Hunting the Con Queen of Hollywood

An interesting thread in this story is the "pay to play" nature of the businesses that people were getting conned in. My only exposure to that business has been in small time music performances, and I instinctively steer clear. In my world of regular tech-industry employment and (for that matter) as a freelance musician the "opportunity" to front my own money in return for a job would be an instant red flag and polite no-thanks response.

A good example of why trust validation is important and why social engineering is one of the most difficult threat vectors to protect against. Hacking the human brain to get trust is a lot easier in most cases than cracking a lot of digital defenses (although it seems a lot of people neglect basic digital defense too...). With some companies I've worked for, I've realized how sometimes customer support could be easily duped, because they want so badly to help the person who is obviously having difficulties and paying us so much money... :P

That recorded phone call sounds very much like a man impersonating a woman's voice to me.

It’s really sad that our government is so dysfunctional that they can’t do anything to help. It’s pure laziness, dysfunction and mismanagement as to why when you call the FBI and they brush you off. What good are they?

> "There is an important element of social engineering going on with these victims," says Snezana Gebauer, K2's head of investigations and disputes practices, who has worked on the case with Kotsianas. "They know everything about their victims' personal lives and use the necessary pressure points, and they use publicly available information about the executives they are impersonating."

So it seems Google/Alphabet finally found how to monetize their new robocaller!

Fascinating read. My hypothesis why the scammer knows intimite/non-public quirks of impersonated people: The scam seems to be a larger operation, e.g. local people in Thailand surrounding the victim. So why shouldn’t they also have inside people in the industry working near those impersonated people? The spies relay everything to the shared scam database/wiki and the scammer on the phone plays his role and pretends to have experienced it first hand.

OA says in several places that the FBI said when contacted that the amount of money involved was too small to warrant an investigation. Just wondering (as an interested Brit) if the FBI would get around to looking at the whole series of scams as a single case and begin to think that the total would be enough to meet the threshold? As the scam escalates, the likelihood of someone getting into trouble abroad increases.

>A designated Indonesian "moneyman" arrives on a moped to collect the funds.

Do people working in Hollywood or documentaries usually hand over sums of cash to anonymous guys on mopeds?

Reminds me of Frank Abagnale's book 'Catch me if you can'

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