8
SHE TORMENTED STUDIO EXECUTIVES, ACTORS, MAKEUP ARTISTS,
SECURITY GUYS, PHOTOGRAPHERS, SCREENWRITERS, ATHLETES,
EVEN BOBSLEDDERS AND SCUBA DIVERS FOR YEARS—UNTIL CORPOR ATE
INVESTIGATOR NICOLETTA KOTSIANAS WAS PUT ON THE CASE175
was a warm, overcast afternoon in
August 2019, and Joe Scarnici was
pumped. A talented photographer
who has gone on tour with Madon-
na, covered the red carpet at the
Academy Awards, and worked on
campaigns for Pepsi, Scarnici had
just wrapped up a call with a new
potential client about a big
photo shoot. He grabbed
some lunch and headed
into his office/garage in
San Juan Capistrano, Cali-
fornia, to sketch out light-
ing ideas. Suddenly, the
phone rang again, this
time from a U.K. num-
ber. The caller, who had a
British accent, introduced himself as Albert, an assistant to Christina
Ong, a Singaporean entrepreneur nicknamed the “Queen of Bond
Street,” after London’s toniest shopping district, where Ong owns a
number of designer stores.
Ong was looking to hire a photographer to shoot a handful of
Indonesian athletes she was sponsoring to participate in the Tokyo
2020 Olympics, Albert explained. If Scarnici was interested, she
would call him directly to tell him more. Sure, he said, and 15 minutes
later—just enough time for him to run a quick Google search on the
reclusive billionaire—Scarnici’s cell phone lit up again. “My first
impression was ‘Wow, why is this person reaching out to me?’” he
recalls. “Because the richest woman in Singapore calling me in my
garage just seemed a little fantastic.” Ong, who said she’d been passed
Scarnici’s details by Martha Stewart’s assistant (Scarnici shot Stewart
for a cookbook launch in 2016), was quick to put the photographer at
ease, telling him he’d been highly recommended, before steering the
conversation onto yoga, revealing she had a private studio in her
house. Did Scarnici ever practice yoga? When he said he’d just done a
session that morning, Ong seemed pleased. “Oh, we’re going to get
along great,” she purred.
After the call, Albert swiftly sent over a nondisclosure agreement
and then a detailed schedule for Scarnici’s six-day trip to Southeast
Asia, along with a contract worth $36,000 (his fee plus expenses) and
athlete bios. Within 48 hours, Scarnici was hugging his wife and
children—one of whom was just two weeks old—goodbye and board-
ing a plane to Hong Kong, where he would catch a flight to Indonesia.
But the trip turned out to be a bust. None of the promised subjects
turned up—and neither did Ong; instead, at the entrepreneur’s
request, Scarnici spent most of the time being chauffeured around
Jakarta scouting gyms to use as backdrops while hoping that an
athlete might finally make an appearance. The no-show was unusual,
Scarnici reasoned, but not unheard of; he’d once spent a week in
Europe waiting for a legendary soccer player to make himself avail-
able for a shoot. At Ong’s urging, he extended the trip by two days,
bailing on a couple of small jobs he had booked back home. But when
the talent still failed to materialize, he got on a flight home before the
weekend; he was due in New York City on Monday to work with a
major sports brand, and there was no way he could cancel. Sympa-
thetic, Ong told him to invoice for his fee and the expenses he’d
incurred, which included his flight to Jakarta and various things he’d
been asked to pay cash for up front, including his driver, hotel, and
food, all the while expressing her wish that once she pinned down the
athletes, Scarnici would return to Indonesia and finish the job.
On Monday evening in New York City, Scarnici, his assistant, and
another photographer headed for dinner in Midtown. As Scarnici was
recounting his Indonesian adventure, Albert rang, saying Ong
wanted to speak to him. He and Ong had been calling incessantly
since Scarnici left Jakarta to discuss his return. As he paced up and
down the sidewalk outside the restaurant, he explained with a touch
of embarrassment that he just didn’t have the funds to fly back before
he was reimbursed for the first trip.
Ong changed her tactic. She asked whether Scarnici would be will-
ing to meet her privately instead to initiate a “discreet relationship”
and needled him to blow her a kiss over the telephone. “In my head,
I’m picturing a 72-year-old uber-rich woman in Singapore blowing
me kisses, telling me she wants to fly me to Japan,” Scarnici recalls.
Now “really weirded out,” he politely declined, and Ong hung up in a
huff. Albert immediately called back, asking what Scarnici had said to
upset his boss. He dismissed her indecent proposal as “something
that was lost in translation.” Still trying to wrap his head around the
exchange, Scarnici glanced up to see his assistant running toward
him while typing furiously into his cell phone. He held it up for Scar-
nici to read: “THIS IS A SCAM!”
While Scarnici was outside, his dinner companions had done some
digging and stumbled across a blog post from Carley Rudd, a New
York–based travel photographer, titled “Travel Scam Alert: I Was
Victim to an International Travel Photographer Scam in Indonesia.”
In it, Rudd described how a woman claiming to be Chinese-American
philanthropist Wendi Murdoch had hired her to take photographs in
Jakarta for an exhibition tied to the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics.
After shelling out for airfare and food (under the assumption that
these expenses were already being reimbursed via a wire transfer)
and spending $1,400 in cash on a photography permit, Rudd began to
sense some “red flags,” she says. On the second day of the trip, Rudd
was asked to hand over yet more money and split from her husband,
who had accompanied her. She refused, so the person pretending to
be Murdoch said her assistant, a New Yorker named Aaron, would
call to discuss further. He never did. When Rudd tried to ring him,
“it went straight to this kind of automated British-accent voicemail
saying this number is no longer in service,” she tells MC.
“As soon as I heard that message, my stomach
sank and I just cried.” Rudd realized she’d
been targeted by a sophisticated con artist
who had pocketed the $1,400 she’d
handed over to the driver for the
“photography permit” and had no
intention of reimbursing her, let
alone paying her fee. “I think it was
$15,000 for business-class flights
that I put on my credit card that I
won’t see back,” she says. “That’s the
biggest mental block for me.”
With Albert still jabbering in his ear
about returning to Jakarta, Scarnici fran-
tically scrolled through Rudd’s blog post.
There was no denying it was the same scam
and that Ong had been impersonated. “The first
thing I saw on the blog was the photo of the driver I just spent eight
days with,” he recalls. Using every ounce of his restraint, Scarnici
hung up and immediately contacted the FBI. After yet another call
from Albert the following morning—in which he continued to as-
sure Scarnici the invoice was being processed, and when could he
return to Indonesia?—he never heard from either Albert or Ong
again. Altogether, Scarnici lost about $15,000. He still hasn’t fully
Chinese-American philanthropist who was impersonated by the con artist
W E N D I M U R D O C H
176 MARIECLAIRE.COM March 2020
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processed what happened. “I give
the con artist credit in a weird
way,” he says. “It was just like
any other job until it wasn’t.”
Scarnici, it turns out, was
just the latest in a long line of
victims who have fallen prey to a
prolific scammer nicknamed by
the media “the Con Queen of Hol-
lywood.” And with most cases’ mea-
ger cash value, multijurisdictional com-
plications, and absence of any physical threat,
the FBI had no interest. It was hard to prove crimes had even taken
place, rather than simply business deals gone wrong, allowing the con
artist to operate for years with impunity. Until one night when the
case dropped into the lap of a corporate investigator named Nicoletta
Kotsianas, who soon found herself in a high-speed cyber chase
through the Con Queen’s elaborate imaginary world.
otsianas is a senior director at corporate investi-
gations firm K2 Intelligence, which offers investi-
gative, compliance, and cyber-defense services.
Its investigators have worked on behalf of Bernie
Madoff’s victims to try to recover as much money
as possible. More recently, they were hired to con-
duct investigations at universities in light of the
Varsity Blues college-admissions scandal; they have also worked for
“democratic governments in foreign countries,” tracing assets embez-
zled by previous regimes. The firm was founded in 2009 by father and
son Jules and Jeremy Kroll—the former widely considered to be the
originator of the modern-day corporate-intelligence industry—and
today boasts seven offices across the United States and Europe, em-
ploying a staff of about 350, about half of whom are women. “Women
are, generally speaking, better listeners,” Jules Kroll says. “And here was
a case where it really cried out for somebody to understand what we
thought was a female con artist.”
Kotsianas joined in 2015. Now 38 years old, she is quick thinking
and detail oriented, and she possesses a mild dramatic flair—she was
big on theater in school—particularly when reenacting conversations.
Her usual specialty is investigations and litigation support, asset
tracing and recovery, and due diligence, “which is, you know, being
brought in to find the needle in the haystack,” she explains. Like many
of her colleagues at K2 Intelligence, Kotsianas originally trained as a
reporter. She worked at the Financial Times, and her beat was financial
markets with a focus on debt, meaning she had a “front-row seat”
to the industry’s most turbulent period in living memory, the 2008
stock-market crash. “I covered all the biggest bankruptcies, including
Lehman Brothers,” she says. From there, Kotsianas moved into due
diligence at a bond-ratings agency before deciding she missed the more
probing aspects of her old job, such as critical thinking and interview-
ing. Fortunately, the agency she worked for shared a building with K2
Intelligence. “And at one point, we were all on the same floor,” she says.
“I knew that there was this company and it did corporate intelligence,
but I didn’t really know what that was.” After striking up conversations
with K2 Intelligence employees in the common kitchen and hallways,
she realized being a corporate investigator sounded like the perfect fit.
Two years after joining the firm, following dinner at home with
her two young children in October 2017, Kotsianas noticed a missed
call from a Los Angeles lawyer she sometimes worked for. Parking
the kids in front of the TV, she snuck into her bedroom to return the
lawyer’s call. It turned out that one of his Hollywood clients, a high-
profile female film producer (Kotsianas won’t disclose her name),
was being impersonated in a spate of strange emails and phone calls.
Was it something she could look into? Kotsianas thought it sounded
pretty straightforward: shut down the fake email, run the phone
number through public-records databases, and have an attorney
send a cease-and-desist notice.
But the closer she looked, the stranger the case became. The imper-
sonator was using the Hollywood producer’s identity to strike up con-
versations with production companies, talent managers, and even
actors—sometimes to fish for information about fellow industry execu-
tives, but other times for something more. “We learned very quickly that
some of these conversations turned sexual,” Kotsianas says. The con
woman, it seemed, was enticing men into phone sex under the pretext
of an audition, and in some cases it was more like a pseudo relationship.
It was unclear whether the producer was the victim of a prank or a
smear campaign, but, either way, the order was to shut it down. “They
were calling people on the phone and having weird conversations,” she
says. “We weren’t treating it like a law-enforcement referral.”
Until, that is, Kotsianas learned that sometimes the con went
much further than phone calls. She began hearing that some of the
victims had been convinced to fly to Jakarta, although at that point it
was unclear why. “I hadn’t spoken to the victims yet,” Kotsianas ex-
plains, “so I didn’t know if it was drug trafficking, if it was prostitu-
tion…” Scouring the Web for mentions of previous Jakarta-related
cons, she soon stumbled across an article published exactly one year
earlier, on October 21, 2016, in The Hollywood Reporter. It detailed an
elaborate scam in which British makeup artists were being asked to
fly to Indonesia to work on a blockbuster Chinese action film. Upon
arrival in Jakarta, the women were each instructed to hand over at
least $1,200 in cash—sometimes multiple
times—to their driver, ostensibly for his
services, which they were promised
would be reimbursed by wire trans-
fer on top of their substantial fees.
After they spent two or three
days being chauffeured around
the city on research missions,
however, a long-promised inter-
view with the female Chinese
film producer would be canceled
for one spurious reason or anoth-
er, and the disappointed makeup
artists would return home, file an in-
voice for their expenses, and wait for the
money to show up in their account. It never
did. “I was pretty sure I was going to get the money back,” says London-
based makeup artist Anna Cichon, who was deceived into flying out to
Jakarta twice in the space of three weeks in the summer of 2016. “They
sent me a receipt from their bank.” After the second trip, however, the
producer stopped responding to her emails and Cichon understood
she’d been had. She lost a total of almost $8,000, which included the
cost of business-class flights (the only ones available on short notice),
food, and other expenses. “You always think, Oh, it’s not going to be
me,” she says, tearing up over the phone.
Kotsianas, by now working with the rest of K2 Intelligence’s
Investigations and Disputes team, which is made up of about 100
investigators and led by executive managing director Snežana
Gebauer, soon established that the modus operandi in the Chinese
film scam had many similarities to the one the Hollywood imperson-
ator was using. The case had taken a dark—and significant—turn.
“That’s what started to allow us to
A M Y PA S C A L
K AT H L E E N K E N N E DY
[CONTINUED ON P. 179]
Former head of Sony Pictures impersonated by the scammer
Lucasfilm president whose name was used to scam victims
March 2020 MARIECLAIRE.COM 177
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SHOPPING DIRECTORY
178 MARIECLAIRE.COM March 2020
reach the yacht. She asked Jauhiainen.
“Latifa had already confided in me
about the plight of her sister Shamsa
and her restricted life,” she says, “so I
knew that she was deeply unhappy and
I didn’t hesitate. I thought it could be a
great adventure for both of us.”
Jauhiainen admits she felt much
more nervous after she flew to meet Jaubert in the Philippines, where the Nos-
tromo was moored in preparation for its rescue voyage. “Once we started going
over the plan in detail, I realized how dangerous it was and the powerful reach
of the Dubai authorities,” she says. “Their surveillance abilities are second to
none.” Sheikh Mohammed reportedly procured the world’s most sophisticated
surveillance technologies during 2011’s Arab Spring uprisings to prevent his
own subjects from getting similar ideas.
In February 2018, everything was finally in place. In her video, recorded just
days before her escape, Latifa sounds upbeat. “Pretty soon I’m going to be leav-
ing somehow. I’m not so sure of the outcome, but I’m 99 percent positive it will
work.” Then she adds caution. “If you are watching this video, it’s not such a
good thing. Either I’m dead or I’m in a very, very, very bad situation.” She
emailed the video to a law firm in the U.S. that Jaubert had introduced her to,
with instructions to release it to NGOs and the press if she was captured.
Latifa was excited when they got inside the car to leave; it was the first time
she had ever sat in the front passenger seat. “It was a good moment,” says
Jauhiainen. “But I also felt very sad when I saw the tiny bag she had with her.
She brought hardly any personal items and no sentimental keepsakes. She had
no attachment to anything in Dubai except the people she loved.” After their
drive to Oman and hair-raising ride on Jet Skis through six-foot waves, the
friends were exhausted and elated when they climbed aboard the Nostromo
and headed out to sea. “We hugged the Filipino crew,” Jauhiainen says. “The
yacht was carrying an American flag, and we were in international waters, so
we were as hopeful as possible that we were going to make it.”
Two or three days into the voyage across the Arabian Sea to India, Latifa grew
anxious. She knew by this stage that her father would be apoplectic with rage at
her disappearance and using all the vast means at his disposal to track her down.
Although both women had disposed of their cell phones, they had bought back-
ups with new SIM cards in case they needed to contact the outside world. The
Nostromo was connected to Wi-Fi through a satellite using a U.S. network, which
Jauhiainen says Jaubert believed that the Dubai authorities couldn’t intercept.
Latifa decided to use her Instagram account to let her friends know she had left,
and she also tried contacting the media in the U.K. to get her story out. “She felt,
along with her video, that this was the best way to protect all of us. If she was in
the public domain, her father wouldn’t be able to kill everyone if they found us
and leave no trace,” says Jauhiainen.
But Latifa hadn’t banked on the fact that her story sounded so far-fetched that
nobody would believe it at first. She did not hear back from the media. She then
contacted Radha Stirling, the founder of Detained in Dubai, a London-based ad-
vocacy group. “I had a number of WhatsApp voice messages and texts from Latifa
from onboard the Nostromo,” says Stirling. “First, I had to verify they were real.
Given the work we do defending clients against human-rights violations in Dubai,
there was a chance the authorities were setting us up with a fake news story to
discredit us.” Stirling did her due diligence, and, satisfied Latifa was genuine, she
started to help. But time was passing fast. Jaubert began to notice Indian Coast
Guard boats following them and planes overhead, indicating that their communi-
cations had, after all, been intercepted. Eight days into the journey and only about
30 miles off the Indian coast, Latifa and Jauhiainen were below deck at 10 p.m.
when they heard loud bangs above them.
“Latifa called me from inside the bathroom, where she’d locked herself with
Tiina, so I was on the phone to her when the armed men boarded,” says Stirling.
“She was trying to let me know what was happening, but we lost communication. I
knew they’d found her. It was devastating to hear that happening in real time and
be unable to do anything.” Jauhiainen says the special forces fired smoke grenades,
forcing the women upstairs. “We climbed up holding hands and were slammed on
the deck by the men as soon as we came out of the hatch. When they held the ma-
chine gun to my head, I truly believed I could be about to die.” Jauhiainen regrets
she didn’t get to tell Latifa that she loved her before they were separated.
[CONTINUED FROM P. 173]
Jauhiainen says she will never stop fighting
for her friend’s release. In addition to an active
#FreeLatifa campaign on social media and lob-
bying by NGOs, both Jauhiainen and Stirling
have made submissions on her behalf to the
United Nations Working Group on Enforced or
Involuntary Disappearances, which is conduct-
ing an inquiry. There is some hope that the re-
cent decision of Latifa’s stepmother Princess
Haya to leave Sheikh Mohammed could help
bolster support for Latifa’s release. In a high
court in London, Princess Haya, the half-sister
of King Abdullah of Jordan, has applied for a
“forced marriage protection order” on behalf of
one of her children and has also asked the court
to grant a non-molestation order, an injunction
that protects against harassment. At press time,
the court proceedings had not been made pub-
lic; the judge has imposed broad restrictions un-
til he has issued his rulings. But Stirling says
that Princess Haya’s fears for her own children
possibly stem from Sheikh Mohammed’s treat-
ment of Latifa and Shamsa, and the royal fam-
ily may be pressured to reveal details of the two
princesses’ situations when the rulings are
handed down.
Meanwhile, another estranged ex-wife of
Sheikh Mohammed, first wife Sheikha Randa
bint Mohammed al-Banna, to whom he was
married in the early 1970s, tweeted a message of
support for Latifa. Al-Banna, 64, was married to
the sheikh when she was 16, before he was
Dubai’s ruler. When the marriage broke down
after four years, the sheikh allegedly took custo-
dy of their baby daughter, and al-Banna has not
seen her since. After Latifa’s 34th birthday in
December, al-Banna tweeted, “Dear Latifa, you
are in my mind and my prayers, I was in a prison
called FEAR but I understood that the real free-
dom is freedom from fear and if you want some-
thing done, ask a woman. I will be there for you.”
Such developments may seem insignificant, but
Jauhiainen believes they represent cracks in
the code of silence and could open the flood-
gates. “It takes immense courage for someone
like Sheikha Randa to raise her voice after all
these years. We hope more will follow.”
While little is known about Princess Latifa
today, Stirling says intelligence sources close to
Dubai’s royal court confirm she is alive. “The
palace is pushing the narrative that both Latifa
and Shamsa are suffering from mental-health
problems and are receiving the care they need
from qualified doctors.” In her video, Latifa pre-
dicted this exact disinformation would occur.
“My sources say she is trying to get on with her
life as best as she can,” Stirling adds. “She has
no access to Internet or phones and is watched
every second.”
Latifa also predicted her video could save her
life—and she was probably right. It provides an
invaluable public record of her real feelings. It
has also enabled her infectious optimism to live
on in her own words. “I’m feeling positive about
the future.…I expect it to be the start of a new
chapter in my life, one where I have some voice,
where I don’t have to be silenced.”
[CONTINUED FROM P. 177 ]
understand, this wasn’t just our client,” Kotsi-
anas says. “We were dealing with something
that had been going on longer than we under-
stood and had taken in many more people than
we were aware of.”
he team quickly adopted a multi-
pronged approach. On one hand,
there was “really old-school investi-
gative work,” says Kotsianas, which
involved countless interviews and
fact gathering. On the other, there was digital
investigative work like painstaking trawling
through databases. With the identity of the con
woman still unknown, the Hollywood producer
filed suit against John Doe, which gave her the
power to subpoena websites to hand over any
information they held about the scammer.
“Scammers know that subpoenas can turn
things up, so they’ll use fake information,”
Kotsianas says. “But sometimes they leave fin-
gerprints.” The producer’s lawyer subpoenaed
more than 20 companies, including Internet
providers, domain-name registrars, and hotel-
booking websites. (To give her enterprise
credibility, the con woman always prebooked
a Jakarta hotel room for her victims; occa-
sionally, when she was feeling generous, she
even paid for it.)
As team members at K2 Intelligence began
combing through the evidence, they discovered
their original client was not the only individual
being impersonated; there were dozens of
high-profile or high-net-worth figures, many of
whom were women. Grouped together, their
names read like the VIP guest list at an Acade-
my Awards after-party. There was Lucasfilm
president Kathleen Kennedy, former Sony
Pictures chair Amy Pascal, Marvel Studios
executive vice president of production Victoria
Alonso, and longtime Warner Bros. collabora-
tor Deborah Snyder, who was a producer on
Man of Steel and Wonder Woman. (While K2
Intelligence wouldn’t confirm the names of its
clients, these are some of the executives Marie
Claire was able to independently verify were
impersonated.)
Even more surprising was the number of
people flying to Jakarta hoping to land a dream
job. “I was amazed,” says Kotsianas. “It was
constant—constant: ‘I was there this day,’ ‘I was
there the next week,’ the next week, the next
week.” In some cases, victims were almost over-
lapping. Lured by the promise of work on the
same Chinese movie offered to Anna Cichon,
South African makeup artist Heather Pitchford
also flew to Jakarta in July 2016. During one
stop on the itinerary she’d been given, an Indo-
nesian local heard Pitchford speaking English
and asked whether she was working on a film
production. It turned out the local had learned
about the supposed film from Cichon just a few
days earlier and both makeup artists had com-
pleted an identical itinerary within a week of
each other. Only afterward did Cichon and
Pitchford realize the itinerary had been de-
signed to keep them trapped for hours in Ja-
karta’s notoriously bad traffic so the con woman
had an excuse to cancel her meetings with
them. In another instance, the scammer con-
tacted a British talent manager and persuaded
her to send two actors to Jakarta, supposedly
for auditions, within days of each other.
It wasn’t just British film-industry profes-
sionals being targeted. Victims hailed from a
variety of countries and professions. “Actors,
makeup artists, security guys, photographers,
screenwriters,” Kotsianas ticks off on her fin-
gers. “Bobsledders, athletes, mountain climbers,
scuba divers.” Bobsledders? “You’re an expert on
this thing,” Kotsianas says, mimicking the scam-
mer’s sales pitch. “I’m interested in expanding
into Asia.” Still, though, bobsledders? In the
same way the con woman had effortlessly
moved from impersonating Chinese producers
to American ones, after word got out about her
original tactic, she simply gave herself another
makeover. Now she was posing as female entre-
preneurs, philanthropists, and socialites such as
Murdoch, the ex-wife of media mogul Rupert
Murdoch, Christine Schwarzman, spouse of bil-
lionaire Blackstone Group cofounder Stephen
A. Schwarzman, and even a little-known heiress
to a Mexican distilling fortune. “It was whack-a-
mole,” says Kotsianas. “We would get a domain
shut down, we would get an email shut down,
and then a new one would pop up.”
Like the fraudulent email addresses (most
were from registered domains and sometimes
Outlook), the websites were used to imperson-
ate the high-profile women’s companies or
foundations in order to further convince vic-
tims of the scam’s legitimacy. As the K2 Intelli-
gence team encountered an ever-increasing
number of websites, it began to map out a net-
work of domains with “shared commonalities,”
and it included not only those women who had
already been impersonated but also those who
were going to be faked next. “I was like, this
isn’t going to stop,” Kotsianas says she realized
only a few months into the investigation. “This
is a road map to the scam.”
At one point during the investigation, Kotsi-
anas believes, she even spoke directly to the
Con Queen, although she didn’t realize it was
her at the time. “I knew there were cutouts
doing different pieces of it,” Kotsianas explains.
(In the lexicon of espionage, a cutout is some-
one who acts as an intermediary.) In this case,
the con woman was employing cutouts to
set up the more technical aspects, such as the
websites and emails. One morning, on a rare
child-free weekend when Kotsianas was away
March 2020 MARIECLAIRE.COM 179
with her husband, her phone began ringing
during brunch—and didn’t stop. “I finally
picked up and went outside,” she recalls. “And
that was the first strange conversation with this
person.” The caller, who went on to ring Kotsi-
anas again a handful of times before eventually
disappearing, claimed to be a cutout who had
been cruelly tricked into helping the con wom-
an. Despite the caller’s protests of innocence,
“from that point on, my mind kept coming back
to this person,” Kotsianas says.
The intensity of the investigation had begun
to seep into her life outside the office.
Kotsianas spent a vacation in Greece fielding
calls from victims—many of them in their 20s
and early 30s—who had been tricked into flying
to Indonesia, at times speaking to them while
they were still there. She would stay on the line
while they walked through the airport, fright-
ened and broke, with the con artist attempting
to call them every few minutes. “I’ve heard from
moms and dads who are crying, [saying,] ‘I
can’t believe they would go’ and ‘They didn’t tell
me,’” she says. Sometimes, after her own kids
were in bed, Kotsianas would sit at her com-
puter and spend the evening investigating
leads. In the mornings, she woke up thinking
about it. “In all the cases that we do, you have
those moments where it’s going into your
dreams,” she says.
For the victims, however, her steady pres-
ence proved invaluable. American Hustle
producer Andy Horwitz, who was touched by
the scam twice—once when he learned his per-
sonal trainer had been conned into traveling to
Indonesia and again, two years later, when he
discovered his name had been used by the con
artist to initiate contact with an actor who was
then tricked into phone sex—is full of praise for
Kotsianas. “She went way above and beyond
just working for whoever hired her. She really
was a true warrior,” he says. “We didn’t hire her,
we didn’t pay her, but she was so helpful. It felt
like she really did care.”
In fact, Kotsianas reveals, there was some-
times no paying client. Once she’d succeeded in
shutting down domains and email addresses
for each successive producer, they no longer
had a reason to fund the investigation. But to-
gether, Gebauer and Kotsianas persuaded K2
Intelligence’s directors, including cofounder
Jules Kroll, that the case was worth pursuing.
“The people who were conned were hoping for
a way to advance their professional careers and
spending tens of thousands of dollars and enor-
mous amounts of time only to find out they’d
been scammed,” says Kroll. “So we decided, you
know what? We’ll stay with the case.”
But there was one element of the scam that
didn’t make sense. Although the victims were
losing thousands of dollars, at least part of that
was spent on airfare, and what the con artist
was left with just didn’t correspond with the
amount of effort she put in. “Other imperson-
ation scams that I’ve personally investigated
work within business hours,” Kotsianas ac-
knowledges. “It’s a business: You’re clocking in,
clocking out.” In this case, however, the Con
Queen was keeping tabs on her victims long
after she’d pocketed their cash, often calling
them at all hours of the day and night, regard-
less of what time zone they were in.
A couple of days into makeup artist Heather
Pitchford’s Jakarta trip, she was alerted to the
scam by a film-industry contact who knew the
actor supposedly attached to the Chinese film.
She immediately returned to the airport, where
she waited, traumatized, in a café for the next
flight home. “My phone started ringing be-
cause the driver had gotten to my hotel and
realized that I’d skipped out,” she says. “And my
phone just rang and rang and rang and didn’t
stop ringing, and every time it got to the end,
she’d ring again.”
For those who deviated from the con wom-
an’s itinerary or dared to question her, the
blowback was intense. She would rage over the
telephone or accuse them of racism. At other
times, especially with men, she would become
overly familiar. “It was very strange,” says Neil
Aldridge, a British photographer who was lured
to Indonesia by the con artist—posing as
Christine Schwarzman—in April 2018. “She was
talking about how she really felt that she could
talk to me very easily and she enjoyed the con-
nection we had in a short space of time.”
Convinced this was about more than money,
K2 Intelligence brought in psychiatrist and psy-
choanalyst Kerry Sulkowicz. The obsession with
high-powered women, Sulkowicz hypothesized,
suggested some kind of childhood trauma. “Our
mothers are all high-powered women when
we’re children,” he points out. But where Sulko-
wicz was perhaps most insightful was in giving
credence to a theory Kotsianas had long har-
bored: that the Con Queen wasn’t a queen at all;
it was a king. “Even though the person was put-
ting themselves forward at the beginning as a
female, it was not entirely clear that it necessar-
ily was a woman doing this,” says Sulkowicz.
“Which turned out to be correct.”
t the very beginning of the investi-
gation, Kotsianas says, “I thought
it was two people.” From the infor-
mation gleaned via the victims, it
was clear the con artist wasn’t acting alone.
There was the chauffeur in Jakarta, the cutouts
doing the technical bits (registering domains
and emails), and occasionally other hired help:
secretaries, tour guides, even a Caucasian man
who actually supervised some auditions in Ja-
karta in one of the earliest iterations of the
scam. And then, of course, there was the male
assistant who would always make the first over-
tures. As the Con Queen spoke to an increasing
number of victims, it often seemed the assistant
“played the largest role,” leading Kotsianas to
suspect that the same individual was imperson-
ating both the con artist and her underling.
In early 2018, even though the investigation
was ongoing, Gebauer and Kotsianas took the
unusual step of going public with the story in
order to warn as many people as possible. The
resulting article, published in The Hollywood
Reporter in July 2018, prompted even more
victims to come forward. Helpfully, a number of
them had recorded their calls with both the Con
Queen and her assistant after becoming suspi-
cious. A few weeks after the article came out,
the K2 Intelligence team was working in its
open-plan office when Kotsianas started shout-
ing. “I remember we heard screaming across
the floor,” Gebauer recalls. “ ‘It’s a man! It’s a
man!’” Armed with a handful of recordings,
Kotsianas gathered staff around her desk to
analyze the voices. “There were British accents,
American accents, Asian accents, sometimes it
sounded like a woman, other times it was a
man,” Gebauer says, “but it was very obvious
they were all the same person.”
They made that discovery by identifying
characteristics that were similar throughout
all of the calls. “There were turns of phrase,
cadence, ways his tone would go up on certain
words or sighs—things like that,” Kotsianas ex-
plains. “It was the personality coming through
versus just the voice.” Most of all, however,
Kotsianas kept thinking back to the person
who had called her, claiming to have been ma-
nipulated by the con woman. “It became abun-
dantly clear that this man I had spoken to was
the person in all of those recordings—the mas-
termind himself.”
For some of the victims, particularly those
who had been induced into sexual conversa-
tions, discovering they had been talking to a
man felt like a further violation. Kotsianas was
equally incensed. “What’s most offensive to me
as a woman is the way he portrays women,” she
says. “When they get angry, they’re shrill and
manipulative and all these caricatures. These
women have worked their entire careers to
make their names, to get to the top of their
industry, and he’s using casting-couch sexual
innuendo and berating people and talking
down to them, and a collection of awful things,
none of which were accurate for any of the
women I’ve interacted with as part of this.” In a
post-#MeToo era, of course, such claims are also
potentially career-destroying.
Victoria Alonso is executive vice president of
production at Marvel Studios, where she is
credited on 24 superhero movies, including
Iron Man, Captain Marvel, Black Panther, and
Spiderman: Far From Home, an unprecedented
accomplishment in an industry long dominated
by men. In April 2019, just days before the
world premiere of Avengers: Endgame, a semi-
nal moment in her career that had been over a
decade in the making, Alonso found out she
had been caught up in the con artist’s web after
receiving an unsettling message from Endgame
actor Josh Brolin. “He reached out to me and
said, ‘Hey, I need to talk to you,’” Alonso recalls.
“ ‘There’s a friend of mine that was [contacted
by you] and asked to do something that seemed
out of character for who you are. I don’t think
this is real. Can I call you and talk?’” When they
connected, Brolin explained that Alonso had al-
legedly told his friend, a stunt performer, that
180 MARIECLAIRE.COM March 2020
Marvel planned to replace Jeremy Renner as
bow-and-arrow-wielding superhero Hawkeye.
The fake Alonso then asked the stuntman to
audition for the part over the telephone, and
the call had quickly turned sexual.
The con artist possessed both an uncanny
ability to impersonate Argentinian-born Alon-
so and insider knowledge of the film industry.
(Last October, rumors surfaced that Marvel
had considered replacing Renner after allega-
tions emerged that he had threatened his ex-
wife.) But the con artist seemed clueless on one
point: Alonso is one of Hollywood’s foremost
LGBTQ advocates and usually appears on red
carpets with her wife, actress Imelda Corcoran.
Still, Alonso was horrified. “That people would
ever think for a second—for a second—that this
was part of how I do things,” she says, “just
makes me sick to my stomach.” Instead of
spending the summer basking in Endgame’s
box-office success (by July, the film had earned
$2.79 billion worldwide, becoming the highest
grossing film of all time), Alonso worked with
K2 Intelligence and asked Marvel Studios and
its parent company, Disney, to further investi-
gate. “Very few times in my career, I’ve lost
sleep over something,” she admits. “And this is
definitely the one time where I just couldn’t be-
lieve that this was happening.”
Like many of the high-profile women who
have been impersonated, however, Alonso was
principally concerned for those who had been
taken in by the imposter. “Most important, I
felt for the people that were on the other side of
the phone call,” she tells MC. “Because what
this person does is, they go after somebody’s
dream. That to me was the most hurtful and
the dirtiest [aspect] of it all.” Similarly, former
Paramount Pictures chairman and CEO Sherry
Lansing was “horrified” to learn she had also
been impersonated in the scam. “You’re prey-
ing on someone’s hopes, you’re preying on
someone’s dreams,” she says in an interview
with MC. “You’re preying on a particularly vul-
nerable population who all have artistic sensi-
bilities, and it just breaks my heart to think
that in any way, without my knowledge, I might
have contributed to that.”
Many of those enticed into flying to Jakarta
have yet to recover financially. Adrian Morris,
a documentary and editorial photographer
based in Spain, admits he was desperate for
work when the con artist reached out to him.
He now wonders if his outwardly glamorous
social-media presence—filled with photo-
graphs of exotic locations—made him a target.
“Maybe he thought that I had more money
than I do or that I was more successful than I
am because it kind of looks like that on my In-
stagram,” he says. “And then he just kind of got
disappointed when he realized I didn’t have
much.”
The brilliance of the con—and its inherent
cruelty—is how much research the scammer
conducts into all his victims, both the ones he
is stealing from and those he impersonates. He
always name-drops a mutual contact to intro-
duce himself (in Scarnici’s case it was Martha
Stewart; for Adrian Morris, an editor at Suit-
case magazine), and often those who fall for the
con are going through personal upheaval—
divorce, money troubles, a new baby. The con-
ceit of impersonating both a high-powered
woman and her assistant allows him to play
good cop/bad cop with his victims, and he uses
anger and accusations of racism to confuse and
intimidate them. “It’s tailored to your vulnera-
bilities, your potential weak spots, your back-
ground,” Kotsianas explains. It also helps, of
course, that the con artist primarily targets
freelancers in notoriously unstructured indus-
tries, where everyone is competing for a
life-changing opportunity. “The impersonator
exploited people’s weakness or association with
celebrities or with having that Cinderella
moment, your one big chance,” Gebauer agrees.
Since Kotsianas didn’t have the power to
make arrests herself, she had a goal of getting
the case to a point where she could hand it over
to law enforcement. In May 2018, the FBI took
an interest in the case and K2 Intelligence be-
gan sharing all the information it had amassed.
Over a year later, in July 2019, the FBI
finally announced it was officially investigating
the so-called Con Queen. “The FBI is seeking
victims who may have traveled to Indonesia
under the promise of a potential job offer from
individuals purporting falsely to be well-known
entertainment industry professionals,” the bu-
reau stated in a press release, which announced
the launch of an online questionnaire for
victims of the scam to submit. “For it to reach
the threshold of what the FBI wades into, it
needed to be buttoned up in a way that shows
the size and the scope of it,” Kotsianas explains.
“Three or four victims—that’s not enough.” She
estimates there are hundreds of victims who,
between them, have lost hundreds of thousands
of dollars—and those are just the ones Kotsian-
as is aware of. She believes the real number
could be at least three times higher. However,
even if the con artist is brought to justice—to
face charges of wire fraud—it is unlikely victims
will ever recoup any of their money.
Citing an ongoing investigation, the FBI
declined to comment on the case, but now that
the feds have their sights set on catching the
con artist, it is hopefully only a matter of time
before he is unmasked. “In a weird way, I have
respect for how good this person is,” says Joe
Scarnici. “I can’t wait to see what he looks like.”
Neither can Hollywood. In a perverse twist of
fate, movie executives—including some of
those who have been impersonated—are al-
ready pondering how to bring the scammer’s
story to the big screen. It would no doubt be a
revelation that would delight the Con King. “I
personally think he’s obsessed with Hollywood
and entertainment,” says Kotsianas. “So it’s sort
of a love letter, in a way, in his head. The wom-
en he chooses—he’s not doing it because he
doesn’t like them or as a vendetta or anything.
He thinks it’s the greatest honor to [imperson-
ate] a powerful woman.”
March 2020 MARIECLAIRE.COM 181
of how far you’d go to protect your family,
and it’s a big metaphor for parenthood, the
first one. That idea of releasing your chil-
dren out into the big bad world and not
being able to protect them and what all par-
ents feel. It’s on a magnified level in Quiet
Place that there’s aliens who have come to
destroy you if you make a sound.
Anne: I’m curious. I notice something when
Sammy watches Joe Biden speak in the
debates. Sammy will say, “See, he was going
to stutter there, and he switched words.” He
notices, and he reads him in a completely dif-
ferent way. Do you have that almost Spidey
sense of picking up on others’ stuttering?
Emily: I think you do have a Spidey sense if
you’re a stutterer, and I can spot one a mile
off. And I’m sure you can too, Sammy.
Because I spot all the tics and all the little
idiosyncrasies that people do when they’re
about to stutter, or they’re hiding it, or
they’re masking it. You spot all the tricks
because you do them yourself. That’s really
interesting that you’ve been watching Joe
and seeing those little trips. Because I think
we all still have them, and it’s not necessarily
that there’s a fumbling for the word. The
word is tripping you.
Anne: But you and Joe Biden and Bruce
Willis, you all seem to have figured out a way
to manage in the world with a stutter.
Emily: You do. You figure it out.
[CONTINUED FROM P. 126]
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