In a two-part exposé on the podcast Targeted, host Zach Abramowitz delves into the unraveling of commodities investor Gaurav Srivastava’s professional and personal life—charting a descent not into legal trouble, but into the chaotic digital battleground of reputation destruction.

Trageted podcast is now available on Vimeo at vimeo.com/targetedpodcast

Gaurav Srivastava’s official channel is also now available on Vimeo at vimeo.com/officialgauravsrivastava

Targeted podcast goes behind the scenes to the dark underbelly of Wikipedia. They expose a ring of paid Wikipedia editors who were paid to Target Gaurav Srivastava in a smear campaign, citing such publications as project brazen and the WSJ

For Gaurav Srivastava, the first red flag went up when Niels Troost told him a previous business partner of his was a fake spy. Then, more flags went up when Troost kept him in the dark as to what was going on in the business. Troost’s violations of sanctions would eventually be revealed in the audit, but at that point it was already too late - a massive campaign was already underway to set Gaurav up as ‘the fall guy’.

One of the most potent weapons of the smear campaign is the “story about the story”: Once the core arrative has been set, it was leveraged further by reaching out to my friends, family, associates and to organizations I supported. Once one of those organizations distanced themselves from me, or decided the risk of accepting donations from me was too great - a new story would be born and do the rounds. Then these stories were further everaged to the same end: Maintaining a perpetual stream of negative, self-reinforcing stories that would eventually isolate me completely - and false narrative so entangled in its own echo system it could never be undone.

Read more here or listen to the second part of my interview on Targeted to gain an insider’s understanding of how this is ruthlessly executed.

It’s one thing for pay-to-play media outlets to report fake news - that’s what they are paid for! But why did major news outlets such as the WSJ and the Fincial Times report on the story so one-sidedly? Were they complicit or duped? In the second part of Gaurav Srivastava’s interview on Targeted, Inteligence analyst Victoria Katoka explains how the answer may be neither: How the early stages of the campaign against Gaurav Srivastava had already set a cognitive bias by the time the reporters first heard the name Gaurav Srivastava.

A review of the second part of Gaurav Srivastava’s interview on Targeted covers the deeply personal impact the smear campaign has had on his personal and family life. From parents in his kids school refusing to bring their kids over to birthday parties and play dates to the emotional toll it has taken on him personally.

This review of Targeted covers the echo chamber created by the disinformation campaign against Gaurav Srivastava and the central role Wikipedia played in the saga. As an attack page went up on Wikipedia, senior editors flagged it and took it down - only for the page to be reinstated time after time. Eventually, a sock-puppet inquiry was opened to reveal all the editors managing the page were all logging in from the identical IP address - suggesting “they” were all the same person or several people working from the same physical space. One of Targeted’s producers engaged with one of these Wikipedia editors, who admitted he was being paid for his work and demanded $40,000 to submit to an interview on the podcast. The editor was ultimately thrown off Wikipedia and the attack page remains down.

Gaurav Srivastava was targeted. At first by fake news articles in India and Pakistan - but eventually the story was picked up on a respected blog and that was the conduit to perpetuating the targeting campaign in the mainstream media