Hue Jackson’s Hall of Fame Scammers: Hargobind Tahilramani

Welcome back to another exclusive sneak preview of the Hue Jackson School of Scam Artistry!

We’re into June! Football gets ever closer with every passing day. I can almost taste it. It’s the time to start crunching film to prepare for training camps. It’s also the time for our planet’s best scammers to get to film study of their own – the more you watch learn about how to pull off the great con, the more ambition you’ll feel, I think. While I get into half-assing my way into a whole-ass paycheck, I’m confident there will be lots of people who’ll start flocking back to movies this summer – maybe even in the great American tradition of the drive-in theatre. Remember – lock your trunks, otherwise I’m swooping in there when you’re busy macking in the back seat, ignoring the movie. Now, let’s take a look at another Hall of Famer who used a little silver screen magic to his advantage!

HARGOBIND TAHILRAMANI: CON QUEEN OF HOLLYWOOD

BORN: 1979 (possibly October 31st)

With the COVID-19 pandemic now seemingly finally on the wane here in North America, people will once again be returning to events with crowds, both outdoors and indoors. In particular, the film industry is probably one of the most excited groups about these loosened restrictions – it’s been quite some time since they’ve been able to scam audiences into buying tickets for absolute dreck. Yes, scams, cons, and grifts have long been a part of the global film industry – with audiences, studios, and investors consistently bilked out of large sums of cash over the last century, it’s thus fitting that we take a look at one of the most egregious con artists that Hollywood’s ever seen.

Our Hall of Fame Scammer du jour is a man who put in almost twenty years of effort to make it to the top of his game. Like in many other professions, hustle is rewarded in the film industry – and in scamming. Hargobind Tahilramani is certainly a guy who knows how to hustle – in both senses of the word.

Beginning around 2015 or so, Tahilramani, an Indonesian man, impersonated numerous American female film executives, including Sony Pictures Entertainment president and co-chair Amy Pascal, Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy, Paramount CEO Sherry Lansing, 20th Century Fox CEO Stacey Snider, producer Wendi Deng Murdoch (Rupert Murdoch’s ex-wife) and producer Deborah Snyder (director Zach Snyder’s wife). He also impersonated a number of male executives as well. By using altered voices, fake accents, and untraceable phone calls, he managed to keep the scam going until late last year.

The scam itself was both incredibly simple and extremely complex all at once: Tahilramani targeted film industry workers, specifically those toiling in the trenches such as photographers, makeup artists, location scouts, and even writers. Using a fake identity, he enticed these individuals to fly to Jakarta on their own dime because of a lucrative work opportunity on a new film project – with promise of reimbursement once contracts were signed and details handled (Such fictitious titles include The Master, Gotham City Sirens, and The Black Widow – all fairly plausible in this era of filmmaking, I suppose.). At the airport, the victim was picked up by a driver who spoke little English, and then driven around the city, ostensibly to various “meetings” related to the project. In this whole experience, the person’s schedule changed constantly – meetings cancelled, hotel rooms needed to get re-booked, driver needed to be paid extra fees… so on and so forth. Eventually, the target became so frustrated by the constant changing of schedules and itinerary that they left early… but not before the fees paid to the driver and “producer” never got reimbursed. While posing as a woman, he even enticed some victims into participating in phone sex, ostensibly as a way of seeing if they could “get into character” for parts in these fake film projects.

Hargobind Tahilramani was so successful with this scam that it’s believed he pocketed over two million dollars from dozens of victims in just a few short years. While this was undoubtedly his most successful scam, he’d been sowing mayhem in a number of different ways prior to the Hollywood scam – before this, he’d called in a bomb threat to the US Embassy in Jakarta, using a mobile phone he’d stashed in an Indonesian prison cell while serving a completely unrelated sentence for embezzlement in the 2000s. He’d also convinced a contractor to stage an elaborate movie premiere party for the Sex and the City 2 smash hit, in Jakarta – which of course he never paid for. He even convinced Enrique Iglesias to fly to Jakarta to play at the “Miss Teen Indonesia” pageant in 2011 – which of course was also not a real thing. (He did not end up performing, unfortunately.)

At any rate, due to Tahilramani’s skill at accents and concealing his identity, he remained a complete unknown for years, despite the stories of this same scam making the rounds in Hollywood for quite some time. Nobody knew who, exactly, he was, or even where he could be found. He earned the nickname “Hollywood Con Queen” in part due to the fact that he was so convincing in being able to speak in women’s voices that investigators just naturally assumed a woman was behind the scam. As it turns out, Tahilramani was living in the UK under the name Gobind Lal Tahil – working as an Instagram food influencer, of all things. The only reason that the FBI even managed to find a break in the case was from their collaboration with screenwriter Greg Mandarano, who’d been one of Tahilramani’s victims in his Indonesian movie scam. Mandarano ended up being a key part of the investigation because he was one of the few victims who’d ever actually met Tahilramani in person – thanks to his work in getting a copy of Tahilramani’s fake passport via the travel agency that set up Mandarano’s trip to Indonesia, the FBI and Department of Justice were slowly able to unwind the threads of the case. Tahilramani was arrested in Manchester on December 23rd, 2020. He’ll stand trial in the near future on eight charges, including aggravated identity theft and wire fraud.

With so much of this story still unfolding currently, we aren’t likely to know the full extent of his misdeeds for a while yet; if you do want to check out more, there’s an excellent podcast entitled Chameleon: Hollywood Con Queen that covers this story in great detail. Hollywood Now reporter Scott Johnson is currently writing a book about the Con Queen, which has yet to be published. There’s also an episode of the HBO Now documentary series Generation Hustle about this same story, not to mention an episode of Nightline as well. Finally, screenwriter and victim Greg Mandarano has a TV pilot of the story ready to go – and hopefully will find a real producer to pick it up soon enough.

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Netflix! Call me! You want another season of Last Chance U? I can hook you up. If you can get to Nashville on your own dime, I can get Tennessee State to reimburse you. Promise. Our program needs a visibility boost – we can make it worth your while. Heck, you could even option these audio cassette lessons if you want! Don’t forget – dial 1-900-FAST-BUX for an exclusive offer – two tickets* to our first home game of the season with every month’s subscription you purchase. Don’t wait! Be sure to get them before they’re gone! Until next time – I’m Hue Jackson.

*They’re actually coupons that look like tickets, but you might save anywhere from 10-30% on the ticket cost depending on how much toner I have in my printer when I go to make a run of these things.

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Information from this article taken from here, here, here, and here. Banner image by The Maestro.