- A scammer posing as Wendi Murdoch has been flying influencers and travel photographers to Indonesia in an elaborate scheme to steal their money.
- Carley Rudd, a photographer targeted by the scheme, told INSIDER she was manipulated by a person who sounded convincingly like Murdoch on the phone, as well as her male assistant.
- The unidentified scammer has been operating since 2013, and has shifted from tricking Hollywood people to travel influencers.
- They allegedly sometimes still pose as powerful movie executives to fool people into having phone sex with them.
Carley Rudd didn't realize something was wrong until she was halfway around the world.
Rudd was on a photography job she'd been hired for just days earlier. It was a big one. On January 2, Wendi Deng Murdoch, the Chinese-American millionaire ex-wife of Rupert Murdoch, reached out to Rudd and asked her to contribute to a photography exhibit she was putting together in advance of the 2022 Beijing Olympics. Could Rudd come out to Indonesia and take some photos?
Now it was Tuesday, January 8. Rudd was in Jakarta, on a shoot with her husband, who's also her assistant. Murdoch was on the phone. Rudd had already followed some requests she found strange — she'd paid $15,000 for airfare through Qatar Airways with the promise she'd be reimbursed, as well as another $1,400 in cash for what she thought was an Indonesian photography permit. But Murdoch's next request set off alarm bells.
"She said, 'Carly, can you just do something for me? Can you split up from your husband today?'" Rudd told INSIDER. "And that was immediately a red flag for me."
It was then Rudd realized she wasn't actually speaking to the real Wendi Murdoch. Rudd was caught in a scam run by a master psychological manipulator, a reported prodigy at voice acting who could sound like a man or woman, and had the ability to closely mimic a number of female Hollywood executives and other powerful women.
Since 2013, the scammer has allegedly been impersonating powerful female executives with two goals.
In one version of the person's scam, they manipulate people into flying to Indonesia under the pretense of giving them a freelance job, only to milk them of cash.
In the second version, they seduce their victims into having phone sex, and then disappear.
After The Hollywood Reporter published a blockbuster investigation into the scammer — who was at that point impersonating Hollywood producer Amy Pascal — in July 2018, they appear to have switched gears. No longer targeting people connected to Hollywood, the scammer is now going after Instagram influencers. They particularly target travel influencers and photographers, like Rudd, who have significant Instagram followings (Rudd has 60,000) but who aren't big enough to have a professional vetting infrastructure in place.
The FBI and New York Police Department have open investigations into the scam, according to The Hollywood Reporter, and are also working with the boutique corporate investigations firm K2 Intelligence, which has tracked the shift to influencers.
"For a long time, they were going after people in Hollywood," Nicoletta Kotsianas, a director at K2 Intelligence, told INSIDER. "[Now, they're] routinely targeting influencers — Instagram stars, travel photographers, people who do stuff that involves them travelling all over the world."
A master manipulator
The scammer is skilled at reproducing specific details about the person they're impersonating, as well as gaining the trust of their victims. In Rudd's case, they sent an email citing her work with an editor at Condé Nast Traveler, which she had worked with before. They also sent emails from convincingly real URLs — they emailed Rudd from wendi@dengmurdoch.com.
Rudd still tried to vet the fake Murdoch, excited yet surprised that someone of her caliber would reach out to her directly rather than through an intermediary. They spoke on the phone, and Rudd looked up old interviews on YouTube to see if the voices matched. As far as she could tell, it sounded like Murdoch.
There were still some red flags, like the rushed timeline for the photography shoot, a non-disclosure agreement with a few typos, and the request that she pay for a photography permit herself with cash.
But Rudd brushed them off. Rudd, like many established photographers or influencers with mid-sized followings on Instagram, are well-known enough to do high-profile projects, but don't necessarily have an infrastucture of managers and agents to do vetting on their behalf.
After The Hollywood Reporter's initial article about the scammer, they went relatively quiet for around two months, Kotsianas said. From there, they started moving away from targets in the movie and television industry and went after more influencers and photographers.
"People just like Carley, [with] 20 to 70 thousand followers, definitely influential in their niche sphere, but are just kind of running things on their own," Kotsianas said. "Maybe they have an agent, but they don't have the infrastructure in place for vetting, and they're directly dealing with brands they're working for and stuff like that. And that's why I think they've been a particularly vulnerable group."
