Hollywood Con Queen is unmasked as UK-based conman

A conman who impersonated top female Hollywood executives to dupe handsome actors and others into phone sex and steal over $1 million has finally been unmasked.

And in audio exclusively obtained by DailyMail.com, the conman is heard using a fake high-pitched voice to impersonate Rupert Murdoch's ex-wife Wendi Deng as he allegedly attempts to lure someone into the elaborate scam. 

The scammer - currently the subject of an FBI investigation - has been operating for at least five years and may have defrauded hundreds of people each out of thousands of dollars, according to new true crime podcast Chameleon. 

Nicknamed the Hollywood Con Queen, the fraudster was at first believed to be a boiler room scam run by a group of women.

But private investigators and the podcast hosts now believe just one male master-impersonator, UK-based Indonesian Hargobind Punjabi Tahilramani, is allegedly behind the bizarre and complex swindle.

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For years, movie industry workers have been receiving phone calls purportedly from moguls including the former chair of Sony Pictures Entertainment, the former chair and CEO of 20th Century Fox, and the president of Lucasfilm, offering them the opportunity of a lifetime shooting a blockbuster in Indonesia.

When they arrive in Jakarta – and after spending thousands of dollars on fake tour guides and other scam fees – they realize the movie is a sham and the phone calls were impersonations.

The scammer appeared to pick handsome, muscular men as his primary targets, and has even tricked some of them into having phone sex with him by asking them to read out a sex scene from a fake movie script, the victims told the podcast. 

But he has also targeted screenwriters, make-up artists, production crew, trainers and stuntmen.

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Josh Dean, co-host of the show Chameleon: Hollywood Con Queen, which revealed the alleged identity of the trickster on Thursday, told DailyMail.com the con artist may be one of the most prolific of his kind ever identified.

'We've spoken to dozens of victims,' Dean said. 'We know hundreds have been scammed, and we've been told up to 1,000 people have fallen for some version of this.'

Dean said the scammer would impersonate up to three different people – an executive, an assistant and a lawyer – in one call, switching between impressions seamlessly, and provide reams of fake documents to convince his victims.

'The con artist is such a convincing impersonator that it just seems legit to these people,' Dean said.

'You might think this wouldn't work two times, but it's worked hundreds of times. It goes back as far as 2015, maybe even 2012.'

Tahilramani, who has been using the alias Gobind Lal, is suspected of impersonating at least 12 Hollywood hotshots, including Rupert Murdoch's ex-wife Wendi Deng; producer of 300, Watchmen, and Man of Steel Deb Snyder; Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy; Universal Pictures chair Donna Langley; former chair of Sony Pictures Entertainment Amy Pascal; billionaire film producer Gigi Pritzker; and most recently Bourne Identity and Jumper director Doug Liman.

When news of the con got to impersonated executives in 2017, they joined forces with private investigations firm K2 and began frantically trying to find and stop the scammer.

Snyder told the podcast she was shocked to get a call from Warner Bros casting department warning her of a rumor that she was running 'inappropriate' phone auditions with male actors.

'It was a two-month period, where once or twice a week, another person was being targeted,' Snyder said on the podcast.