Yahoo News 'Hollywood Con Queen’ Exposes How 'Genius' Impersonator Scammed Industry Hopefuls
For years, the female figurehead of an international scam syndicate shattered the career dreams of vulnerable Hollywood gig workers, emptied their bank accounts and coerced some men into performing sex acts via Skype for what they thought were auditions.
In reality, journalists would discover, they were communicating with a single person, who was operating the elaborate, intricate international scheme alone.
And “she” was actually a man.
“Hollywood Con Queen,” a fascinating and disturbing docuseries now streaming on Apple TV+, follows investigative journalist Scott Johnson in his ultimately successful attempt to track down and interview the notorious con artist: Hargobind Tahilramani, an Indonesian food blogger.
Johnson told HuffPost he was “just floored” when he learned about Tahilramani’s identity following his 2018 Hollywood Reporter cover story on the so-called Con Queen.
His THR story included actual recordings of the scammer in conversation with “her” victims. At the time, Johnson didn’t know the con artist’s name, true gender, or that they were operating alone. Tahilramani — an Indonesian food blogger — was identified two years later in a podcast, “Chameleon: Hollywood Con Queen,” and documented in an article for Vanity Fair.
Johnson learned about Tahilramani’s true identity at around the same time from a source.
“I remember thinking it was just so improbable” and “totally bizarre,” Johnson recalled.
In that same conversation Johnson learned that not only was Tahilramani running the scam single-handedly, but that he had already served four years in prison. He later confirmed both facts through his own reporting.
Tahilramani “had this wild and crazy criminal record involving all kinds of other crimes,” Johnson said, including embezzlement and making bomb threats.
“There’s something much more devious and sinister going on here” beyond an impersonation scam, Johnson realized. “It just opened up a whole box of weirdness.”
Tahilramani scammed dozens, if not hundreds, of Hollywood hopefuls by impersonating powerful women in the entertainment industry, including studio heads, directors and wealthy producers. He was adept at mimicking the women’s particular accents, including rapid-fire regional American, British and Chinese accents. The victims also believed they spoke with other associates — a male assistant, for example — through increasingly relentless phone calls, emails and hundreds of texts.
Actors, hair and makeup artists, and photographers hoping to break into show business or expand their portfolios paid tens of thousands of dollars to travel to Indonesia for what they thought were location shoots. In addition to covering their own flights and hotels in Jakarta, they were forced to pay cash to drivers, guides and other associates. All expenses would be reimbursed, they were told, and they were promised generous paychecks for their work — not to mention invaluable experience.
But the promised jobs, like the employers who offered them, were fiction. The victims, many of whom were novices in their fields, were never paid or reimbursed. Some lost their life savings; almost all endured what “Hollywood Con Queen” director Chris Smith called “psychological devastation.”
It seemed like Tahilramani’s “sole purpose,” Johnson said, “was to kind of string you along and disrupt your life, and cripple your ability to discern fact from fiction and psychologically mess with you.”
“Hollywood Con Queen” was filmed in tandem with Johnson’s investigation for his 2023 book of the same name, a follow-up to his original THR 2018 feature.
The docuseries begins to feel like a spy thriller when Johnson (whose father actually was a spy, which he writes about in another book) tails and finally confronts Tahilramani on a busy street in Manchester, where he was hiding out from authorities.
Tahilramani appears to be stunned and desperate to flee — but incredibly, he suggests that Johnson interview him later on Zoom.
Tahilramani ended up speaking to Johnson for hours, in countless video and phone calls.
Johnson navigated Tahilramani’s fabulism to learn more about his past, mindset, motives and justification for his crimes.
“Basically, he viewed the victims with a fair amount of contempt and scorn,” Johnson told HuffPost.
Tahilramani has never apologized. In fact, he said he believes that his marks — whom he researched extensively before contacting them — “wanted” and “deserved” to be fooled.
The con artist seemingly had a “desire to hurt somebody else without … any real explanation for why, other than there’s a kind of sadistic pleasure in itself,” Johnson said.
When asked whether he believes that the “evil genius” moniker in the book and docuseries’ subtitle is accurate, Johnson said, “it’s a certain kind of evil.”
“Obviously, we’re not talking about murder or anything like that, but evil comes in all forms and shapes and sizes, I think,” he said.
Tahilramani, Johnson believes, displayed “a real recurring pattern of real malevolence.” His threats to some victims “were kind of sadistic to the point of being grotesque.”
As to whether he is a genius, Johnson said, “there’s a sort of a mastery at work here.”
He pointed specifically to the “creative and logistical and psychological tools, personality skills, that were on display.”
Tahilramani was arrested in Manchester in November 2020, after he was indicted by a U.S. grand jury on eight federal charges, Johnson reported, including wire fraud and aggravated identity theft. A U.K. judge ruled last June that he can be extradited to the U.S., which he said he would appeal.
He has been held in a London prison since his arrest.
