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Agence France-Presse quoted an FBI spokesperson as confirming that British authorities arrested a man suspected of embezzling hundreds of thousands of dollars from movie workers posing as powerful women in Hollywood.
According to the magazine “Hollywood Reporter”, the suspect was arrested last week in Manchester, north-west England, with the help of the private investigation firm, K2 Integrity.
It turns out that the “Queen of Hollywood Fraud” is actually a forty-one-year-old Indonesian man named Hargobind Tahilramani who is proficient in imitating female voices and accents, and is wanted by police around the world after charges are brought against him in a California court in November 2019.
The US authorities intend to ask the British judiciary to extradite the suspect, according to an FBI spokesman in San Diego.
Among the women personified by Tahilramani are Kaithlan Kennedy, director of Lucasfilm, producer of Star Wars, Amy Pascal, former director of Sony Pictures, and Sherry Lansing, former executive director of Paramount Studios.
According to the indictment, the forty-year-old man was contacting film professionals from different fields and offering them valuable job opportunities on bogus projects, and the only condition required was that they travel to Indonesia for preliminary work.
The victims were stripped of their money upon arrival in the country by partners demanding “transport fees” and huge advances that were supposed to be returned to them later during production work.
The victims did not get their money back and whoever dared to question these practices or complain about them was being intimidated by Tahilramani, who threatened his victims with photographs of their children or cut them up, according to the indictment.
These scams likely began in 2013 and continue until this summer, as the group adapted its methods to the health crisis and now demands that its victims pay money in exchange for “training video courses” that do not exist in reality.
The ‘Queen of Fraud’ was always mysterious until K-2 Integrity announced last year that it found out she was a man. The publishing house “Harper Collins” bought the rights to this evolving story, which will be written by Scott Johnson, a former journalist for “The Hollywood Reporter.”
