For more than a year, some of the most powerful women in entertainment — including Amy Pascal, Kathleen Kennedy, Stacey Snider and a 'Homeland' director — have been impersonated by a cunning thief who targets insiders with promises of work, then bilks them out of thousands of dollars. The Hollywood Reporter has obtained exclusive audio recordings of the savvy imposter as victims come forward and a global investigation heats up.
He was a freelance documentary photographer, 27 and eager, but not inexperienced. He'd worked in conflict zones for several prestige newspapers and magazines and shot ad campaigns for corporate clients. One day in late 2017, he opened his email to find an unusual message. The first thing he noticed was the sender's name: Amy Pascal, the former co-chair of Sony Pictures Entertainment. That kind of thing didn't happen every day.
Pascal wanted to know if he would be interested in traveling to Indonesia to pursue an exciting project. They got on the phone the next day to discuss it further. His previous assignments had often taken him overseas. He'd explored 16 countries during the past year, including Indonesia. He knew the terrain and could hit the ground running.
After the call, he looked at the email again and noticed the URL: pascalfilms.com. Online, it didn't exist. Pascal, now a producer (Spider-Man: Homecoming, The Post), did have an outfit called Pascal Pictures, but the company didn't seem to have a website. He chalked this up to the fact that Pascal had been very publicly embarrassed in the 2015 Sony hack, resulting in the disclosure of her private emails. The lack of an online presence for her new company made sense.
When they spoke again on the phone, Pascal flattered him. She enthused about his still photography, which she knew intimately. She also was familiar with details of his corporate clients, specific personality quirks of people with whom he'd worked closely. "You wouldn't know these things unless you dealt with these people in very specific ways," he says now. "This gave her immediate credibility."
Over the course of several conversations, Pascal explained that she was reinventing herself after the Sony hack. "She said the news media had made the hack into more of a terrible event than it was," he says. "She said she was still very close with everyone, working actively with them." She had a new production company, a new staff, a slate of fresh projects. As part of this reinvention, she wanted to develop a pair of short documentary films. She was looking for a talented photographer with just the right aesthetic, someone who might even be interested in directing one day. She wanted to collaborate, to build something really special from the ground up.
She explained he would stay in Indonesia for about a week shooting images of landscapes, temples and iconic scenery for a storyboard that would bolster his bona fides with potential buyers. Together they would edit the results into a pitch they could present to financiers in L.A. She would arrange for hotels. He would pay in advance for the airfare and front the costs for drivers, translators, food and other sundries. She would reimburse him for all of these expenses. These kinds of financial arrangements aren't unusual for freelancers in creative industries. He reviewed the contract she sent. It was all pretty standard, a mundane but necessary routine in the life of a photographer. Nothing stood out, except that it was exceptionally professional.
Before long, he was on a plane to Jakarta.
***Six months and $65,000 later, the photographer, who has requested anonymity out of concern for his safety, has come to understand that he was duped by one of the most elaborate scams to ever hit Hollywood. The woman he'd spoken to several times a day for weeks on end wasn't Pascal, but a sophisticated imposter who took him for a colossal financial and emotional ride.
For the past two and a half years, hundreds of unwitting victims around the world have been ensnared by a small but cunning criminal organization whose contours are only beginning to be understood. Three of the producers impersonated have retained the services of a high-end corporate investigations firm, K2 Intelligence, run by Jeremy M. Kroll (brother of the comedian Nick Kroll; their father, Jules, founded Kroll, considered a foundational benchmark in the world of corporate risk management). K2 Intelligence won't reveal specific clients, but sources confirm that one of them is Pascal (she declined to comment for this story). Hollywood companies also are getting involved. Earlier this year, when Lucasfilm's Kathleen Kennedy learned that she had been impersonated, she informed Disney's internal security. A spokesperson for Kennedy says she refers all cases of fraud to law enforcement.
Victims of the elaborate ruse are led to believe they are speaking to powerful female entertainment executives, including billionaire producer and philanthropist Gigi Pritzker; former Paramount head Sherry Lansing; 20th Century Fox CEO Stacey Snider; and Lesli Linka Glatter, a director and executive producer on shows including Homeland, The Walking Dead and Mad Men. "This is such a terrible thing — I was shocked," says Lansing, who left the industry a decade ago to focus on her philanthropic work.
"The people being impersonated are a who's who of Hollywood, as well as high-net-worth individuals in New York," says Nicoletta Kotsianas, a K2 Intelligence investigator who has been tracking the scammers for months. "It's horribly upsetting that someone is making promises and behaving badly in your name," adds Linka Glatter, who was impersonated at least a dozen times between the spring of 2017 and today. "It would go quiet, and I would think it was over, and then suddenly it would start all over again."...MORE
