VAN NUYS, Calif.—Perhaps the first thing that will strike readers of the new article on The Daily Beast's website, "Inside the Vigilante Sting to Catch a Bogus Porn Scout," is writer Emily Shugerman's description of one of the scammer's victims, Evil Angel Video: "one of the largest and most respected porn production companies in the country." Frankly, as true as the description is, it's not the sort of phrase one normally finds in a mainstream story about porn—or even on The Daily Beast, which frequently posts stories about the adult industry.
According to The Daily Beast's story, aspiring actress Deana Embry was contacted through her Facebook page by a guy claiming to represent Evil Angel and saying that he liked her look and asking her to meet him in his North Farm, Texas, hotel room to audition. It wasn't the first time Facebook had been used in the same sort of scam, but Embry fell for the come-on and met the man. He turned out to be a local business owner and engineering student by the name of Francisco Reveriano, who had her sign some "contracts," took photos, discussed the industry and her personal role in production ... and had her perform a sex scene with him.
It was only afterwards that Embry discovered that the guy was a phony—and according to her, a "pervert"—and it was Evil Angel CFO Adam Grayson who gave her the lowdown on the scheme. Seems that Grayson had been contacted weeks earlier by actual agent Mark Schechter, who forwarded him an email from Reveriano who'd used the e-dress [email protected], and included the Evil Angel logo. The email read, in part, "Our agent will be taking you through the process and hopefully you qualify and agree to work with us. ... Most importantly, in the end it is up to our Agent to decide if you qualify for a project or not and what final compensation you will be offered. So please be prepared and bring your A-level game." Grayson had never heard of an adult agent sending out such an email on Evil Angel's behalf, and he didn't recognize the e-dress as one that anyone at his company had used.
But that wasn't the end of it. Weeks after that first notification, Grayson received two more notices of the same scam being pulled, only this time in Louisiana—and Grayson decided to do something about it.
"I actually emailed the guy to say, 'Hey, man, I know you think you're real cute and clever but we literally know an FBI agent who handles this stuff. This is really stupid. You should stop,' I told him. 'You should get out while the getting's good,'" Grayson told AVN. "And he responded right away to say, 'Oh, you're right; this is really stupid. I'm gonna stop,' and he shut down that gmail account that day. Come the second or third week of August, a girl had randomly called us or sent us a Twitter message or something saying, 'Hey, some guy tried to hire me for an Evil Angel movie. Is this real?' And I saw the email he sent her and I knew it was the same guy: same format, same language with a new gmail account, so I knew he was back at it, and then Sandra McCarthy from OC Modeling calls me, like on a Friday afternoon in mid-August, to say, 'Oh, do you know about this guy?' I said, 'Yeah, I know all about it.' She goes, 'Well, I just spoke to a girl who is scheduled to shoot with him on Sunday in Dallas!' And I was like, 'No way!' So I talked to the girl, Deana Embry, and she was in Dallas and she was awesome, because she had already shot with him a few weeks earlier, he didn't pay her, and he said 'I'll pay you the second time,' of course conveniently, and I said, 'What do you want to do? I'd love to catch this guy.' And she's like, 'Fuck him; we're gonna catch him.' And I said, 'This could be dangerous; he could be a lunatic and you're the bait.' She said, 'I don't care; we're gonna get this guy.'
"This is all late on a Friday," Grayson continued. "Everybody had left the building, and I just googled 'private investigators in Dallas' and I got this guy on the phone who was former Dallas PD and I told him what's going on, and I'm like 'I need somebody to be with this girl on Sunday morning and get this guy's real name and contact info,' and the guy was on it—like, 'Great, happy to do it; let's catch this scumbag'—and comes Sunday midday, I got a message from him, 'We got it; we got everything on tape,' to which I responded, 'That's incredible!' I didn't think it was actually going to work. So we have a video—if you navigate down our Twitter feed a bit, there's like an edited-down version of this, the confession of this idiot, which is pretty colorful. He cracked pretty quick.
"It's pretty colorful; the guy's singing like a canary," he added. "The best part is, I come into work that Monday and I have a message from the guy apologizing, like, 'I should have listened to you two months ago; I'm such an idiot; I hope I don't go to prison.' Then, two weeks ago, when we posted it on Twitter, he had the fucking balls to email me to say, 'I didn't think you were gonna post this video.' And I said, 'I'm pretty sure you're not really in a position to negotiate your publicity rights right now. You're sexually assaulting women; I think you somehow give up some of your privacy. I only took one Media Law & Ethics class in school but I'm pretty sure once it becomes newsworthy, you're out of luck, buddy.' Gotta say, this is one of the stranger episodes in my career."
And that's pretty much what happened, but though another porn scammer had been shut down, Embry still felt violated and attempted to get Reveriano prosecuted. However, her complaints to both the Dallas and the North Farm Police Departments were essentially dismissed. Though Embry had been tricked into sex and she described the entire encounter to an officer, the Dallas Police report said only that "suspect grabbed [complainant’s] butt," which resulted in a charge of "assault by contact," to which Reveriano pled "not guilty" earlier this month. In fact, what he did would have been a crime known as "rape by deception," and if convicted, should have resulted in jail time—but that crime only applies if the rapist "poses as the victim’s partner or advertises the activity as medical treatment." In this case, Reveriano faces only a $365 fine.
The North Farm Police gave the accusation even less credit. According to The Daily Beast story, "Embry also called in a report with the North Farm police about the encounter in which she was allegedly tricked into sex. But when police called her back, she said, they told her the encounter was consensual and there was nothing they could do.
And so (hopefully) ends the saga of yet another phony porn agent—but perhaps this account will give some other budding performer pause if someone emails them from an account they don't know or friends them on Facebook with an offer of hardcore work: CHECK IT OUT BEFORE YOU SAY 'YES'!
