Aspiring actors, be cautious.
When my partner, actor and writer Tom Ward-Thomas, applied for the Amazon series “The Power,” he was asked to send an audition tape, usually called a “self-tape.” The role required a character to strip and perform a humiliating dance. Although the nudity was implied and not shown, the “production” wanted him to strip down for the audition.
“I did the tape, head and shoulders only, and removed my top. They loved the tape but now wanted a full-body shot and told me, ‘Feel free to go all the way.’ I said I was happy to go down to underwear, not naked,” Ward-Thomas recalls. “I never heard from them again.”
More recently, in Dec. 2025, Ward-Thomas was contacted directly, not through his agent, with another opportunity, in exchange for an “audition” requiring a 30-second clip involving full frontal nudity, which he recognized as a scam.
“I wasn’t sure from the beginning whether it was above water, but when he was insisting on a naked self-tape, I realized it was not above board.”
The rise of this practice, which we’re coining “castfishing,” has become a plague on the industry. Mashable spoke to actors and other experts about these scammers and who they’re exploiting.
What is the ‘castfishing’ scam?
Castfishing is the offer of a big break in exchange for a nude video.
An anonymous former actor who left the industry told Mashable they’ve experienced more than one scam casting call with characters in sexual situations. In one experience, they described, the character had a bloodthirsty and insatiable lust and spent most of the film luring others into having sex.
“The ‘self-tape’ was expecting my own interpretation… and was without lines. Nudity was fine to be included! The production notes at the bottom of the treatment said ‘no acting experience necessary,'” they say.
While catfishing — pretending to be someone else online — isn’t new, what’s different here is the entry point, says Anna Rowe, founder of romance fraud education site Catch the Catfish and fraud center LoveSaid.
“Instead of romance or flirtation, offenders are exploiting ambition, authority, and the power imbalance in the creative industries. They’re grooming victims under the guise of professionalism, using industry language, fake opportunities, and implied expectations to normalize increasingly inappropriate requests,” says Rowe.
By the time nudity is introduced, Rowe went on, the victim doesn’t feel like they’re being exploited but evaluated.
“That’s what makes this so dangerous,” she says. “It removes the internal alarm system people usually have with sextortion because it doesn’t feel like a sexual interaction. It feels like a career opportunity, which can be rare.”
Exploitative practices encouraging nudity predate the rise of the self-tape, with one Redditor sharing their own experience of a sham in-person audition requiring full nudity on tape.
The arts have long been plagued by abuse of power, with scandals continuing to make headlines. The multiple allegations of abuse from Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, which catapulted the #MeToo movement in 2017, are just a handful of examples.
But now that self-tapes are more common, so is castfishing.
Self-tapes are the new norm in Hollywood
There was a shift towards self-tapes that happened just before COVID, and it became a massive trend afterward, actor and agent Lydia Piechowiak told Mashable.
“Technology has expanded opportunity, but it’s also expanded opportunity for bad actors,” says actor Jona Xiao, who at 12 years old first experienced a scam audition, looking for monetary gain.
The rise of self-taping democratized access, she says. Actors don’t have to live in LA or New York to audition anymore, and that’s powerful. But, “it’s also created new vulnerabilities. It’s easier than ever for someone to create a fake breakdown [summary of the project and roles], request tapes, or present themselves as legitimate without in-person accountability.”
Equity, the leading British performing arts trade union, recognized a spike in complaints when surveying about self-tapes in 2020. Actors found their time exploited, auditioning and never knowing if it was watched, needing to develop their own filming skills, and often needing a scene partner. Despite this, the self-tape boom has continued, both for good and bad.
An industry standard to prevent the exploitation of actors’ time and otherwise has been established, thanks to multiple organizations representing or working with actors, but the standard must be upheld.
In 2023, a group of UK actors came together to publish their own self-tape best-practice document, hoping to regulate a practice they called “the main route to work.” Speaking to Variety, the group stated, “If we’re going to have self-tapes, they need to be done in a way that’s