Adrian Țofei, February 2019
We’d like to warn everyone about a man called Andrea Corbella, who’s been involved for years in complex international frauds related to Hollywood production companies, independent filmmakers and actors around the world, and likely to fılm investors.
Update #2 [May 2023]: I’ve been contacted by yet another person in the film industry who’s been sadly scammed by Corbella in a similar fashion, claiming to work with Hollywood people, impersonating them in fake emails, faking contracts etc. If you are reading this article because you became suspicious of Corbella and his proposals, please search on IMDb PRO for the real emails and phone numbers of the important companies/people Corbella claims to be working with, and inquire about him. They’ll confirm that they’ve never worked with Andrea Corbella.
Update #1 [April 2020]: I’ve been contacted by two Italian citizens who found my article. Andreea Corbella claimed to them that he’s an agent who can present their film projects to investors and producers, in exchange for a money fee. Looks like he’s out of money and out “hunting” again, this time using a different strategy. He’s now claiming to had been working on the movie Paranormal Activity. If contacted by this guy, don’t pay him anything and alert the authorities. There’s already a criminal investigation in Romania against him, but it would be good to have investigations in other countries as well to stop him from scamming more people. If in doubt, contact the office of Susan Bymel from Entertainment 360 (the LA company he claimed to be working with, phone is listed on IMDbPro) or the creator of Paranormal Activity (Oren Peli) or any other person/company he claims to be working with, and they will confirm that nothing is true. He’s very manipulative, can be very nice and appear professional, has film production knowledge and can even send you small advance payments to gain your trust and make you give all your time, creativity and energy (and even money) on bogus projects.
In September 2016 I was contacted by Andrea Corbella to help him develop a feature film project called “Good Girl“. He presented himself as a development producer and representative of Entertainment 360 / E360 (a branch of Management 360).
My wife (Duru Yucel) also joined the project, and for the past two and a half years we worked on developing “Good Girl”: we wrote the screenplay together, I was also set to direct the movie and presented my vision in details, Andrea Corbella came to Bucharest in 2017 and we organised an audition to find the best actresses, then we did another online audition to finalize the cast. We also started working on other projects of his or with him, my wife auditioned for “Voyage” and was about to get a role in “Ambassador’s Wife“, she also proposed to adapt Suzy Favor’s Hamilton’s “Fast Girl” and Corbella said that E360 optioned the book for Duru to adapt, he even said he’s pitching my series project “Film Crazy” to companies like Netflix and Amazon (after advising me to cancel my feature project “We Put the World to Sleep” and develop it as a series instead).
But this January (2019), after we didn’t receive our script payment on time and couldn’t get in touch with Andrea Corbella anymore (after he constantly postponed saying he’s either in meetings in LA, or even in hospital with cancer one time), we contacted the LA office of E360 directly (using the phone numbers and emails listed on IMDb Pro) and learned that Andrea Corbella never worked for E360, he fraudulently claimed to be an E360 producer, he did fake contracts implicating companies like Blumhouse and 30West, he faked Suzan Bymel‘s signature on contracts (Suzan Bymel being Anne Hathaway’s manager and a founding partner of E360), he impersonated Suzan Bymel in communications with us from a fake email address, and multiple other frauds.
Looks like we’ve been working on fictitious projects for a con-artist for the past two and a half years, making fictitious plans and dreaming fictitious dreams.
And we’re not the only victims, Corbella has multiple other fake projects all over the world. He even traveled to the Cannes Film Festival and another festival in Brazil posing as a representative of E360, claiming to be producing films with Anne Hathaway and other celebrities. Which makes us think that he was most probably using all these film projects professionally wrapped and fake Hollywood credentials in order to get money from investors and then disappear with the their money. He even sent us a small advance payment in the beginning to gain our trust, which makes us think that the stakes were high for him, standing to make much more money in the process.
We tried to contact and warn everyone involved in Corbella’s other projects, based on what we could find on his IMDbPro. We’ve also informed some news sites, but looks like they ignored the story so far, and therefore we decided to write here. Please republish and/or share this to raise awareness and make it much harder for Corbella to continue to scam other people in the film industry.
The screenplay we wrote for “Good Girl” is about an actress whose life if manipulated by a psychopathic filmmaker, which is ironic in the context of Corbella manipulating people in the film industry, including actresses. Moreover, my first movie, “Be My Cat: A Film for Anne” (2015), is about a filmmaker obsessed with Anne Hathaway, so, considering that Corbella claimed to be working with Anne Hathaway and obsessively shared pictures of her on social media (now deleted), we thought that there might be a slight possibility that he has a mental disorder as well, being delusional about working with Anne Hathaway. But most probably not, and he did all that deliberately to hook us into his scam. While attending the Cannes Film Festival with fake credentials, his phone left on the table rang with Anne Hathaway’s name on the screen, as if she’s calling him. He obviously did it to manipulate everyone at the table and gain their trust.
We have hundreds of emails from him (a couple attached here and here), including the ones of him impersonating Suzan Bymel with the E360 logo (a couple attached as well here and here and here), fake contracts with fake signatures (attached here and here), even a letter of intent supposedly signed by Charlie Sheen which Corbella shared with us (attached here, we don’t know if he faked that one as well or actually scammed Charlie Sheen into signing). Entertainment 360 can also confirm all this if contacted.
This is his profile on Cinando with his real picture (a bit younger): Cinando.com/en/People/corbella_andrea_328081/Detail. And this is his Stage32 profile, with fake credentials: Stage32.com/acorbella. He also had Facebook and Twitter profiles, but recently deleted them.
And here are a couple of articles from Brazil, with titles like “Andrea Corbella, director of Entertainment 360, brings to Brazil international co-productions with Oscar-winning actors” or “Documentary with Anne Hathaway to be shot in Goiania“, and including pictures of him on the festival stage together with film professionals in Brazil who are obviously unaware that he’s a fraud: iconnectgyn.com, jornalwebdigital.blogspot.com, curtamais.com.br, meioemensagem.com.br.
We’re now making efforts to recover both professionally and personally from all this madness, and we hope to see some justice after wasting all our savings working day and night for two and a half years without being paid, and wasting precious time that could’ve been used for advancing with our genuine film projects.
Adrian Țofei • Official Site 