Famous Podcasters Impersonated: Scammers Target Hollywood Personalities with Sophisticated Schemes

When Seth Rudetsky received an invitation to appear on Nikki Glaser’s podcast, he had no particular reason to think it wasn’t real.

Rudetsky, the Broadway performer and SiriusXM host, gets asked to do podcasts all the time. Better yet, this one was offering him between $4,000 and $5,000 to appear. “Oh my God, they’re actually paying for a podcast,” he remembers thinking. A Glaser fan, Rudetsky quickly said yes.

The invitation also seemed to know an awful lot about him. It mentioned his Broadway cruise and his work with Sara Bareilles — the kind of details that suggested somebody had actually done their homework.

“All these specific things about my career,” Rudetsky recalls. “I’m like, oh my God, they totally know my work.”

Rudetsky had stumbled into an increasingly sophisticated scam in which fraudsters impersonate famous podcasters and their representatives, using flattering, highly personalized invitations — most likely composed

And he is not the only recognizable Hollywood figure who fell for it. Bruce Vilanch believed Terry Gross wanted him on Fresh Air.

“It was so articulate and so like her,” the veteran comedy writer and performer tells The Hollywood Reporter of an email he believed came from Gross. The correspondence that followed was equally persuasive, laying out the subjects the person identifying themselves as Gross intended to discuss with him, demonstrating what appeared to be deep, actual knowledge of Vilanch’s work.

“I thought, ‘Well, this must really be Terry,'” Vilanch recalls.

There were, of course, red flags, in retrospect at least. Vilanch knew Fresh Air was an NPR production with an entire organization behind it, yet Gross seemed to be personally handling the booking. He decided perhaps she was simply “a maverick.”

Then “Gross” asked him for money. The explanation was tailored to the moment: NPR was a nonprofit, they explained, but the government had cut funding and the organization needed help. Vilanch found the request strange, but

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“It felt real,” he says. So he sent the money.

But the scammers didn’t disappear after getting his money. They continued preparing him for his Fresh Air appearance, sending more questions and ultimately scheduling the interview. When the appointed day arrived, Vilanch clicked the link. Three windows appeared on his screen: himself, one labeled NPR and a third containing a man.

“Hello, this is Mike,” the man told him. “I will be conducting the interview.”

“No, you won’t,” he replied. “I’m talking to Terry or I’m talking to nobody.”

The man explained that Gross was conducting another interview. Vilanch’s skepticism finally overwhelmed his willingness to believe. He waited about 15 minutes, then left. He sent one last message to his supposed host: “Whoever you are, I hope you enjoy the paltry sum that I sent.”

Vilanch then contacted WHYY, the Philadelphia public-radio station that produces Fresh Air, to warn them someone was impersonating Gross. To his surprise, they already knew.

Vilanch says the station asked him not to immediately post publicly about the scam and told him others had reported similar impersonations. He subsequently spoke with a WHYY media executive and turned over his entire email chain.

For Rudetsky, the scam had a different objective.

After accepting the supposed Glaser invitation, he was asked to join her “manager” on Zoom for a technical setup involving Facebook Live. The man’s camera was off. He had a British accent but told Rudetsky he was in Pakistan. Even his email address struck Rudetsky and a colleague as suspiciously literal, something resembling “NikkiGlasersManager [at] Gmail.”

Yet each compounding oddity was just plausible enough to ignore. Eventually the “manager” began guiding Rudetsky through Facebook permissions. Administrative control of Rudetsky’s page still belonged to a marketing company he’d worked with years earlier, so Rudetsky brought its representative into the process.