“You’d be perfect for this!” Inside the deceptive scam sweeping Hollywood

Like many others, Isabella Schwab moved to New York with a dream. With acting aspirations, the recent college graduate, a 24-year-old with a pale, heart-shaped face and curly blond hair, began doing background work in film and television between shifts as a barista and coaching soccer, among other gigs. And in February, she got her big break, especially for someone so young and new to the game: a connection with one of Hollywood’s top casting directors.

Linda Lowe, whose keen eye for talent was evident Gray’s Anatomy, Friday night lights and scandalAfter reviewing casting platforms and professional databases, I landed on Shaub. Via email, she first invited Schwab to submit a photo for an undisclosed series on HBO Max, and then, after one thing led to another, she delivered a monologue.

Schwab recorded Robin’s (Maya Hawke) speech outside Strange things And kill him. Lowe wrote to her that her performance was “convincing and assured.” Her line delivery needed a little work, but it wasn’t anything a little coaching couldn’t fix, and after one day, Louie offered her the opportunity of a lifetime: a role in Hacks. Due to the project, Schwab was required to sign a non-disclosure agreement, which was no problem. There was just one hitch: she needed to become a member of the performers’ union, SAG-AFTRA, to play the role.

Fortunately, Lowe was able to connect Schwab with a union contracts official. But this supervisor did not have an official SAG-AFTRA email address (his address was “SAG-AFTRA@contractor.net”). When Schwab Googled him, she couldn’t find someone with that name in the union. Finally, Schwab contacted the union through official channels. “Yes, that’s fake,” she remembers the real SAG-AFTRA representative telling her. Then, she received a response from the supposed union official: The $3,000 initiation fee can be paid through bank transfer, PayPal, or CashApp.

It’s a terrible feeling to be cheated on. It’s even worse when someone takes advantage of a deep-seated desire. “I felt like all the wind was knocked out of me. I said to myself, ‘Of course it’s a scam,’” Schwab recalls now. “I felt so naive. But, as she later told her followers on Instagram, where she showed them the nondisclosure agreement, the union information she received, and the invitation to a future Zoom meeting with the software creatives, “This is a big effort to be a scam.”

It was so, yet Schwab’s experience with Fake Linda was just the tip of a larger suspicious iceberg. For at least half a year, one or more scammers have been impersonating some of Hollywood’s most prominent casting directors among a group of particularly vulnerable actors, many of them early in their careers. Carmen fake Cuba that threw Strange thingsThere are hopes raised. There is a quack version of Avatar Casting director Margery Simkin emulated JJ Ogilvie, who acted Riverdale and The good doctor. Counterfeiters contact performers in hopes of obtaining funds through various methods, but often in the form of union fees.

Their scam is an old-fashioned social engineering scam, and it’s not even a particularly sophisticated process, but it nonetheless fooled some actors initially with polished emails and a general understanding of how the casting process works. It may be a sign of things to come as the phenomenon of hucksters peddling false Hollywood dreams enters the age of artificial intelligence.

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Here’s how the scheme has worked recently, according to correspondence provided to Hollywood Reporter And those who have tried it. A big name in casting reaches out to performers via email or social media, inviting them to submit material to be considered for an upcoming role. If the actor responds with some requested information, such as a photo of their head, the scammer may request a self-tape or performance reel. The actor may receive some feedback and then eventually learn that he or she has been chosen for the role – pop the champagne! Except, wait, here come the fake fees.

In the past few months, Liz Weinstein, a model and actress, has received emails from people claiming to be Avi Kaufman (Emotional value, Train dreams), Rachel Tenner (Fargo, to cut), Ogilvy and Mindy Mae, supposedly John Ridley’s casting director (Shirley, the Godfather of Harlem) project. While she noticed warning signs in all these communications and stopped engaging with the senders, she noticed how difficult it was for large-scale actors to separate spam from opportunities. “A lot of legitimate jobs feel like scams,” she says, explaining that some projects require actors to sign a non-disclosure agreement before they can get more information, and they don’t provide a lot of details upfront.

Many fake casting directors use Gmail addresses, which is not as mysterious as it may seem. A lot of casting directors are freelancers and not studio employees, so they have their own email addresses (and some actually use Gmail).

However, impersonators are sensitive to some basic details. For those fakers asking for a “fee” while they’re hiring an actor for a fake project, that’s not only suspicious, it’s illegal in California, and violates the state’s Krekorian Talent Fraud Prevention Act, says Doll Amir & Eley co-founder Gregory Doll. Rogue union representatives also don’t play by the rules. An actor can’t just join SAG-AFTRA by paying a lump sum; They must work on a union-covered project or be an eligible member of an affiliated union for at least one year first.

Then there are the sometimes glaring red flags. In one email, a fake SAG-AFTRA representative named William Parker directed a representative to pay SAG-AFTRA initiation fees to the personal checking account of a person named “Adeleye Ayobami” in Kansas City, Missouri.

However, the more plausible language in the scammers’ messages begs the question of whether the person or people behind the scheme actually know little about the industry. Sarah Preebus is a working actress who received an email impersonating her and created a video warning fellow actors about it. She doesn’t think the perpetrators have much inside knowledge. “It’s obviously illegal for me and for anyone in this business… and there’s no way around it,” she says.

But others are not so sure. “It’s like whoever is doing it has a strong understanding of the casting process because they actually ask for auditions now and sometimes they give feedback and really lead you down the fun path,” says Tiffany Little Canfield. evil The Casting Director is also Vice President of Communications for the Casting Society. “They mimic the casting process instead of just saying, ‘Oh, I saw a picture of you. You would be perfect for this part.”

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Acting director Kaufman first learned she was being impersonated months ago. She started getting emails from actors asking, “Is this you?” Or alert her to unclear messages purporting to be from her. Even more disturbing was that some asked follow-up questions about the fake projects she claimed to be doing. “Some of them have been asked to send monologues for money, and then some of them ask: What kind of monologue? “And we’re like, ‘We don’t want anything from you. This is a scam,'” she recalls. ”

Today, Kaufman is a favorite among scammers, with five sources for this story reporting contact from her digital doppelgänger. The prolific casting director personally receives at least two emails about these schemes a day, she says. As of May 7, Casting Society had identified 13 fake email addresses, all using Gmail accounts, for Kaufman. (and THR I found three more.)

I was horrified by this attempt to steal actors, and she’s not the only one. “The idea of ​​giving them this false hope when there is hope is a part,” he says “Being an actor, the hope, the passion, the desire to be seen for their craft…it’s a very painful thought.” Strange things Casting director Cuba. The Cuban office identified eight fake email addresses for her.

Amanda Linker Doyle, who worked on Murdoch: Death in the family and Chad Powershas been impersonated on Facebook, Instagram, and via email. “I’m an incredibly physical empath. So when these things happen to other people, I feel them deeply and I feel very terrible about it. My physical reaction was: ‘Let’s call the FBI.’ I’ll get them. How dare you try to hurt someone in my name?’” she says. (She tried to contact the FBI but said she received no response.)

in case Avatar Casting director Simkin said the scam went deeper: Her voice was impersonated. In a voice note sent to her by a representative, which he shared with her THRthe scammer posing as Simkin tells the sign, “I’m sending this voice message to clear the air and let you know that this is really me and not a fucking scam from Africa.” The voice on the audio recording is somewhat choppy, and his choice of words is odd, but it undoubtedly sounds like Simkin’s voice. He listens:

“There are no words to describe how terrifying it was to hear my voice,” Simkin says.

The Casting Society has fought back, setting up an anti-scam committee and creating a web page to help casting directors report scams. Next, the community wants to create webinars for SAG-AFTRA representatives and college programs.

“It definitely seems to be growing,” Little Canfield, one of the three leaders of the Anti-Fraud Commission, says of the scheme. “The one thing I think we’ve really found as a pattern is that more often than not [pretend to be] Someone who has no online presence himself.”

To be clear, it is not yet clear how successful this scam will be. There is no performer for it THR Talking about this story actually ended up bombing, after it became suspicious before the money was even changing hands. (This is clearly not the queen of Hollywood Universe.) However, a few people came close. “I was so excited,” wrote one person who commented on an Instagram post about the scam. “I would [sic] Give them[sic] Every paycheck and I would get a second job to pay the $1000 fee.

With the scam going on for months, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to suspect someone was caught up in it. “I think it works,” says Peter Warmka, a former senior CIA intelligence officer and founder of the Counterintelligence Institute, which conducts security audits and assessments of companies. “And I think there’s also a very good percentage of people who have been scammed and don’t report it.” In 2025, a Pew Research Center survey found that about ¾ of adults who experienced online fraud and lost money never reported it to authorities.

While it’s easy to dismiss these messages as too good to be true, the ruse appears to exploit some of the realities of the casting process in 2026. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, casting has increasingly gone online, with self-tapes and virtual auditions becoming the new norm. While it is still rare for directors to request material directly from an experienced actor, finding non-professional actors who can bring greater realism to a project is popular. As a result, stories abound of directors reaching out to potential stars directly on social media or on the street, rather than going through traditional channels such as agents or casting directors.

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The entertainment industry has long been a magnet for scammers, from modern-day romance scammers posing as Keanu Reeves or Kevin Costner to the age-old phenomenon of phony talent agents charging for lessons or photo shoots. In the early 1990s, a scam similar to the one that exists today spread across landlines. “Non-union performers are contacted by a scam artist claiming to be a casting director.” backstage at that time. “They were told they were in a SAG commercial to be filmed in Canada and had to immediately wire money (usually $93) or hand over the money to a hotel to get a union ‘waiver’.”

But fraud experts say this latest scheme could be a sign of things to come for Hollywood as generative artificial intelligence accelerates the scale and complexity of consumer fraud. “Unfortunately, this type of victim profile and this particular industry are pretty much a perfect match for these types of impersonation schemes,” says Mason Wilder, director of research at the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners. The large number of high-profile people in the industry, whose voices and images are widely available online, is catnip for an impersonator with AI tools at their fingertips.

Scammers also like to exploit desperation and dreams — such as an actor’s intense desire to land a movie or TV role — paving the way for victims to overlook red flags. “Your big opportunity, that big opportunity, you want it so bad that you want it to be real. The first place you don’t think is: ‘This has to be a scam’ or ‘This could be a scam,'” says Chelsea Baines, associate professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

With the help of artificial intelligence, it’s easier than ever to suspend disbelief. Some messages associated with this scam used generic company language without typos, posted company logos and added “Terms of Use” and “Privacy” links in their footers. A fake SAG-AFTRA membership application asked which other acting unions the actor belonged to (Actors’ Equity Association? American Guild of Musical Artists?). Fake casting directors made semi-critical comments on the self-tapes, adding a touch of genuine insistence.

Actress Katie Milewski previously auditioned for a small role in one of Kaufman’s projects, on HBO. a taskWhen she received an email from Kaufman in November. So it doesn’t seem unreasonable that “avy.kaufmanscasting@gmail.com” is looking for a potential role in an upcoming Apple TV+ series. Alarm bells didn’t start ringing until Kaufman requested a segment or monologue; Milewski thought that if Kaufman knew who she was, she would surely have seen her act by now.

Milewski found Kaufman’s direct email online and attempted to verify the exchange, but did not receive a response. However, she was skeptical enough that she did not handle the letter again.

But she wasn’t entirely sure she made the right decision until she saw Pribys’ Instagram post about her email from Kaufman in March. Even then, Milewski says, “In the back of my head, I always wondered, Could this actually be real?”

This story appeared in the June 3 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.

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