Hollywood Con Queen, Part 2
The Perfect Scam
AARP
4.5 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 5 June 2020
⏱️ 40 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Celebrity photographer Joe Scarnici spent thousands of dollars trying to complete an assignment in Indonesia for someone posing as billionaire Christina Ong. Another photographer, Carley Rudd, had a similar experience with a person claiming to be Wendi Deng. Comparing notes, they realize they are caught up in a scam that has been weaving its way through Hollywood freelancers. Investigators pick up the case, trying to decipher who is behind the scam and why they're doing it.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This week on the perfect scam. |
| 0:03.0 | You know at that point my mind was racing and I feared for our safety. |
| 0:08.0 | I feared that the hotel we were at, you know, potentially they could be in on it. |
| 0:13.8 | And my mind went to a million places and I've watched too many James Bond movies and |
| 0:19.8 | spy movies to kind of get into my head about it. |
| 0:24.0 | Welcome back to AARP's The Perfect Scam. |
| 0:30.0 | I'm your host Michelle Hosinski. |
| 0:32.0 | This week, the sequel, to what is honestly one of the |
| 0:36.7 | most bizarre elaborate scams I've ever encountered. I think it might be my favorite partly because of who's involved and the extreme |
| 0:45.7 | lengths both the scammers and their targets are willing to go to to achieve their |
| 0:51.6 | very different goals in this. It all unfolds like a |
| 0:55.4 | creepy thriller and fittingly enough is set in Los Angeles. At least that's where |
| 1:01.1 | the wild ride starts at the intersection where the perfect job and the perfect scam collide |
| 1:08.4 | You need to listen to last week's episode where sought after photographer Joe Scarnichie takes us through every painful |
| 1:15.8 | moment of how what he thought was the perfect gig led him to the other side of the world |
| 1:21.8 | and the loss of a lot of his money. But who is the |
| 1:26.2 | Hollywood con queen? There have been hundreds of victims and Carly Rudd is one of them. I am a freelance travel photographer. I'm |
| 1:38.0 | based in LA but I travel all over the world and live this kind of digital nomad lifestyle I've been living for |
| 1:46.2 | the past three years in different cities all over the world depending on where my work takes me. |
| 1:53.0 | What kinds of things do you take pictures of? |
| 1:55.0 | Everything from landscapes, nature, to cultural attractions, |
| 2:00.0 | restaurants, interiors of hotels, architecture. |
... |
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