Scott Johnson

There were hundreds and hundreds of victims.

It wasn't really about the money.

It was about something else.

It goes back to 2018.

I was at the time I was working as a features writer at the Hollywood Reporter.

And at the time I covered almost exclusively what I like to call the kind of sleazy or dark underbelly of Hollywood.

So, you know, anything that had to do with crime or cons or, you know, fraud or murder or just all the all the sort of weird things

you know, kind of unseemly stuff that happens in Hollywood, that was kind of my beat.

It sort of became my beat.

And it was just a lot of weird stories, you know, strange tales.

And so one day, a colleague of mine came over to my desk and she gave me a tip.

She said that a contact of hers, a big Hollywood producer, was being impersonated.

And she said, maybe you should look into it.

And at the time I thought, well, okay.

But I didn't, I didn't really think much of it.

It was, you know, I heard a lot of stuff like that, a lot about just random cons or weird little grifts and things like that.

So anyway, I looked into it.

I talked to the folks at the producer's company.

They said, yeah, there's, there's something going on, but we're not sure what.

There was somebody or a group of people, some entity was, was impersonating