The secret world behind those scammy text messages

0:00This message comes from NPR sponsor Charles Schwab. Financial decisions can be tricky. Your biases can lead you astray. Financial Decoder, an original podcast from Charles Schwab, can help. Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com slash financial decoder. This is Planet Money from NPR. A couple years ago, my friend PJ Vogt started getting these weird text messages on his phone. You know the ones. They come from some number you've never seen before, and they ask you some out-of-context question. Around for dinner today? Are you still in Boston? If you answer and tell them it's the wrong number, they'll try to engage you in conversation.

0:42It feels like a scam, but the actual scam part never seems to materialize. PJ is the host of one of my favorite podcasts. It's called Search Engine. Each week, they answer a different question. Some of them are big and existential. Some are tiny and hilariously specific. And with these texts, PJ got curious about what happens when you do keep these scammy-seeming conversations going. When you do start to follow the crumbs, one of these texters starts leaving you. So he called up another journalist who'd also gotten obsessed with figuring out this mystery. Like, who was on the other side of these messages?

1:16And how were they making their money? Okay, August 2022, you get a text message from a woman named Vicky Ho. What did Vicky Ho want? So Vicky said to me, hi, David, I'm Vicky Ho. Don't you remember me? And this is kind of weird because my name is Zeke. Zeke Fox, author of the book Number Go Up, Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall. You may remember him from our episode on the explosion in new meme coins. I wanted to get scammed. So I was like, I want to see how this scam works. So I wanted to give her what she was looking for.

1:59Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Alexi Horowitz-Gazi. These days, it can feel impossible to go more than a week or two without some bizarre text from a stranger. But what is actually happening on the other side of that text bubble? Today on the show, we're going to hand that question off to Search Engine, Host PJ Vogt and his guest Zeke Fox take us down the sinister rabbit hole Zeke found when he raised his hand to get scammed.

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3:12Odoo, exactly what a business needs. Sign up at odoo.com. That's O-D-O-O dot com. Zeke is an unusual person. He writes for Bloomberg Businessweek, but instead of doing what I would think he's supposed to do there, which is write about how a successful company has an IPO or something, Zeke is the guy at the fancy business publication who is only really happy when he's investigating scams. And this particular text message he'd gotten from one Vicky Ho, he wanted to play along and experience the scam because he'd heard that these wrong number texts might be somehow connected to a cryptocurrency that he's obsessed with, a cryptocurrency called Tether.

3:54There's this one leaked text message from a Russian money launderer who got arrested by the FBI. So he's texting a customer, and he's being like, you should use Tether. It's convenient. It's quick. and I'm like, okay, this is how the criminals are talking about Tether. Yes. But I don't know any Russian money launderers, but I hear that among the criminals who use Tether are these pig butchering scammers. Now I do know one pig butchering scammer, Vicky Ho. Right. Will she ask me to use Tether? Yes. Okay. And also, wait, sorry, I should just ask you, you refer to these scams as pig butchering scams.

4:32Can you just explain that term? Yes. The idea is that you need to fatten up the victim like a pig with fake romance or even with once you get them to invest in your scams, maybe even let them withdraw a thousand bucks or five thousand bucks. But meanwhile, you, the scammer, are sizing up just how much money this person has, how much you can take them for. And once they send in the maximum you think you're going to get, which in some cases is millions of dollars, you cut off their head. You take it all and you disappear. Okay, so you decide you're going to intentionally fall for the scam. So you start engaging with her.

5:11How does the conversation play out? How does the scam play out? Okay, so I wrote to her, nice to meet you. My name is Zeke Fox. I live in Brooklyn. Vicky said, you have a very cool name. I'm 32 years old and a divorced woman. And she sent me a picture. She looked like a very attractive young woman with like a heavily face-tuned face. Yep. And I thought, all right, we're on the path to getting scammed. But like every day I'd wake up and there'd be messages from Vicky. She'd say like, good morning. How did you sleep, my dear? And she did try to flirt a little bit. Nothing like dirty. Okay. Now, she wasn't that good at this whole thing.

5:55Like I had already said I was from Brooklyn. And then she said she lived in New York. Why? Big mistake. Right, because if she says she's somewhere else, then she never has to meet you. She's sending me these pictures, and I could see in the background, it's not New York. Zeke finds himself getting increasingly more impatient. She was not getting to any sort of scamming. And I would say, what are you up to? And she would list, like, a number of conspicuously expensive hobbies. Like, what was Vicky up to? Like, what types of things was she doing? Well, she'd be like, Like, today, I'm going to go golfing and then drive my Ferrari.

6:31I think she said she owned a chain of nail salons, but then she also had income from trading. And I was like, okay, cool. I want to hear more about that. You're starting to feel like the tug of the fishing line. Yeah. And then she said at one point, she liked to analyze cryptocurrency market trends. So I'm like, oh, crypto. I'm sort of curious about that. Tell me more. Yeah. And so eventually she starts telling me about something she calls short-term node trading. Short-term node trading. Yeah. She's sending me these price charts. And she's basically saying that she can predict fluctuations in the price of Bitcoin.

7:09And she starts in between the Golf and Ferraris. She'll be like, I see an opportunity in the Bitcoin market. And is short-term, I'm not a financial journalist, is short-term node trading a thing in some other context, or is it just a bunch of words that sound mathy and sciencey? No, yeah, it's total nonsense. Okay, okay. But it sounds kind of equally plausible as like all the other random jargon in the crypto world. Like EVM arbitrage, that's a real thing. That's a real thing. Short-term node trading, that's big. But they're close. Yeah. And one morning, I get yet another text that says, love, did you sleep well last night?

7:46and I'm like, I've got to get Vicky to scam me. What am I going to do? And so I'm like, Vicky needs to know that I have money and that I have financial goals. She needs to know that I'm ready to spend. So I sent her a picture of a goal-wing Tesla that I want. And I was like, Vicky, I need money to buy this Tesla. and Vicky said, I see the price is$142 ,200. As long as you like this, money is nothing. As long as you like this Tesla, money is nothing. Yeah, so she told me that tomorrow we could do it. We could do the trading. Vicky Ho told Zeke, her fattened pig, what he had to do. He needed to go home and download a very sketchy looking app for his iPhone.

8:41Zeke was delighted. Once we get into it, she sends me a link to download an app that's called ZBXS. ZBXS. And this is like an iPhone app? Kind of. Kind of. You have to sideload it. Okay. It's like not allowed in the Apple store, but it can be in a dodgy way put onto an iPhone. Let me tell you, it was not easy to install ZBXS. You have to be pretty motivated. This is why she had to butter me up for a week. Oh. Because, like, these instructions to get this bootleg app on your phone are not simple. Okay. Like, my mom, I don't think, would ever be able to install ZBXS. Did you have to jailbreak your phone?

9:22No, but it was just, like, you had to adjust something in the settings that seemed very clearly... Designed to protect you from things like this. Yes. It was clear it was a bad idea. And you open up the app, and it says it's a new and safe, stable trading market. And it's got a lot of, like, price symbols, and it looks kind of like a bad crypto trading app. Okay. But one thing that was promising is that all the prices are quoted in terms of Tether. So, first she tells me to download Crypto.com. I say, ah, yes, the exchange of my friend Matt Damon. Then I learn that Crypto.com is illegal in New York, and it won't work for me.

10:06Okay. So, like, Vicky probably should have researched that. Yeah, as a New Yorker. Yeah. Then she suggests I use one called Trust Wallet. And this is where the good message comes. I'm like, what should I buy in Trust Wallet? I've downloaded it. And she says, find USDT to buy. That's Tether. Yeah. Because USDT is not affected by any rise or fall in the currency market. Which is true, actually. It's pegged to the dollar. Yes, it's a stable coin. Each Tether is always supposed to be worth$1. Yes. Because I was sort of wondering, all the cryptos would probably be pretty good for Vicky's purposes. Yeah.

10:44Why Tether? This is why. It's part of the sales pitch that she's like, oh, it's always worth a dollar. Don't worry about it. So one of the funny things I always learned in investigating crypto is that in theory, there's no fees, but there's always lots of fees. They always hit you with some fees. And in order to buy Tether the way that Vicky suggested, I have to pay$105.86 for 93 Tethers. So I'm paying$12 in fees. Yes. I don't know why. Vicky says it doesn't matter. We're going to make so much money on the nodes. You're going to be buying a Tesla. Okay, so just to recap, because I fear this may be getting a little bit confusing.

11:24Vicky told Zeke to spend$100 real dollars on$100 worth of the cryptocurrency Tether. And then she told him to transfer that crypto into a wallet, a crypto bank account on the internet. Vicky was saying to Zeke that this wallet belonged to a crypto trading app called ZBXS. More likely, the money was just going directly to the entity behind Vicky Ho. Zeke, meanwhile, is dutifully following all of these instructions so that he could learn as much about the entity as possible. I tell her I'm nervous, and she said, it's okay, I was nervous when I first traded too, you have to relax, it's not too complicated.

12:04Then she says, get ready, we have to be ready by 4.30, you have to make sure you have 500 tethers in ZBXS by then. and at this point I might have been busy that day also like my budget for losing money to Vicky Ho was more like a hundred dollars I didn't really want to lose so I was I was sort of hesitating and she starts calling me asking me to send the 500. Okay Jake what are you doing I see you got my message why you not reply to me better why you don't pick up my phone I'm waiting for your reply me, okay? I don't know why. I did sort of stick to the truth in my communications with her, a lot of them.

12:51So I said I had to take my daughter to the doctor. She said, well, the child's body is important.

13:00Child's body is important. Yeah. She asked, has your daughter's health improved? She suggests that I maybe do some trades so I could get money to buy my daughter a gift. In this moment, when the person claiming to be Vicky Ho was telling Zeke to send her more money so that he could buy his ailing daughter a gift, things had gone as far as were really useful for Zeke. He actually had what he needed from this scammer posing as Vicky Ho. Cryptocurrency is traceable. When crypto is sent from one person to another, it usually leaves a public trail. Which meant Zeke could look at the wallet where he'd sent his hundred bucks and see all of its other transactions.

13:39The money in, the money out. And when he looked, he saw vast sums of money flowing from suckers like him in the West to this address where it would sit for a moment and then move on to Asian crypto exchanges, presumably to be cashed out by the scammers. Do you have a sense of how do people come to lose like millions of dollars in this? These scammers are often not any more convincing than Vicky was with me. But one thing a lot of the people have in common is that they've hit some sort of desperate circumstance in their life. Like they have a terminal illness, or they've just lost a loved one, or it's the pandemic and they're unemployed and they've had to move in with their parents.

14:23And a lot of people, if you're at least middle-aged, have access to some amount of money. You could max out your credit card even if you're broke. Yeah. There's weirdly something exciting about knowing that this door that you're dancing in front of, some people have walked through to complete ruin. Like you're talking to someone who is trying to push you into a process where they will take all of your money and all the money you have access to. And that's like a dangerous thing, but they're also doing it in such a clumsy way that you can like have fun with it, I guess. Yeah. Although once you know what's really going on on the other end of the text messages, it becomes not fun at all.

15:03And I started to wonder if Vicky might be punished for her failure to scam me. And I just, I realized that it was time to come clean. After the break, Zeke and PJ start digging into how much trouble Vicky might actually be in. And discover a whole web of human trafficking and scam compounds on the other end of the text bubble. More from the Search Engine podcast when we come back.

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17:06Insperity brings it to your business. Want to be the best? Work with the best. Insperity. How you HR matters. Learn more at Insperity.com slash Tiger. So, for Zeke, what started out as a fun side-reporting project of getting scammed starts to feel a little icky. Like, what if pretending he's going to hand over all this money and then not doing it ends up getting the person on the other end of the text bubble in big trouble? So, he goes searching for someone who knows what might be happening over there, and he finds this group of volunteers who call themselves the Global Anti-Scam Organization.

17:43He ends up talking to a guy known as Ice Toad, and he handed off Ice Toad's contact information to search engine host PJ Vogt. I actually talked to Ice Toad. He told me that, like many people who end up in this world, he arrived because he got scammed himself. The trick he fell for, it used to be called a romance scam. At some point, those romance scams evolved into what we now know to be pig butchering scams. Otherwise known as Xiao Zhanpen in Chinese. Ice Toad finds the Global Anti-Scam Organization, which was started by a woman from Singapore who had also been scammed. But while the organization began in an effort to protect people being scammed, its members had started to learn about the scammers themselves.

18:24Because we realized that these scammers were actually, in a lot of instances, they weren't choosing to scam other people. They had been human trafficked into a place and then basically locked in a compound and forced to scam people. How did you begin to understand that? We got a few of them to admit the fact that they couldn't escape and they would tell you what was actually going on in hopes that you would ring up law enforcement or whoever and get them freed. When Zeke finally found Ice Toad, what he'd originally wanted was just help from a crypto tracing expert who might be able to follow the$100 he'd sent Vicky Ho further and more forensically than he could on his own.

19:07Ice Toad is explaining to me how he can trace the crypto wallets. And he's like, I've personally seen hundreds of millions of dollars of Tether move because of these scams. Oh, wow. And I'm kind of thinking there might be some way to locate Vicky. Maybe not Vicky herself, but like Ice Toad is like, you know who you should really talk to is this Vietnamese hacker. The Vietnamese hacker helped Zeke crack into the fake crypto trading app that Vicky Ho had given him. Although whoever was behind the app quickly shut down the whole operation when they realized that an intrusion was happening. But from that hacker and from other people Zeke spoke to, he was able to get a sense of what a day in life was like for someone in one of these scam compounds.

19:52What I've learned is that there's like a hierarchy within the compound. And the lowest level workers who've been trafficked, they got 10 phones, each has like a different fake identity. And they're trolling the world, sending spam messages, sending messages on LinkedIn, on Instagram, on Tinder, whatever. And they've got like some sort of quota for how many calls they need to initiate. Once you've got somebody hooked, that person gets passed off to like a manager. Oh. So. Almost like the moment you write back, you get pushed up to someone who is more of like the closer. Yeah. And it was actually Vicky1 hit me on text message.

20:34Yeah. Once we chatted a bit, they moved me to WhatsApp. Oh, interesting. And that's probably when a more skillful Vicky took over. Right. Right. And then the person who sent me those voice memos saying that they were Vicky. Yeah. presumably that's like some poor female victim whose job is like recording all the voice memos i see and then if you consistently don't meet your quota they would sell you to another compound the only way to leave is if you pay a ransom of like anywhere from like five to thirty grand and i just i realized that it was time to come clean so i told her i'm an investigative reporter and I'm only talking to you because I wanted to figure out how this works.

21:23And I also said, I've heard bad things about the working conditions for people like you. And she wrote back and said, oh, oh, it's not what you think. Her WhatsApp picture disappeared and I never heard from her again. Zeke had learned that many of these scam messages originated in Cambodia. And more specifically, from a single city, actually a single neighborhood there. A place called Chinatown in a beach town called Sihanoukville. Sihanoukville is a string of high-rises along the water. It looks a little bit like a less glitzy Miami. I found a blog from a kind of confused tourist who went on a very detailed drive around Chinatown.

22:08Hello, everybody, and welcome back. Today we're in Sihanoukville. There's actually a ton of video blogs in this strange genre. European tourists careening around Seahookville with a camera on, unaware of what it is they're really filming. We are in Sahanikville. It seems like a very interesting place. We are in Sahookaville. In recent years, there was a huge casino development boom fueled by Chinese money. It's now got like 100 casinos. Another casino. Is that another casino? Yeah, it is. Casino number seven. But Seahookville fell on hard times. Like the skyline is completely unfinished. There's literally like thousands of unfinished buildings around Seahannockville because this development boom just like stopped.

22:53Casinos and half built buildings. It doesn't make any sense. And the casinos, the ones that were built, had no customers coming in. Right. So a lot of these casinos turned to skimming. And sorry, this vacation blogger, what did they report seeing? On the ground floor, a lot of the buildings have restaurants, barbershops, bodegas, all with signage in Chinese because the intended customer is not Cambodian. But the stores are divided by metal bars in the middle because the workers might be going to the restaurant from inside the courtyard and they don't want them going out to the street to escape.

23:36Oh, so it's like a prison city almost. Yeah, and there's a police station right at the entrance to Chinatown. And the reports are like the police don't do anything. A lot of the local news, they're interviewing the people who like stand on the street and sell cigarettes or the guy who runs the bodega or whatever. People who aren't involved but who just live in the neighborhood. And one of these people said if an ambulance doesn't come every week, it's a wonder. Zeke's implication here is that the ambulances kept coming to the compounds because the people inside were being beaten badly enough, often enough, that they frequently needed to be taken to the hospital.

24:14Zeke starts talking to local reporters in Cambodia who've been investigating these compounds. Danielle Keaton Olsen and Mek Dura. They both worked for a paper there called Voice of Democracy. They'd been writing these exposés about Sihanoukville. And in Chinatown, there were just like 40 or 50 buildings where, according to what they were saying, thousands of people were trapped there and forced to run these scams. My name is Matt Dara. I'm from Cambodia. And I have been a reporter for more than 10 years. I talked to Dara over the world's glitchiest internet connection. He was connecting from an internet cafe in Phnom Penh, the city where he began his career as a reporter.

24:59I started writing about crime, and then I started moving to the human rights, environment, politics. The way Daraa first started to crack the scam compound story was when a Chinese friend brought him a group of people who'd just gotten out of one of the compounds. He brought me two or three or four people who had been, like, released from the compound. and I start to interview and start to learn what they do. As details emerged, he kept adjusting his picture of what life was like in there. More cruel, more brutal. He started hanging around outside the compounds, looking at how their exteriors were set up.

25:38With barbed wire, with a guard, very strict guard. He saw high security. Barbed wire, guards, people only allowed to enter or leave with a card. One of the questions I had about all this was just, Why not just pay people to do this? Why hold them prisoner at all? What I learned is that these compounds seem to be an evolution. In the beginning, some people likely were coming in voluntarily for jobs where they'd be paid to scam Americans and Chinese people. Here's Zeke. Some of them might sort of know they're getting into scamming, but they don't realize that they will be stuck there or that they'll be abused.

26:16And is it sort of like that similarly, like on the American side of it, the reason people fall for these scams is they're desperate. And, you know, something has happened in their lives that has thrown a wrench into the gears. It sounds like for the people who end up being compelled to run these scams, it's similar. It's like their life hits a rough patch and they try something risky that they might not have tried. Right. I mean, if someone told you, do you want to go work in customer service in Cambodia? Like we'll give you$200 a month. That would hold no appeal for you. But yes, like, there are a class of people who can't find any jobs, who are desperate for work, and when they see an ad on Facebook or something like that, they're like, I'll give it a try.