more, then obviously there's a bigger margin, depending on how much the hotel and driver and such cost per day in Jakarta. But how much work is that? How many of those can you do per day? Maybe at best, at best, two people a day with the one driver because the traffic's so bad. And now I had him for three days. So how much are you making? $1,000 a week? $1,000?

It seems like you could make more working at Walmart. But as we've established, the con queen works in volume. A thousand a week, times many weeks, times many victims, over and over. Nicole, of course, had also thought a lot about the money. And she had some answers for us about how it worked. So it's always tailored, but you're told that there's going to be a logistics company that's going to take you around...

And so you're going to have to just pay them up front. And so you have to hand over cash. You have to go to one specific money changer to exchange. It's a detail you might recall that we heard from Eddie back in Chapter 1. So the handler was like, I'll go exchange your money for you.

And I'm like, okay. So I give him like a thousand bucks. And then you hand your cash to a guy on a moped and he speeds away. And usually he's speeding faster than the car to get to the hotel and then they pay the hotel up front because that's the one thing they cover. They will pay for the hotel. The remaining money for the logistics or whatever remained after the hotel fees, that was all getting back to the scam artists through traditional banking channels.

This would seem to incriminate some of the people on the ground in Jakarta, like this guy on the moped. They take a cut so the driver and the money man get their cut. The driver seems obvious. We've thought for some time that he has to be in on it, even if Heather and some other people who met him personally don't think so. He didn't give off that vibe.

Heather sent me recordings of the driver that she'd made that evening when she was freaking out in the back of the cab. They'd been on her phone ever since, and she'd totally forgotten about them until I asked. So we got the phone recordings from Heather, and then we got a friend of our producer's who speaks Indonesian to send us some translations.

He's talking like he's driving. He's talking and around and around and around and never really going straight to the point. He's from Jakarta. Not a very high education. The person on the other side of the call is asking him for money.

which he owes and which he has to deliver in a few days time and that's why he's he mentioned that he's been driving for a bread car which is indonesia's version of

The guy also mentions that he's got Heather in the car. And he's taking her on a circuitous route. Remember how afraid she was about that?

He emphasized that he's avoiding Sudirman, which is a street in Jakarta and it's a central business district street. Because usually on Sudirman Street, there's always a police check for the vehicle registration certificate.

and he said that that's why he's been avoiding that street. - So the driver wasn't taking this circuitous route to screw with Heather. There were no nefarious motives, at least according to this tape.

He was just trying to avoid a police checkpoint. But the weird thing about this is the translator doesn't say anything in particular about Heather. And he certainly doesn't talk about another person who's directing this whole thing. And he emphasized again that he's been driving GrabCar recently and he hasn't had holidays. It doesn't really sound like the driver is in on this big scam to us, at least not as some active participant.

But when we asked Nicole about it, she had a different opinion. I think the driver is an accomplice. He's been driving people around for two years, and it always ends the same way with someone screaming on the phone and then not showing up for the pickup the next day. So you would think he would say, I think what they think is that people are just being ripped off.

Remember, the driver doesn't speak English, or he pretends not to anyway. I don't think they necessarily know that the money's never being reimbursed or really what the ultimate scam is. The more you talk to Nicole, the more you understand about what you're facing here. And she's still got one big revelation up her sleeve. Can you guess what it is? The answer, after the break. You're listening to Chameleon from Campside Media.

Weeks became months, and as the months piled up, the Con Queen case just sort of overwhelmed Nicole. She worked on it a lot late into the night when her kids were asleep. It had begun as a seemingly simple stop-the-impersonator job, almost a favor to that L.A. lawyer who called her out of the blue, and quickly evolved into a complex investigation into what felt like this sprawling conspiracy.

It was so much bigger than she ever imagined. I wouldn't even know how to total the amount of time that I've spent on it, but it was always, it's a passion project. We would bill clients when it was appropriate, but at some point it was not about the billings. It was just about the case. It would be...

immeasurable amount of hours. Like being in bed thinking about it. Yeah. Oh, no, like waking up in the middle of the night and like, oh, I didn't think of that connection. Or, you know, somebody calls you back that you've been waiting months and they open up a little bit and tell you some information that's really helpful. So, you know, bordering on harassment on my part, you know, please talk to me.

Thing is, this wasn't wasted effort. Nicole was making progress. Slowly but surely chipping away at the scammer's wall. And as the months went by, Nicole increasingly had a feeling. This was different than her feeling that the scam wasn't run by a network of criminals. That it was the work of one person. The evidence really had just pointed to that. This was more of a gut thing. And the more Nicole listened to tape...

The more she couldn't shake this feeling she had about the voices. My accent is my accent. I'm not a European. Let me talk to the vendor's manager because they're the ones who take care of that. Don't worry about that. Don't worry about that. To get you there? Not a problem. To get you a hotel? Not a problem. You have an initial deposit. That's not a problem. It's not a problem. There will be a collector at the hotel that will give you a receipt. So that should be in your account.

by end of business Tuesday. By Wednesday, you have it in your account. I will put that in writing tomorrow and you'll get it booked.

Some journalists who covered the case had gotten two professional linguists to listen to some of the con artists' voices. And these linguists, experts at analyzing people's tics and inflections, had missed the thing that Nicole was starting to circle around. We got to a point where we sort of had amassed a number of recordings and a lot of people in the office weighing in. Nicole listened to those recordings over and over. She shared them with her colleagues at K2.

And the more they listened, the more they heard the same peculiarities. We always had it in the back of our mind, but a hunch is not good enough to go on in what we do. But, uh, you know, at that point, it, I think, you know, it was, um,

There was just something off about these voices. There were different accents, Asian accents, American accents, British accents. Like I said, we were getting more recordings of the lawyer or the assistant, but there were characteristics that were similar throughout the calls. Don't worry about that. Don't worry about that. So certain turns of phrase, cadence, the way...

The sentences would end and trail off. It was really like the personality was coming through the voices. So it, at that point, went from sort of a hunch to the working theory. That theory? Well, it was a corker. You know, but it's just that I don't know how to say it. And it's a theory that turned out to be true.

The famous con queen of Hollywood who'd convinced hundreds of people, including two linguists, that she was a rotating cast of powerful, even famous women? She was, uh, yeah, she's a man. Once you know, it almost seems obvious.

Almost. Because the scam would have never worked if it had been obvious to the Marks that they were talking to an impersonator. A woman who wasn't actually a woman. Take Mandy, for instance, the agent from England. Or Anna, the Polish makeup artist. I know how shocked they were when they found out, because they both heard it from me. And at what time, what point did you learn, was it the second story that revealed that it was a man? At what point did you realize it was not a woman? What do you mean it's a man? I didn't know.

You didn't know that? What? Leslie's a man? It is a man, yes. Hang on a minute, James. Leslie's a man.

Jane, by the way, is Mandy's assistant. How come, though? So I take it you've never... Oh, my God. No. No. I'm a bad detective. Oh, my goodness. I didn't have a clue. Are you joking? No. No. No, she didn't tell me that. Yeah. Oh, I'm standing, but my jar is literally, like, into China right now. Like...

I know. Oh, Jesus Christ. And Andy, who'd spent more than a year obsessing over this story, he was dumbstruck too. I talked to this person. There is not even a question in my mind that it's not a woman. No, I mean, like, I didn't even think about it. Like, why would I think that? Like, sounded like a woman, had the mannerisms of the phone like a woman, was representing to be a woman that I can look up and see that this is a real woman in real life.

The funny thing is, if Nicole's being honest, her husband called it way earlier than she did. So my husband, and he would appreciate the credit, he said it was a man pretty early on. Yeah, he was like, that sounds like a man. That's a dude. These revelations that it was one person and that the con queen was a man, they just intensified Nicole's drive to the extent that this no longer felt like a job. She was taking all this personally.

And wherever she went, the case followed. Like on vacation with her family. I went to Greece last year for three weeks and the tips just started pouring in and I

none of them were actually related to reality in the end, but people just had a lot of theories about who this was. And so, you know, I had to look into all of those and kind of make sense of them. And yeah, I was sitting on a balcony. I was in Chios at night, two in the morning in Greece time, just because it wasn't the sort of case that I could put out of office for, right? Right.

Her family wasn't upset. They were invested, too. I mean, everybody. What's going on with the con queen? Did you catch the con queen yet? Versus credit derivatives, it's a lot easier to explain to my family what I do. My five-year-old knows. I'm trying to catch a bad guy.

If Nicole doesn't take that call at bath time or get so invested in the case or realize that the con queen is actually a con king, it's not hard to imagine that no one is hunting the scammer, even today. Because without Nicole and K2...

Who is gathering these stories and totaling the cases? I mean, here we are, five years after Heather went to Jakarta, still chasing one single perpetrator. He's acting with reckless abandon as if he doesn't care whether or not he gets caught. Or, more likely, he's convinced there's nobody out there who can actually catch him. We'll see about that. Next time on Chameleon...

Another woman joins the fight. It makes me feel horrible because I bet you there's a lot of people that might be embarrassed that haven't come forward.

We go to visit one of Hollywood's most powerful producers, the producer of 300 and Wonder Woman. She's a very different victim of the con queen scam and a woman who wasn't just about to sit back and take this abuse. It's sickening. It makes me sick to my stomach. I just want people to know that you can't trust everybody, and if it seems too good to be true, sometimes it is. Soft cross on the tan racket

Chameleon is a production of Campside Media. It's developed, created, and written by Vanessa Grigoriadis and me, Josh Dean. The executive producer is Mark McAdam. Our associate producer is Abakara Don. Fact-checking by Callie Hitchcock. Archival research by Megan Shubb. Editorial support by Doug Slawin, Natalia Winkleman, and Ashley Ann Krigbaum. Our technical consultant is Ben Decker of Mamedica.

Our theme song is Bad Checks by Houses. Sound design and additional music by Mark McAdam. Our consulting producers are Andy Horwitz at Atlas Entertainment and Charles Mastropietro at Circle of Confusion. The executive producers at Campside Media are me, Josh Dean, Vanessa Grigoriadis, Adam Hoff, and Matt Scher. If you enjoyed Chameleon, please rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts. It helps other listeners like you find the show.

And make sure to subscribe to the show on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you have any information about the Con Queen scam or were a victim and would like to share your story, please call 203-807-4453. You can also email us at chameleonpod at gmail.com. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.