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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. All passengers and cabin crew should now be seated with their seatbelts securely fastened. The cabin lights will remain dim for landing. I was just so relieved to be, to have not been gang raped or abducted. Remember last week when Heather got home safe?
Even though she was back in London, Heather was traumatized for months afterwards. It's affected me in ways that are not necessarily glaringly obvious or on the surface. I have had trauma counseling because I feel like any trauma for anyone, no matter how you react to it, needs to be shaken out of your body somehow, however you do that, spiritually or physically or mentally. Heather actually did this. She shook her body.
It's based on the theory that when animals are traumatized, when they run away from a lion or something, they lie down and shake and then they feel better. And they forget the trauma. It's something I learned at a sanctuary in Thailand. And it's kind of a really beautiful way of releasing stuff that you hold on to. Heather was also worried about someone else. Like, where's Anna? The other makeup artist, Anna. The one she'd heard about from that kind Indonesian woman at the theater when she first got to Jakarta.
Guess where Anna was when Heather's agent finally reached her? In the backseat of a car, still in Jakarta, in traffic with a driver who spoke very little English. I got like a strange phone call from a British phone number. This, you probably guessed, is Anna. She's Polish, so English isn't her first language. It was a representative of Heather Pritchard.
I was so confused between, you know, the Chinese production and the lady that she called me. And I'm like, I don't know who you are. Anna was caught totally off guard. Who was lying here? You know, I wasn't really sure 100% what was going on right now. I'm like, oh my God, like...
And the meteor strike my head, like, who I supposed to believe? Anna didn't know what to think because she was still hearing a lot from Leslie, the Chinese film producer, who was getting weirder and more erratic by the day. Like, Leslie had been getting on Anna's case about her social media. She phoned me up telling me why I'm posting pictures on Instagram and on my Facebook. And I'm like, okay, that is really weird. Like, you're stalking me right now?
I didn't say anything about the movie or anything. I'm just, you know, having, you know, a trip. So she filmed me really bad, whatever I was doing. And she's like, oh, you lost your chance to
The director didn't really like your behavior. So she was trying also to manipulate me and I was like in tears because I'm a very sensitive person. It was a stretch for her just to cover her own airfare, to get to Jakarta. I also realized after I did invoice them to get my money back and I was calling to German bank, to Chinese bank and nobody know anything.
So I'm like, oh, fucking hell. I lost like six and a half thousand pounds. It's a lot of money for a freelancer to lose. But there was something else. The thing is,
There is another side of the story because I went there second time. You heard that right. When Heather's agent reached Anna, that was her second trip to scout around Jakarta at the request of this mysterious movie lady. Everything was looking, you know, like from a fairy tale. You know, dreams come true, but not this one. Anna was out around $10,000. She felt crushed and ashamed and alone. But of course, she wasn't alone. Not even close.
As we're about to find out, the scam had its tentacles spread far and wide, preying on artists like Heather and Anna, and on trainers like Eddie, and so many more people. Every victim seemed to lead us to five more victims. But what the hell was this all about? And how many people were behind it? All I could picture was, like, a phone bank of women sitting at long tables and headsets, just emailing and calling people around the world, playing all kinds of characters. Imagine.
And what's kind of amazing is when you imagine the women sitting at this phone bank, the people they're pretending to be when they make their calls are basically every powerful woman in Hollywood.
The real one. This is Chameleon, the story of the Hollywood con queen. I'm Josh Dean. Chapter 3, Into the Rabbit Hole.
So, some people out there concocted this scheme maybe four years ago to lure young or at least up-and-coming Hollywood gig workers to Indonesia to work on some project, a movie or a TV show. Then, when these workers get over there, there is no movie. It's just a bunch of driving around.
This is such a bizarre thing to do to people, and someone had to get to the bottom of it. It's just a surprise that the first person to pick up the trail would end up being a mom of two from New Jersey. The first time that mom heard about the scam, she was just trying to get her kids into the bathtub. This was late 2017.
That's when her phone rang. So when I got the first call from the lawyer, I actually was home trying to wrangle my kids for bath time. And I saw his contact calling and I, you know, he's at a Hollywood law firm. So I figured I should pick up the phone. That's Nicoletta Katsianis. But to most people, she goes by Nicole. It fits her job. She's a private investigator.
Nicole works from home a lot, so getting a call at inopportune moments, like in the evening at bath time, isn't so unusual. I'm often on the phone as I'm doing all sorts of other things. Sometimes it's throwing Cheerios at the kids to keep them at bay for a couple of minutes.
Nicole's work isn't exactly James Bond stuff. She sits at a couple computer screens in her home office doing background searches on executive hires, litigation support, due diligence during mergers, asset searches. A lot of the time, her clients are companies. A client will have won a judgment against a party and they're not paying up. And so we help find the assets and seize the assets. And that includes everything from yachts and...
Priceless art. But this call that she got amidst the bubbles and splashes, it was different. It was a Hollywood lawyer who had brought Nicole business before. This time he had a client, a powerful, high-profile female movie producer whose identity had been stolen, but not in the typical way. Like, this wasn't to set up fake accounts or credit cards. Some mysterious con artist had become her, in a sense. Sound familiar? The client in this case wants to stay anonymous, so we won't be mentioning her name.
I thought it was more in line with what we typically work on in impersonation cases, which either fall into two categories. It's a kook or it's a financial goal. We weren't seeing that initially, so we weren't really sure what category to put it into for a while. Was this person a stalker?
Nicole wondered about that. We didn't understand why this person was doing it. And so all we really were doing in the beginning was trying to understand the motivation. And we didn't have a whole bunch of clues at that point as to the who or even the why. Of course, Nicole was missing a key piece. She hadn't yet heard about the other side of the scam, the other victims, the Eddies and Heathers and Annas, who'd been baited into these trips.
Nobody we spoke to initially said, "I was asked to get on a plane and go to Indonesia." And it wasn't until a couple of weeks later that we heard from the first victim who was in Indonesia at the point that they put two and two together, realized they were being scammed, contacted our client's real office. We thought this was just a prank, basically. And now you're saying people are being asked to go to Indonesia. What's going on? And so at that point, everything changed.
This realization that it wasn't just one very powerful victim being messed with really turned the case on its head for Nicole. So I started picking up the phone and talking to some of the people who had gone through this experience. Nicole means that she'd reached out to people who'd made this bizarre journey from Hollywood or London or wherever to Indonesia.
Often, Nicole would hear about some person who'd gone to Jakarta secondhand, in the way that we were hearing about people too, from other victims. One mark passes you on to another. And like us, she would just pick up the phone and call these marks, cold.
We started calling the people who were getting these calls and trying to pick their brain about, "Who do you think this is? Did it sound like it really was an American? Did it sound like they worked in Hollywood? What was your take on who you were speaking to?" The victims seemed surprised to be getting these calls. Not everyone was excited about it. A lot of former military guys who work in private security, you know, having spoken to them,
They do not want their name affiliated with this. They don't want it to be known that they were scammed by this because they believe that this is something that they should have picked up on and that it will reflect badly on them. Heather, the makeup artist, was a little more receptive. I was really interested that she got in touch with me because I knew that when it hit America and it hit some bigger people than me...
And selfishly that made me, it vindicated me because I thought, oh, I'm not the only one. There are others, like, which is an awful thing to think because you don't want it to happen to anyone else. But when it does, it makes you feel less stupid, right?
But even so, she was a little wary of Nicole. Was she legit? Once we've been scammed, you do get suspicious and your tummy goes in a knot. Nicole would kill me if she heard me saying this because we've swapped so many stories and confided in each other. But I just still have this mistrust of anyone who's involved in this story at all.
It's understandable. These people, the marks, were already rattled. And here was another random woman calling out of the blue, claiming to be some authority and wanting them to spill their guts to her. Think about where these people were.
Heather had tried to report the crime, or whatever it was, when she got back to London by reaching back out to her contact at the consulate. She kept forwarding it to various people and no one kept replying. And she even said, like, they've said they can't do anything about it. She's forwarded it to the embassy in Jakarta in case they ever get a phone call from a frantic person, they'll be aware of it or whatever. I'm like, oh, that's great.
But no one's interested in investigating or spending money or time or energy on something where there's no real victim. Like, I get it. They're like, well, did they get murdered? Did they get raped? Did someone traffic them? Did they have drugs in their bag? Like, what was the scam? I guess we're so desensitised nowadays to crime and murder and death and whatever that unless someone's actually bleeding or dying or traumatised to death...
It's not a big deal, you know? I'm exaggerating slightly to make a point, but you know what I mean. Heather felt almost silly. There was shame about the scam, of course, and also shame because she wasn't taken seriously.
Eddie, our trainer from Chapter One, he had tried to report the scam too, by calling his local cops in Ventura. I called Ventura Police Department and they're like, "Well, we really don't do cyber crimes, stuff like that." And that's exactly what it seems like. You know, did you, were you harmed at any point? Were you held up at any point? Did they physically take money from you? Did they take money from your bank account? And I was like, "No." Did they take money from you? "No." Were you robbed? "No." You willingly give them the money.
Hearing about that issue the victims were having, trying to report the crime, it clarified something for me.
Almost from the day we first heard about this scam, we had been obsessing about the money. The amounts of cash that the marks handed over in Jakarta were just so small, like a couple thousand bucks max. And every time I told someone a version of this story, they wondered the same thing. How were these scammers making any money? But what if that's the idea? What if the relatively small amounts of money paid out as fees and permits and to the cab driver is a feature of this scam, not a bug?
Stealing large amounts of money attracts cops, makes enemies. Stealing small amounts? It's just annoying. And kind of brilliant. Especially when you peel back the layers even further. More on that after the break.
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You're listening to Chameleon from Campside Media. The way people felt when they heard from Nicole, almost ashamed to tell their stories, we were getting a lot of that too. Shame is a powerful emotion, and a natural one. Most everyone who falls for a con will feel some amount of shame. Victims often don't ever talk about it.
And this is something serial con artists know. Their success depends on it. Shame is exactly what they use to prevent people from talking about it. Shame and fear of shame and fear of whatever. Heather went to Jakarta in 2016. We think that's the year the con started, but we're not 100% sure. We can be sure, however, that it's gone on basically unabated ever since.
And there were so many people out there who felt like suckers, like they alone stepped in shit. You could say the process of reporting this podcast was kind of like opening a set of Matryoshka dolls, those old wooden nesting dolls from Russia.
Every time we talked to one victim, she or he led us to the next one. We'd open the doll head and peer inside, and it was another person who had experienced a very similar-sounding scam. A lot of the rest of this episode is going to be us meeting some of those victims, and, as the clues mount up, finding out exactly who is manning that phone bank. The victim we're going to talk to now, she united a lot of them. Her name is Carly Rudd.
Carly went to Jakarta in January 2019 with her husband. When they got back from Indonesia, she did something very different than the other victims. Carly didn't just lay low and feel embarrassed. Instead, she posted about what happened to her on Instagram the day after landing in New York. Here's what she said. Hey guys, I don't normally do this, but I...
She was telling everyone, thousands of followers, what happened.
victim to a highly elaborate international business scam. I flew to Indonesia under the impression that I was being hired for a photography assignment. Arriving in Jakarta, Indonesia, things escalated. Potential kidnapping heist. I'm pretty shaken up by the whole experience, but at the end of the day, I'm happy to be safe and I'm back in the U.S. And yeah, thanks guys for listening.
Carly's post was a turning point in the story because it was so widely seen. Nicole, the investigator, had reached a lot of victims, dozens at least, but there were so many more out there. When Carly's post went viral, she became a kind of Pied Piper for victims of the scam. All those lonely folks who had been embarrassed and ashamed couldn't believe that so many others had fallen into the same trap.
It helped. They felt better. A little. Within 24 hours, I probably heard from hundreds of people that had been affected by the same scam. And over the course of that next week, just was completely inundated with
people contacting me and telling me that they, you know, knew somebody that something similar had happened to or people that were literally on the ground in the car with the driver and a friend of theirs sent them my blog post and they realized they were in the car with the same driver because I had a photograph of him on my blog. Let me pause a second here. Carly even heard from a person who was in Jakarta in the driver's car when she saw Carly's post.
I can't stop picturing that moment. This woman just flipping through her phone in the backseat of a cab, sees this shared post and just freezes. Oh shit, I'm being scammed right now.
Multiple other people over the course of, you know, this year now, more than multiple hundreds, like I said, have just still been affected by this scam artist. So you think hundreds, plural, in the past year who have actually gone to Jakarta? And that's just the people that I've had direct contact with. I wouldn't be surprised if it's more. Not a few, not a dozen, hundreds of people, possibly up to a thousand or more.
This blew Carly's mind. And ours. That volume is astounding. Multiply $1,000 by, say, $1,500, and suddenly the money that people kept asking about, it isn't so small. That's $1.5 million. We thought for a while that this scam was just quirky, that it was some prank and whoever was behind it got lucky that it worked more than once. But luck doesn't work a thousand times. The scope of this was just dizzying.
Nicole felt like that, as she was sucked into the rabbit hole. And so did we. The scam is, if nothing else, a lot of time and detail management. The kind of operation that would require one hell of an organized team, running spreadsheets and fake websites and just complicated logistics. Was this a cabal of angry production managers?
So we were thinking about that when we were talking to Carly. But then she emailed us a tape recording that was amazing. On that tape, there was something that we'd heard about before. So before the targets talked to the powerful woman, a lot of times they talked to an assistant. This is pretty normal in Hollywood. Hi, Aaron. How are you? This is Carly. Hey, Carly. How's it going?
So this particular assistant doesn't sound like a normal Hollywood assistant. Like, he's not being officious or, please hold for my boss so-and-so. This assistant actually kind of sounds like he's out of a Martin Scorsese movie. Like, he spends time in taxi depots. Yeah, good question. Let me talk to the vendor's manager because they're the ones who take care of that. Yeah, I just want to make sure the hotel is aware that we changed plans and we're staying one more night.
Okay. All right, perfect. Okay, I'll speak to you then. This guy, Aaron from New York, was just one of many assistants we heard about. Sometimes they'd have a British accent or they'd sound Chinese. And Eddie Scammer was American with an American assistant.
Eddie also talked to a male lawyer. There was a point where I was on the phone and there was a three-way call with a lawyer, right? With a man that was there, hey, Eddie, da-da-da, all this stuff, I just want to go over everything. And it's like, okay, and then you would hear D. Backish say, okay, Eddie, are you satisfied, da-da-da? Here, and like back and forth, and you're like, okay. So like a cast of characters. That's pretty nuts. But I also heard about something even crazier. This mysterious casting agent.
We found an actor who actually had an audition in Jakarta in person. We'll meet him and hear about that weird-ass audition after the break. You're listening to Chameleon from Campside Media. We were talking about something that honestly shocked us, a twist we hadn't seen coming.
This was a phone and email scam, a trail of sham movies and producers who never were. But this one victim, an actor, had a very unique experience on his trip to Jakarta. He had an actual audition with a casting agent in an Indonesian high-rise. This actor's name is Omri Rose, and I met him, like always, from another contact. Omri lives in LA now. I met him at his friend's house, a little craftsman in the valley. Sherman Oaks, to be exact.
Omri's tall and fit. He served in the Israeli military before he was an actor. I'm Omri Rose. I'm an actor, voice actor, and script doctor. I do a lot of voice work. I can hear it. You have a very good voice. Oh, thank you. Thank you. It's like immediately apparent. I can close my eyes and imagine your voice. Well, buy Wrigley's Chewing Gum because I do Wrigley's Extra. Do you? That's my little tag for you, Wrigley's. I don't know if you're going to use this, but... Drink two. Extra. They've been very good to me. Thank you, Wrigley's. Representing Chicago. All right.
Omri went to Jakarta a couple years ago now to supposedly do some scouting on a movie job. But while he was there, he was also asked to read for a part in person. At this very swanky looking building, and the driver just pulls up and he says, all right,
kind of points. Inside, in this bare office, obviously rented, Omri met a casting director. And oddly enough, it was a white guy. An American. Avan K. Byrne. Black hair, kind of shoulder length, darker eyes, short, friendly. Avan wanted him to read lines for the movie he was there to scout for. This kung fu epic called The Master. The Master. A visual action adventure.
That, you might recall, is the same movie Heather was supposed to be working on during her trip to Jakarta. The producer in this case, a Chinese woman named Wei Yang, had sent Omri some sides in advance of his trip. Sides is the term for pages pulled out of movie scripts that actors get before auditions. It looked legit. There's a script. I mean, it's a bad script, but it's a kung fu script. You think, all right, this kind of makes sense. It's kind of the cheesy, you know...
Maybe the Mandarin version of this is better written or the Cantonese version is better written and this is just the English translation that when you read, because I used to watch the Kung Fu movies, the subtitles, it's kind of like that. Plus, Donnie Yen, that star of Hong Kong cinema who was in Star Wars Rogue One, was supposed to be in it. So the movie couldn't be that bad. Omri was auditioning for a character called Aaron, who was described in that slick treatment he got, like this.
Aaron was a versatile and renowned MMA athlete combining his kickboxing skills with several disciplines including his native samba, ballroom intricate ballet, and tap. One day as he was getting ready for an MMA competition, a mysterious and sudden accident left him almost dead. But when he got up, a Sifu taught him the art of Tai Chi. After years of silent and resilient practice, Aaron was able to get to his feet and be whoever he wanted to be, even if his other leg was amputated.
Wait, am I getting this right? He's a one-legged tap dancing tai chi master? So in the dialogue Omri was supposed to read, this character is having a conversation with a man in a hood. The hooded man jumping up and going, "I don't care about your jade chain." "Why were you spying on us?" "I'm looking for someone. Winston Lai. I'm a messenger from the D.U. Society. I have a message for him, and it's urgent that I give this to him personally."
And then Aaron goes:
It's silly, a little hacky, but it also could be meaningful. The master here is a master criminal, which, I don't know, maybe it was a little signal from our writer? Because here's the thing about the scam. When the feds bust up boiler rooms or email scams, they usually find a hive of people, a streamlined operation, working together. Some mastermind started the thing, probably, but to scale up requires a bunch of assistants and gophers and accomplices.
And in this case, here's what we know. There are the voices on the phones, imposters pretending to be executives and assistants, lawyers, whatever else. Plus we've got fake casting directors, real drivers, certainly bag men somewhere. And now it looks like there are writers involved. And graphic designers.
Except, as Nicole, a relentless PI, dug into the documents, and especially tape of the scammer that she'd been accumulating, something became increasingly clear. Something really crazy. There was no phone bank. No boiler room. No network. This scam, with all its characters, stretching over six years at least, it was just one person. Hello?
Maybe there are some for hire accomplices, like the smiling driver who speaks minimal English, or this Avon K. Byrne guy who auditioned Omri. Stooges who aren't even totally sure what they're doing. But the truth of this story, well, I'll let Carly tell you. There's this crazy person that is this master, you know, evil mastermind, and they have no other motive other than just they enjoy the thrill of it.
Yep, a single mastermind playing all these characters. Americans, Brits, Chinese, playing both assistant and boss, women and men. Nicole had thought that this was some vast network too. It was her operating theory for a while. I'd say initially that was the working assumption, having worked other impersonation cases in the past that do function that way and are structured that way. But increasingly, the evidence was revealing something else.
We came across one individual who was involved in a couple of different capacities. It just became clear through some tradecraft as well as some cyber fingerprints that there really was one person who ultimately was behind the emails and the calls. So as it were, the mastermind.
Nicole had found various hires, people building websites and signing up for phone numbers, and obviously running errands in Jakarta. But those roads, well, all led back to the same place. So those people collectively were leading to one person when you peel back the layers. One lone human behind all of this. The number of people that have been impersonated is, it's crazy to think that one person is doing this.
Omri Rose has parsed that detail, that it's just one person, a lot. Especially because he'd met that casting director. What the hell was that? So I looked up Avon K. Byrne. Couldn't find anything casting-wise about this person. I think maybe I found something somewhere that seemed like maybe it was an Avon without the K.
connected to hooks you know but like that again could have been something that they manufactured of course the master went off imdb after a while and disappeared and all that stuff so who was that white guy was he a stooge was he an accomplice
By the way, in those sides that Omri read as this character Aaron, that character has another name in the script. Is your character in here? Aaron the Chameleon. Yeah, he's written Aaron the Chameleon. Chameleon. Chameleon. Oh, no. I sent Vanessa the fake sides and then gave her a call. Just so you know, we called this podcast Chameleon 1.
long before we had any idea that this character in this one random fake movie. But it's also like, I think when I looked at the actual printed out sides that he gave you, the title of the sides is also Chameleon. So I think it's like the nickname and also the title of that particular scene. Oh, I actually didn't realize it went to that extent. We really did name this podcast many months ago. Oh, yeah.
We have the receipts. We can show you an email chain. If you got to this point thinking that this was the work of some network, because that just makes sense, take a minute to reconsider it all. Look at the scam now with a new lens, with the understanding that it's all the work of a single person. I asked Amri about that.
If you think about the architecture of the scam and the amount of time and effort, the project management aspect of knowing who you are at a given moment and who's where and what form does that agent need and what does that guy need, who do I owe this much money to? It just seems impossible that one person could be doing it, but all indications are that it is one person. And we're filling out paperwork. They're responding to it. There's so much nuance. Putting together schedules, you know.
All that stuff. Replying to the emails. Talking to people in numerous time zones. Numerous time zones, pretending to be different people if it's one person. Again, it's a lot of work. Now the room I'm seeing in my head, the one I described way back at the beginning, looks totally different. It isn't a phone bank. It's just a single weirdo, alone in the dark.
She's got four computers covered in post-it notes, color-coded spreadsheets, a whole wall of names and pictures connected by strands of yarn. I don't picture a happy person deep down, you know. I picture quite a lonely person, an angry person, you know. And they do this stuff and they feel that power trip, but it's like a junkie. I mean, that's what it seems like to me. It's a junkie. Gets the power trip from doing this, but then when it's done, there's an emptiness.
That's what I think. You know, that first hit was small and it gave you a rush, but then you need another one and another one and it gets bigger and bigger and bigger. But, you know, it all comes crashing down eventually. Fuck the West next, go and cash your bad checks.
To find this person, though, would be another project entirely. But Nicole was on the hunt. 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. That's next time on Chameleon. You got a white bitch in your pocket You bought a big house
Thank you.
Our technical consultant is Ben Decker of Mem Etica. 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 Josh Deem, Vanessa Gregoriadis, Adam Hoff,
and Matt Scher. If you enjoyed the show, please rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts. It helps other listeners like you find the show. 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. I'm Omri Rose. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week. And make sure to subscribe to the show on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.