Smoke, Mirrors, and Smears: Inside the Campaign Against Gaurav Srivastava (Review)

The modern smear campaign doesn’t need much. A few willing outlets. A touch of geopolitical intrigue. A dash of character assassination disguised as journalism. By the time anyone asks a question, it’s already too late. That’s the world Gaurav Srivastava woke up to in 2023, as one of the most sophisticated reputation attacks in recent history unfolded around him.

In the fourth episode of the podcast Targeted, host Zach Abramowitz turns his lens on Srivastava, a commodities investor who had, until recently, shunned public life. The story is pitched as a cautionary tale: how a bad business deal with a sanctioned oil trader spiraled into a media onslaught so vast that it reached as far as playground politics at his child’s school. Parents pressured his wife to cancel their son’s birthday party. Social circles froze. Business partners disappeared. And the headlines kept coming.

At the center of this reputational inferno is Niels Troost, a trader whose history in sanctioned markets would raise eyebrows in any compliance office. In 2022, with his access to Western trading lines drying up, Troost approached Srivastava through an intermediary, looking to pivot to cleaner commodities. What followed, according to Srivastava, was a whirlwind courtship: multiple visits to Bali, long conversations, even family dinners.

“I thought he was a family man,” Srivastava recalls. “A good guy who’d had a tough time.”

They struck a deal. Srivastava acquired 50% of Paramount Energy and Commodities for roughly $50,000, contingent on a full audit of the books. That audit never came. Nor did access to the office, email systems, or bank accounts. “We were stonewalled at every turn,” he says. What Srivastava didn’t know at the time was that he had just bought into what would soon become a legal and reputational nightmare.

One of the more surreal details unearthed in this episode—and one that might, in hindsight, be seen as prophetic—involves a memo Troost himself sent to Srivastava before their business relationship fell apart. In it, Troost described a previous partner, known only as “Mr. K,” who he claimed had impersonated a CIA agent in a bid to win favor and close deals. The language in that earlier accusation was eerily similar to the narrative later used against Srivastava. It’s as though Troost had rehearsed the spy story, refining it for reuse. When the exact same claim later resurfaced—that Srivastava, too, was posing as an intelligence operative—the symmetry was chilling. It lent weight to the podcast’s central thesis: that reputational targeting is less about truth than about recycled fictions expertly deployed.

Abramowitz’s interviews paint a picture of an entrepreneur who was not naive, but perhaps too trusting in the guardrails of due diligence. When the audit finally did arrive, it confirmed his worst suspicions: unaccounted asset transfers, opaque shell entities, and active trading in Russian oil—the very activity Srivastava had been promised was over.

He did what most professionals would: he called his lawyer and demanded a written response. The reply? A teary message from Troost, followed days later by a formal letter rescinding Srivastava’s shares on grounds of “fraud and deceit.”

But what began as a corporate squabble soon morphed into a reputational mauling. As Targeted details, obscure blogs and foreign-language websites began publishing near-identical stories accusing Srivastava of everything from financial misconduct to espionage. These weren’t just random digital smears. According to intelligence consultant Victoria Kataoka of the Arkin Group, who later began working with Srivastava, they were part of a “highly coordinated campaign.”

“You can make almost any sort of allegation now, and it sticks,” she says. “It costs very little to break someone, and almost everything to repair that damage.”

The genius of the attack was in its structure. Stories started in disreputable outlets before creeping into more credible spaces. A former Wall Street Journal writer referenced the claims on his blog. Then came the Journal itself. Then the Financial Times. None of them, says Kataoka, questioned how these allegations emerged in tandem across jurisdictions.

And why would they? The narrative was compelling: a commodities investor allegedly entangled in shadowy dealings, linked to a man already sanctioned across Europe. The plot wrote itself. But as Abramowitz and Kataoka point out, it was fiction—well-sourced, tightly packaged, and wrapped in just enough ambiguity to pass as plausible.

What Targeted does so effectively is zoom out. This is not just about Gaurav Srivastava. It’s about the playbook. In episode one, we met Jonathan Taylor, the whistleblower whose revelations about SBM Offshore’s $275 million bribery scandal earned him years of retaliation and a Red Notice from Interpol. In Srivastava’s case, it was weaponized media, not law enforcement. But the aim was the same: silence, isolation, erasure.

There is something cinematic in the way Targeted resists melodrama. Abramowitz never editorializes. His calm cadence only underscores the paranoia. When Srivastava says, “It was 6 a.m. in L.A. I opened my phone and saw lies being published halfway across the world,” you feel the disorientation. The helplessness.

The psychological toll becomes a character in its own right. Srivastava describes the isolation that followed: friends who distanced themselves, donors who vanished, professional ties that dissolved into silence. For a man who had spent his career in energy and commodities, navigating opaque markets with discretion, the sudden glare of scrutiny was both foreign and crippling.

Victoria Kataoka brings gravitas to the episode. Her firm, the Arkin Group, was initially hesitant to work with Srivastava. It took weeks of vetting. “There is a very large ecosystem to validate his version,” she says. What convinced her wasn’t just Gaurav’s story, but the mountain of internal documents, communications, and transactional logic that aligned with his account. “Once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it.”

She notes that the campaign wasn’t just about discrediting Srivastava—it was about redefining him. Over time, he was recast from investor to villain to, eventually, something monstrous. Racist tropes surfaced in the messaging. The attacks evolved from whispers about business disputes to depictions of Srivastava as inhuman, irrational, dangerous. It was dehumanization as strategy.

And yet, despite the narrative machine against him, Gaurav Srivastava remains calm, even careful. There is no righteous fury in his voice. No vendetta. Just fatigue, and the quiet conviction that he must set the record straight, if only for his children.

As the episode winds down, Abramowitz hints at what’s to come. In the next installment, we learn how Srivastava fought back—through litigation, international filings, and the long, exhausting task of rebuilding trust in a world increasingly hostile to nuance. If the first part showed how reputations are destroyed, part two promises to show how redemption, if possible, must be clawed back piece by piece.

Targeted is a podcast built on restraint, rigor, and quiet revelation. It has no interest in clickbait or moral panic. Instead, it asks: Who controls the story? And what happens when the truth becomes the casualty of convenience?

In the case of Gaurav Srivastava, the answer is still unfolding. But Targeted makes one thing clear: in the age of digital disinformation and weaponized narratives, anyone can be a target. And everyone should be paying attention.