Photographer Henry Wu couldn't believe his luck when he got an email from Wendi Murdoch.
She was offering him and his partner Zory Shahanska a lucrative assignment abroad for an exhibition connected to the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics.
Now divorced from media mogul Rupert Murdoch, she chaired events at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, and worked as a film producer and art investor.
So her email, describing the pair's work as unique and "the kind of voice I was looking for", was both flattering and entirely plausible.
Based in San Francisco, Henry and Zory were joint editors of an online travel photography site, called This Life of Travel.
They were completely taken in by Wendi Murdoch's invitation to "capture the essence of China" among Chinese immigrant communities in South-East Asia.
"She complimented us on our photography and went on to talk about how our style was exactly what she wanted," Henry Wu wrote on his blog.
Soon after, Henry answered a call from Aaron, who introduced himself as Wendi Murdoch's assistant and wanted to talk about the details of the project.
"He had a thick New Yorker accent and connected us to Wendi after a momentary pause," he said.
"When she got on the line, she introduced herself with an interesting accent that was a mix of Asian, British, and East Coast drawl.
"If any of you have seen Crazy Rich Asians, she sounded very similar to the character that Michelle Yeoh played."
There were a couple of "red flags", as Henry put it, including his discovery that Wendi Murdoch's listed lawyer appeared not to exist.
But Henry and Zory duly signed the contract sent to them and booked flights to Indonesia, where they were to photograph people and sites in several cities, including Jakarta.
But there was a catch.
They were suddenly told they would have to cover their own airfares plus other expenses, until they were paid and reimbursed for all costs once the project was completed.
It meant thousands of dollars out of their own pockets and seemed risky given they had never met Wendi Murdoch nor her assistant Aaron.
But in their excitement, not even that could deter them.
But nagging doubts turned to suspicion when the pair arrived in Jakarta.
'This might be an elaborate scam'
On landing, Aaron called and told them they would have to cover more costs, payable to the driver who'd picked them up at the airport, including $1,500 for a photography permit. Again, they were promised it would be reimbursed.
But a day later, Wendi rang in a fury, accusing the pair of racism for taking unauthorised photos of the driver. She threatened to cancel the project altogether.
As they promised to fix any misunderstanding, she told them they would have to fork out for another photography permit, again payable to the driver.
They began to smell a rat.
"It started to dawn on us that this might be an elaborate scam," Henry said.
He remembered an old friend of his was living in Jakarta, and called to see if he could help, only for the friend to drop a bombshell.
The same scam had been operating for years, luring creative artists to Indonesia from all over the world — actors, movie producers, make-up artists, photographers, and countless more — most of whom were eager to get a foot in the entertainment industry, especially Hollywood.
The friend sent Henry a link to an old story showing that victims before him had also agreed to travel to Indonesia to work on a film or project that never materialised.
Like Henry and Zory, they too had paid thousands of dollars to the same driver, on the instructions of an assistant who was often called Aaron, occasionally Leslie, and sometimes Albert.
Most had spent long days being driven around the Indonesian capital Jakarta, or to remote towns, in the belief they would meet key people to film or photograph. In every case they failed to appear.
Once it dawned on victims that the promised project didn't exist, Aaron or Leslie and the female boss would disappear, never to be heard from again.
Phone numbers to contact them would no longer connect. Email addresses proved to be false.
Needless to say, the victims never received a cent.
A private investigator begins chasing the Con Queen
Like Henry Wu, the victims all received invitations out of the blue from a powerful or high-profile woman.
But it wasn't always Wendi Murdoch on the line.
Some believed they were dealing with then-chair of Sony Pictures Amy Pascal, the filmmaker Kathleen Kennedy, or producer Deb Snyder, among others.
Many described the woman as having a distinctive voice or accent. In every case she had a male assistant.
As the scam grew in its scale and audacity, it became clear a sophisticated fraudster was impersonating each and every one of these powerful women.
The scammer had a gift for mimicking their individual accents and speech mannerisms.
By 2018, the impostor was dubbed the Con Queen of Hollywood.
As a steady stream of people went public to expose the scam, one of the high-profile women who was being impersonated quietly took her own case to investigators.
It was Nicoletta Kotsianas who took up the case for K2 Integrity in New York, a corporate intelligence firm that investigates everything from bribery and corruption, to cyber fraud and money laundering.
Very soon she discovered her initial client was just one in a long line of victims.
"We believe that more than 20 executives and high-net-worth individuals — including our clients — have been impersonated over the last few years," she revealed last year.
Meticulous research and organisation, she says, were the key to the scammer's success.
"They take the time to learn everything they can about the person being impersonated so their victims have no reason to doubt. They know intimate details of their lives and also master their voices — both in accent and style," she said.
"It's amazing how much information is available on the public record that can be used to construct a nearly fool-proof profile in order to pretend to be another person."
What did the Con Queen actually want?
For many of the Hollywood Con Queen's victims, the cost of being defrauded was relatively minor.
Most lost a few thousand dollars on plane tickets, accommodation and other on-the-ground costs.
Numerous victims reported the scam to their own law enforcement authorities, including the FBI.
But given the relatively small amount of money they had lost, the fraud was simply not big enough to interest the authorities.
As Nicoletta Kotsianas spent months reaching out to as many victims as she could, she began to realise the true scale of the scam.
It became clear the number of victims was potentially in the hundreds, and the total amount defrauded — gathered in small amounts over many years — could be substantial.
At the same time, she believes the scam was as much about the thrill of manipulation as it was about money.
"It's about setting up a whole situation to fool people, and to prey upon people's vulnerabilities," she said.
Australian endurance athlete and Bachelorette contestant Damien Rider was a victim of the Hollywood Con Queen in 2015.
After being lured to Jakarta on the promise of work on a TV show, he said the scammer posed as Apple founder Steve Jobs' widow Laurene Jobs and tried to get him to engage in phone sex.
"The fact that some of the conversations veer into the sexual ... it really just was clear that this was somebody who was basically role-playing," Nicoletta Kotsianas said.
"The money was gravy, almost."
The surprise revelation about the Con Queen
Nicoletta Kotsianas says at first, she and her colleagues at K2 Integrity used "old-school" tactics to try to crack the Con Queen's identity.
They interviewed as many victims as they could find and compiled every shred of evidence they could gather.
They also used digital technology to analyse the metadata in emails the victims had received, going back years, and quickly discovered the IP address was in the UK.
The team also filed a civil lawsuit against the perpetrator, which gave them legal powers to subpoena a range of information and uncover crucial facts about the scammer's operations.
Eventually it became clear the scam was largely the work of one individual, even though there appeared to be at least one accomplice on the ground in Indonesia.
Some victims, including Henry Wu, had managed to record snippets of their phone conversations with the fraudster and sent them to the investigators.
Listening back to multiple calls, and comparing the voice and speech patterns, Nicoletta Kotsianas had a breakthrough realisation about the Con Queen's true identity.
The impostor mimicking the voices of Wendi Murdoch, Amy Pascal, and Kathleen Kennedy was a man all along.
Some subtle clues gave him away, according to Nicoletta.
"There were turns of phrase, cadence, ways his tone would go up on certain words or sighs — things like that," she told Marie Claire magazine.
Nicoletta was closing in on a suspect.
It turned out, the elusive Hollywood Con Queen had made a crucial error: He met one of his victims in person.
The Con Queen's mistake
Nicoletta Kotsianas finally had the name of a suspect in the UK, an Indonesian man who had been living there for four years.
"Multiple pieces came together — phone records, domain registrations, witness accounts," she said.
Gregory Mandarano, an aspiring screenwriter from Long Island, may be the only victim who met the Con Queen in person.
He had travelled six times to Indonesia in 2015 in the belief he was working on a fantasy movie, with a senior producer who introduced himself as Anand Sippy.
"He had an LA style to him, he was dressed casually, khakis, button-down shirts, sweater, vest, a friendly persona," he told the American ABC network.
Mr Mandarano calculates that he lost between $111,000 and $139,000 from the scam over the course of several months.
But crucially, he obtained a copy of a false passport the Con Queen had used at a travel agency in Jakarta, while booking guides for their trip.
The name on the passport was Gobind Lal Tahil, and included a photograph that was clearly the producer Mr Mandarano had worked with.
"We tried contacting the FBI, we tried contacting Interpol. No one cared about it," he said.
Finally, after Nicoletta Kotsianas and the K2 investigators had gathered a critical mass of evidence, proving the magnitude of the scam and the scale of the total monetary losses — well over $1.39 million — the FBI stepped in.
"We built out that victim class to a point where it was deserving of law enforcement getting involved," she said.
"We also had developed enough intelligence about the guy who we believed to be at the centre of it all.
In 2019, FBI agents in California launched their own investigation to track down and interview victims about their experiences with the 'Con Queen', in a transnational fraud scheme that it said had begun around 2013.
The investigation included an online questionnaire to identify as many victims as possible around the world.
Finally, in November 2020, British police acting on a request from the FBI arrested a man in Manchester.
Meet the man accused of being the Con Queen
Hargobind Punjabi Tahilramani, a 41-year-old Indonesian citizen of Indian ancestry, often went by the alias Gobind Lal Tahil.
He grew up in a wealthy family in Jakarta, attending a prestigious private school and later travelled to the US for university.
But court records in Indonesia and old newspaper reports showed he already had a long history of fraud and impersonating women, years before he was accused of being behind the Con Queen scam.
In 2008, he was jailed in Jakarta's Cipinang prison for embezzlement against his own family.
While in jail, he had made bomb threats to the US embassy in Jakarta, imitating an Iranian accent. Anti-terror police had traced the phone number to the prison and tracked him down in his cell.
Mr Tahilramani told authorities he was "just joking".
Former prison staff say he would boast about his ability to impersonate women's voices.
Several times he had ordered pizza to the jail over a hidden mobile phone, impersonating a woman.
Hargobind Tahilramani's love of Hollywood and impersonation may have been partly inspired by his father, Lal C Tahilramani, who had produced films in Jakarta, starring Indonesian actors.
It was only after the death of both parents that his life began to unravel.
Sometime after his release from Cipinang prison, Mr Tahilramani moved to the UK, where he tried to build a profile as a food blogger on social media.
But a US federal indictment claims that while he was trying to become a food influencer, he was also living many different lives online.
Mr Tahilramani is due to face an extradition hearing in London's Westminster court on January 31.
He is charged with several counts of wire fraud and aggravated identity theft.
If the extradition is successful, he will be brought to California.
But he won't be going to Hollywood, where so many of his alleged victims have spent years chasing their dreams.
Instead, he'll be down the road in a San Diego courtroom.
