In a world where identity is increasingly shaped by search results and social media echoes, the line between truth and fiction can disappear without warning. That’s the unsettling reality at the heart of Targeted, a podcast from Next Chapter Podcasts, where host Zach Abramowitz devotes two full episodes to unpacking how one man’s fall from anonymity became a blueprint for 21st-century character assassination.
Gaurav Srivastava, a little-known commodities investor with connections across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, isn’t the kind of man you’d expect to find at the center of an international media cyclone. And yet, by 2023, his name had become synonymous with scandal—accused of fraud, linked to false CIA credentials. How that transformation occurred—rapidly, irreversibly, and perhaps even by design—is the core mystery Targeted investigates.
But Srivastava’s story is not only about him. It’s about the mechanisms that allow stories—true, false, or engineered—to metastasize through digital platforms and journalistic pipelines. And it’s about how institutions built to arbitrate facts can be co-opted, quietly and efficiently, by those willing to game the system.
“I Was a Liability”
The story begins, as many do in the post-sanctions oil economy, with a partnership forged in uncertainty. In late 2022, Srivastava was approached by Niels Troost, a trader that has since been sanctioned for violating rules around Russian trading, with a proposition: to restructure his commodities group and pivot the business away from sanctioned Russian oil. Srivastava agreed, obtaining a 50% stake in the firm. That decision would soon upend his life.
“I had no bank account information. I didn’t even have an email address with the company,” Srivastava tells Abramowitz. Despite being a major shareholder, he says he was systematically denied access to financials and operations. What began as a calculated risk, it seems, soon unraveled into suspicion.
When Srivastava ordered an audit, the findings were “shocking”: money transfers to shadow entities, concealed ownership structures, and continued trades in sanctioned oil—exactly what the company was supposed to be avoiding. “Where the f*** is the money?” he remembers asking, exasperated.
Niels Troost, for his part, allegedly responded with a dramatic reversal—revoking Srivastava’s shares and accusing him of fraud. From that point on, the dispute left the boardroom and entered the bloodstream of the internet.
The Anatomy of a Campaign
The media onslaught began not with established publications, but with obscure digital outlets in South Asia. “A publication I’d never heard of from Pakistan, and one from India, published an article saying the exact story that the Wall Street Journal reported,” Srivastava recalls. These pieces, seemingly minor at first glance, later became the source material for more influential platforms.
The process, according to intelligence analyst Victoria Kataoka, was deliberate. “It was masterful,” she says. “Extremely well resourced… The animus and the resources that were brought to bear to do this, I think it is extraordinary and terrifying.”
Srivastava connects the dots. A blog post from a former Wall Street Journal journalist amplified the rumors. Soon after, the Journal itself, and then the Financial Times, echoed the claims. The sheer repetition, rather than verification, lent credibility. “It’s much easier to break someone than to defend yourself,” Kataoka notes.
What Targeted lays bare is that disinformation no longer requires a shadow state or bot army. It only needs time, coordination, and a willing ecosystem—comprised not just of actors on the fringes, but of the very media and public institutions meant to safeguard truth.
Wikipedia as a Weapon
Nowhere is this clearer than in the saga of Gaurav Srivastava’s Wikipedia page. Two weeks before The Wall Street Journal ran its story, a new article titled “Gaurav Srivastava scandal” appeared on the platform—curiously well-sourced and meticulously written.
“It was incredibly obvious that this was an attack page,” says a Wikipedia editor identified only as David. “It didn’t grow organically… It literally sprung up overnight.”
When Wikipedia moderators deleted the page, another editor recreated it almost immediately. An internal investigation later found that the accounts responsible shared the same IP address, suggesting sock puppetry—multiple identities operated by a single person, often for hire.
According to email correspondence with one such editor who was part of a “large and complex” team, and claimed direct knowledge of how third-tier articles were created specifically to seed Wikipedia content. When asked for an interview, he demanded $40,000 in cryptocurrency.
The underlying lesson: even the most authoritative-seeming sources can be gamed. And once a narrative appears on Wikipedia, it gains legitimacy in the eyes of a public conditioned to trust the platform.
The Human Cost
Beneath the geopolitical intrigues and digital manipulation, Targeted never loses sight of the personal. Srivastava’s pain is not abstract. It’s visible in the quiet moments—his voice cracking as he recalls sitting in his children’s chapel assembly, watching light filter through stained glass as he tried to hold back tears.
“Every parent in the school turned their back on us,” he says. “One told us, ‘If you host a birthday party, nobody’s going to show up.’”
Playdates vanished. Friends distanced themselves. His bank accounts were closed. “I contemplated whether I had failed as a father,” he admits. “Because I brought this agony and pain on children who had nothing to do with this.”
Srivastava still doesn’t know exactly how the campaign against him was executed—or why it was so effective. He only knows that it worked.
A Crisis of Perception
What Targeted captures, in its most haunting moments, is not just the fall of one man, but the collapse of faith in information systems. “I used to believe what I read in the press,” Srivastava says. “I didn’t even know the phrase ‘disinformation campaign.’ I had no context for this.”
That naïveté—so rare in our cynical media landscape—is perhaps what makes his story so affecting. Srivastava is not a whistleblower or a celebrity. He’s an investor whose life was engulfed by something larger than a business dispute. As Abramowitz remarks, “This isn’t mud. It’s quicksand.”
The episodes close without resolution. Lawsuits continue. Gaurav Srivastava’s name remains entangled with rumors that he cannot fully erase. And yet, there’s a quiet note of resilience: “You’re here,” he tells Abramowitz. “You’ve taken the time to hear what actually happened.”
That, Targeted implies, may be the start of justice—not a retraction, not a ruling, but the simple act of being heard.
