Who's behind these scammy text messages we've all been getting?

27:34And they were overly friendly almost. And then after a while, maybe after chatting with them for three or four weeks, they would start to send me screenshots of their little investment in their wallet. And it would show hundreds or even millions of dollars sitting in their wallet. And they're saying, oh, yeah, I'm earning 2 % a day. Do you want to see how? You know how the story ends. One of his attractive new friends convinced him to send$750. The money disappeared. So did the new friend. I felt like kind of, if you ever had your car broken into and somebody rummaged through it for, I don't know, loose change or your CD player or something.

28:10Yes. It was seeing that kind of similar feeling, like, it feels like you've been violated in a way. And so Ice Toad's life as an anti-scammer began. 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. IceToad 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.

28:46Because 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. Once the scammers began to trust Ice Toad, they were soon asking for help from his organization. Ice Toad to the group started to pivot, from helping just the scammed to trying to help the scammers, too.

29:28The global anti-scam organization was even able to free a few dozen people. 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. Ice 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.

30:11He's really into this whole thing. He's actually hacked some of these scam compounds and has like a trove of internal data. He could really help you out. He'd like broken in and gotten their internal files? Yes. 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 the life was like for someone in one of these scam compounds.

30:44What 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 like the first time Vicky texted you, there was probably someone's job who was to send that text message a hundred, a thousand times.

31:21And 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. Yeah. 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, presumably that's like some poor female victim whose job is like recording all the voice memos. I see. So they're sending these messages all day. Yeah. And then if you consistently don't meet your quota, they would sell you to another compound.

32:06And the only way to leave is if you pay a ransom of, like, anywhere from, like,$5 ,000 to$30 ,000. So to return to that moment when Zeke was still talking to the person or persons claiming to be Vicky Ho, remember he was being told to send more money so that he could buy his ailing daughter a gift? By that point, Zeke was starting to understand that life in these scam compounds was pretty grim. That's why, Z said, he'd felt uneasy about continuing this conversation with Vicky Ho. I started to feel bad for leading Vicky on. And I started to wonder if Vicky might be punished for her failure to scam me.

32:53And 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. And 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. And then her WhatsApp picture disappeared. And I never heard from her again.

33:27After the break, Zeke goes to the country, to the neighborhood that's become infamous for hosting these scam compounds. High rises filled with people sending these scam texts. Let's have your smats.

33:51Thank you.

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35:13Chapter 3, Cianookville. 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 like a kind of confused tourist who went on like a very detailed drive around Chinatown. Wait, it was just like a person who was just like, I'm on vacation and I've found a weird neighborhood and things seem strange here? Yes, because Cianookville, it's a beach town.

35:53It used to be kind of like a backpacker destination. It was cheap. Hello, everybody, and welcome back. Today we're in Cianookville. There's actually a ton of video blogs in this strange genre. European tourists careening around Cianookville 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 Sahukaville. 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. What the fuck? But the casinos depended on Chinese tourism and also this semi-legal loophole that enabled them to live stream gambling to Chinese people in China.

36:45And COVID killed the tourism. Then there was a change in the law in Cambodia that made this live streaming business even less legal. Okay. So, Si Anoukville fell on hard times. Like, the skyline is completely unfinished. There's literally, like, thousands of unfinished buildings around Si Anoukville because this development boom just, like, stopped. So, basically, the whole town is a construction site and it has been for the last few years. Empty building, empty building, empty building, empty building. They do look abandoned. Like, they were halfway through the project and then they were like, f*** this.

37:24See ya. Just casinos and half-built buildings. It doesn't make any sense. And the casinos, the ones that were built, had no customers coming in. Right. And you also had all these workers who were desperate for work because it's the pandemic. So a lot of these casinos turned to skimming. I'm sorry, this vacation blogger, what did they report seeing? Compounds of office towers that are near an unfinished casino, like a giant Las Vegas-style casino that was not completed. Yeah. Each one has like 20 buildings, and they center around courtyards. The courtyards have big black gates with armed guards, and there's barbed wire anywhere people might want to climb out.

38:08Oh, wow. And the blogger noted something else that was incredibly spooky. 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. Oh, 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.

39:00People 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. Zeke starts talking to local reporters in Cambodia who've been investigating these compounds. Danielle Keaton Olson and Mek Dura. They both worked for a paper there called Voice of Democracy. They've been writing these exposés about Sihanoukville.

39:34And 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. And, I mean, their stories were like the most evil police blotter like you ever read in the local newspaper. My name is Mike 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. When did you decide to get into journalism? When I was in high school, I was looking for a part-time job, something that helped me to learn my English and also to support my study.

40:28Dara says he was selling newspapers on the street at a coffee shop. He decided he wanted a job at the newspaper, so he started asking people he saw walking into the building. I keep asking them, hey, would you lend me a job, anything I can do? and then there is luckily one guy. One person actually helps Dura get a job. First, he's set to work in the archives, but later he moves up. A fixer for foreign reporters, then a reporter himself. I start writing about crime and then I start to move into the human rights, environment, politics. The way Dura 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.

41:09He brought me two or three or four people who have been, like, released from the compound. And I start to interview, I start to learn what they do, you know, little by little. Little by little, Daraa learned about life within the compound walls. And 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. with barbed wire, with guard, very strict guard. He saw high security. Barbed wire, guards, people only allowed to enter or leave with a card. Dharag couldn't get inside any of the compounds, but he was able to access the telegram channels the bosses used to talk to each other.

41:56He's reported on one in particular called the White Shark Channel. This is where the people who capture other human beings and sell them to each other to work in scam compounds talk shop. So we have access to the Telegram group. In the Telegram group, it's selling the people, you know, like, oh, this is how much, this is how much. They're selling you from one compound to another country. It's, I think, could be not different from anymore. Dara saw classified ads in the channel. Quote, 20 Indonesians can type more than 30 words per minute. Contact me if any companies need. People are in Cambodia.

42:35Or another, quote,

42:48This was the market of trafficked humans powering the countless text messages Americans got every day, pinging them with what seemed like strange non-sequiturs. The abject misery under something that just seemed, from here, like a weird annoyance. 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.

43:34And 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. Right. 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.

44:16So, Zeke says, this may have started as a business without human trafficking. And some of these compounds may include willing workers, But the margins are thin here. It takes a lot of messages to find a sucker. And Daraa told me that he talked to a boss from one of the compounds who described the financial pressure he feels he's under. One scammer, local scammer, he told me, like, we need to scam this month to get at least one million. If we don't get, we will go bankrupt. The boss was worried about going bankrupt. So the overbosses pushed the bosses under them, and the bosses pushed the people beneath.

44:52which, in this environment, often means physical torture.

45:02Just floor after floor of people who were forced to send scam messages around the clock, and if they didn't meet quotas, they'd be beaten or tortured, like, shocked with electric batons, or even killed. Like, I've heard from people that if they didn't make their quota, they had to line up and beat each other. And they'd be like, if you don't beat each other hard enough, like, we will beat you. Just like the worst, the worst stories.

45:38These places Zeke was learning about were such a modern kind of hell. A site of human misery that would have had no reason to exist without the internet. And the route that some of these people would use to escape this hell was also very modern, and frankly, sort of absurd.

45:59Chapter 4, The Escape Artist.

46:07Zeke wanted to go to see these compounds in person for himself, and he wanted to meet someone who'd escaped one. His quest to do so would introduce him to one of the stranger and, frankly, more morally confusing internet personalities I've encountered. I learn about a Vietnamese YouTuber named Phong Bui. He's very popular on YouTube. What he does is he travels the world and makes often kind of lurid videos about the suffering of Vietnamese people in other countries. Like people who've, like, moved abroad and are now struggling to make a living. And is it for a domestic Vietnamese audience? For a Vietnamese audience.

46:47Phong Bui is in his early 30s. He's a handsome young man with dramatically arched eyebrows. His specialty is interviewing people who have experienced spectacular misery. A lot of media does this, some of it high-minded and award-winning, some of it less so. Here are some sample titles of Phong Bui productions. Quote, devil-faced boy meets doctor to get his face back. Quote, the smile of a man who was banished by the burden of a thousand pimples weighing 10 kilograms. Quote, pity the boneless family, lying like a snake. One of Fang Bui's popular interview genres involved talking to people who had just escaped these scam compounds.

47:28He'd have them show their injuries. He'd get these recently traumatized people to tell the stories of what had just happened to them. So it's like kind of a mix of like, on the one hand, it's useful information. It's like, hey, just so you know, if you're emigrating, bad things happen. But it's also a sort of Mr. Beastie, like, spectacle of, like, this will just get attention because it's lurid. Yes. And understandably, Phong Bui has learned about the most lurid abuse of Vietnamese people abroad, which is people who've been trafficked to scam compounds in Cambodia. Yeah. So Phong Bui, the reason he's able to make these videos about Vietnamese people who are trafficked to Cambodia and work in scam compounds is because he will pay their ransoms to get them out.

48:16And then he films them. It's so similar to Mr. Beast, where it's like you're doing something that is good. You're also doing something that is good in a way that is calculated to give you content. It's like it's just a complicated feeling about things like this. Yeah, it's hard to argue like, hey, he paid$5 ,000 and now this person is free. Like, that seems good. But the established organizations that fight human trafficking will not pay ransoms. They're like, you could even create an economy where people are being trafficked in order to earn ransoms. Like, this is not an effective way of solving the problem.

48:51Right. But these were his most popular videos ever. They're getting like millions of views. I think one of the most helpful things he was doing was just raising awareness among Vietnamese people that you should be suspicious of job ads that say, come to Cambodia and work in customer service at my casino. Right. It's so funny. It's such an interesting— because also journalists would not— like most journalistic ethics would preclude paying a ransom to get someone out of a trafficking situation. And like there's good reasons for those rules, but also I'm sure the people whose ransoms were paid really appreciated that.

49:25Yes. So one of the guys who's in a bunch of Phan Gui's videos is named Thuy.

49:41And Fang Bui and one of them, he's on the phone with Thuy.

49:50He's just paid$5 ,000 to rescue Thuy from Chinatown. And Thuy's like, I just got electrocuted a few more times before I got out. And then Fang Bui says, I gave them the ransom. Why did they electrocute you? And Thuy is like, I don't know either. They took my phone and smashed it. They beat me and said, who paid the ransom? So I get in touch with Thuy, and I start interviewing him about his experiences too. And first time we talk, it's on video chat. And he's like a really young-looking 29-year-old with wavy bangs. And his living situation is precarious. He doesn't really have anywhere private to talk.

50:33So he's, like, walking through the rainy streets of Ho Chi Minh City, FaceTiming me, smoking cigarettes. And, like, when he opens his mouth to get a new cigarette, I can see that he's missing a bunch of teeth. And he's like, yeah, you know, I've lost them in a beating from my captors in Cambodia. So he tells me all about what happened to him in Chinatown. He sends me a lot of pictures of Chinatown. and we've got like Google Maps too. So he's telling me like what happened in which building. And how do you like, not that he would have a reason to lie, but also you kind of can't like verify what are you doing with this information in your own mind that he's giving to you?

51:15So I'm not sure entirely what to believe, but I feel like enough of it is lining up with other things I know about Chinatown that I feel like the new details he's giving me about Chinatown are likely true and could be useful as I try to investigate it more. After a few video calls with Thuy, Zeke decides he wants to meet him in person. They're not the locals. Home people here is not local. He flies to Vietnam. He recorded himself with Thuy and the translator walking around Ho Chi Minh City. So we're walking to Thuy's house. Zeke says there were parts of Thuy's story that struck him as possibly unlikely, but it was also very clear that he'd suffered.

51:56When we meet up, you know, he's showing me scars that he has from his time inside. He has me touch his forehead to feel like there's still sort of a lump from a fracture. But the most hard-to-believe part was he told me that when he was locked up in Chinatown, the way that he was able to escape was that at one point he had been given the assignment to clean the guard's room. and they left him unattended in the guard's room for cleaning. He found a phone in the pocket of the guard's pants. He stole this phone and he took it apart with no tools to remove the front glass. Then he hit it, like, up his, he hit it in his butt.

52:50He hid the phone in his butt? Yes. Okay. And he said that he'd learned how to do this in prison and that you have to take the glass off because otherwise your muscles will contract and crack the glass. But if you take the glass off of a small cell phone, you can fit it in your butt? Yeah, I mean, this is where it's getting to be. I have some questions about this story. This is an iPhone. It's a full iPhone? Yes. And when he got back to his dorm room, And he took the phone out, and then he realized he hadn't stolen the charger. Okay, so he takes the phone out of his butt. He has the piece of glass which he can reattach, but he has a dead iPhone.

53:35Yes. So then, again, he doesn't have a screwdriver or anything. He removed the battery from the iPhone, and he's sleeping on, like, a top bunk. and in the ceiling there are fluorescent lights. And he told me that he, without tools, removed the battery from the iPhone and then wired it to the fluorescent light fixture and charged the battery that way. That's insane. And do you, like, do you believe this? So I'm pretty skeptical of this. In the U.S., I do some research. It seems pretty clear from, like, people's writings about prison that one could hide an iPhone that way. Okay, so people do smuggle iPhones into prison in their butts sometimes.

54:23Yeah, that I think is plausible. Okay. And the charging thing, I talk to people who say that they think it would work. Like, it might not work very well, but it might work. But when I meet up with Thuy, I'm like, Thuy, there is one part of your story that I'm kind of skeptical of. Yes. And he's like, well, you want to see? And I'm like, wow. Okay. Whose iPhone do you use? So we go to a store. Yeah. I buy like a older iPhone, a used one for 50 bucks. Okay. And we went back to my hotel room. Okay. So we're back at the hotel and Toy is demonstrating his skills with the light bulb. And in my hotel room, I didn't really want Tui to take apart any of the light fixtures.

55:17But luckily, the desk lamp had an LED light bulb inside it. Yeah. What's the light bulb for?

55:30And he was like, there's like the necessary low voltage power source inside the LED light bulb. So he took apart this iPhone. Maybe plug it in over here. And I gave him a USB cable that I had. He stripped it with his teeth. And he used the USB cable to connect the low-voltage power source inside of the LED light bulb to the iPhone battery. And charged it? He did charge it, and he did turn it on. Zeke, for reasons he will one day have to answer to God for, actually stopped recording before they got the phone to turn on. But Zeke says, Tui really was able to turn the phone on. To MacGyver, a dead iPhone, back to life, with only a desk lamp and his bare hands.

56:21It really makes you think about how, like, really brilliant people get trapped in, like, really horrible circumstances. Like, what a brilliant person in such a stupid use of their brilliance. Yes, I agree. So he shows you this. He takes the most unlikely part of his story and is just like, no, no, no, I can show you. He doesn't. So that's fascinating. So he had used, he had been able to hotwire this guards dead iPhone, which he smuggled in his butt, and then use that to call out and to get on basically like the list for the Mr. Beast YouTube ransom program. Yeah, but actually, as you could imagine, Vietnamese Mr.

57:03Beast is quite popular. He actually had a lot of trouble getting Phong Bui's attention. And he'd only gotten his attention by writing in the comments on a video of someone else being rescued. And then somebody else in the comments section, not an employee of Phong Bui, was like, what's up? And then he'd become like pen pals with this woman who he met in the comment section. And she had actually been the one who connected him with Fang Bui. I just want to pause here and marvel at the strangeness of this. Every day online, we mindlessly watch videos and our eyes glide past the comments, which contain all these people clamoring annoyingly for our attention.

57:48The idea that one of these commenters wanted attention because he was in a kind of modern prison, experiencing a kind of modern enslavement, that Thuy was asking for someone to notice him using a cell phone he'd smuggled in his own body, that he was really asking for his own freedom, this was one of the things you might have seen on the internet one day and not really noticed. That is one of the competing realities of life right now. Zeke had stumbled into this when he was supposed to just be reporting a book about cryptocurrency. This wasn't even really the story he was supposed to be telling.

58:19It was just the story that insisted he tell it. You can see how I got kind of sidetracked with this guy's story. I can see how you got sidetracked, yes. He was basically able to give you, like, what kind of life is this Vicky person having? And Tui is, like, a voice from one of those compounds. Yes, like, he is not Vicky, but, like, he could have been. Yes. You know? Yes. And there was no finding Vicky, so this was, like, the best I was going to do.

58:49Chapter 5, The Kaibo Hotel. Zeke decided he wanted to actually go to a compound. He did not expect to get inside, but he wanted to see how close he could get. So he takes a bus from Vietnam to Cambodia. He meets up with the reporter, Mek Dara, and they head to the neighborhood where all of these scam compounds are. So when we drove to Sihanoukville, just like driving through town, the Cambodian reporters who I'd been in touch with could point out scam compounds. They'd be like, we know about people who've escaped from this one. Look at the concertina wire and security cameras and the guard over there.

59:25One of them looked like particularly scary. It was just a black tower that had barred windows and fences topped with broken glass and barbed wire. But Chinatown is outside the city center. It's like maybe a 15-minute drive from town. And there's a big avenue that runs through the middle of it. and on the right is this, like, blue glass X-shaped unfinished casino. And on the left is two different groups of office towers. The first group, maybe a dozen buildings, could have held thousands of people. These ones, as we get there, they're clearly empty. And the gates are open, and we're able to walk into the courtyard.

1:00:13But if you keep going, you get to a second group of buildings that surround a hotel called the KB Hotel. People call Kaibo because it's next to this KB or Kaibo Hotel. And it's another like 12 buildings that could have held a few thousand people. And this is where Thuy was held. This was the place that Zeke had heard so many rumors about. The place that the text message from Vicky Ho had drawn him to. A boomtown gone bust, half-built, that had turned into this. A string of nondescript buildings modified to become more like prisons. The gates were guarded, and we hung around for a long time and saw people driving in and out.

1:00:57I see five guys dressed all in black, polishing a black Maybach limousine. And then I see a Chinese guy with a red mohawk and a big belly wearing a Gucci t-shirt, pacing back and forth. and smoking. And this whole area is weird because it's clearly built to be like a fancy casino, but all of the office towers that held the trafficked workers were super run down and dirty and totally out of place. But at the center of it, there's this KB Hotel, which has this gold facade. It's like a pretty fancy-looking hotel. So Twi had told me he was like in the hotel. There had been sex workers and that like bosses had gone there as like a reward.

1:01:42Weirdly, though, like it actually appeared to be open to the public. The hotel? Yes. And a small adjoining casino. So did you try to just walk in? Yes. I decided, yeah, I wanted to see what was going on in this hotel. But I'm out of my depth. I don't speak Chinese. It's hard for me to know what anything means. Because I had gone in by myself, I didn't bring a translator or anything. So I walk in. And I took a tour of the hotel with the guy at the front desk. Zeke is a fantastic investigative reporter in print. He was not there in the field as an audio reporter, but he did record one 12-second clip inside the hotel, which he sent me.

1:02:25I like this music. This is Chinese music. I like this music, Zeke observes. This is Chinese music, the staff member helpfully points out. In exchange, Zeke sounds a bit nervous, which I also would have been. He's walking through a dead casino connected to a hotel that is now an active human trafficking operation. It's just Zeke and the people who work there. We saw no one anywhere. Like, the hotel's fully staffed, but, like, there are no guests. But also completely empty. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He showed me lots of different nice rooms, each of which had views of, like, the place where... People are being held against their will and beaten.

1:03:06Then in the lobby, there's like a grand marble staircase that leads upstairs. And when I walk up there, I see a massive restaurant where you could host weddings. And there is like a small buffet set out. And the host seems pretty confused that I am there. And I might not be interpreting this right, But it seemed like they were so not used to having, like, a customer there that they didn't even really have any habit of, like, collecting payment. So he was just like, go ahead. Eat at the buffet. And so there's only a few people in there. Everybody seems really at home. Like, there is a fridge with beer.

1:03:56And you just go take it. So is your suspicion, like obviously it's hard to prove, but the hotel was almost just like the base of operations for the people profiting from the compound? Yes, like the workers are not allowed to leave. So my thinking was that these are like hires up who work at these compounds or connected to them somehow. And this is like their cafeteria. But again, I really have no idea what's going on. Yeah. So one of the hostesses spoke English. and so came over to see if I needed anything. And I was like, what's with this place? Why is it so empty? What's with these dirty buildings next door?

1:04:38And she said it only opened to the public a couple months ago, i.e. after the raids. And she said that before that, only people who worked in the buildings had been allowed to come to the hotel. And I'm like, why is there all these armed guards? And she says, this is Chinatown, don't you know? And I'm like, no, I don't know. And she's like, the people inside, they can't go outside. Oh, wow, she just said it. And then I made like a horrible face, I think. And she tried to reassure me. And she's like, don't worry, the staff here, we have our freedom. and I was just like, oh no. And, you know, I went and looked out onto these buildings that could have held hundreds and hundreds of people, Vicky Ho's, Tweez, and yeah, I just thought like, this is horrible.

1:05:38And Dara and our driver picked me up and we're driving out of Chinatown and right by the police station on your way out of Chinatown, I see a closed currency exchange. And the signs have been taken down, but you can still sort of see the shadows of, like, the letters that they had on the facade. Yeah. And it's USDT, and it's advertising that they'll, like, trade Tether for cash. God. So for you, it's like you see all that misery. So many things have to happen to create that situation. but what you see undergirding it is tether, like this cryptocurrency that you had originally been curious about.

1:06:24Like that, I mean, if it weren't tether, it might be a different form of crypto, but that without digital, very difficult to trace money, you don't have a scam that's able to get that broke and organized and stay up for that long. That in a world where, you know, you had the same authoritarian regime and you had people wanting to make money and human misery, that just the money trail of banking would mean that it was easier for even, like, other countries to prosecute this. Yes, but I will say in recent months, this has become, like, a bigger issue among governments. Like, Cambodia is under a lot of pressure to crack down, but the activity is shifting to other places.

1:07:10And the UN put out a report where they estimate more than 100 ,000 people in Cambodia are held in these scam compounds. More than 100 ,000 people? Yes, and 120 ,000 in Myanmar. And so now the situation in Myanmar is actually even worse. Between Myanmar and Cambodia, perhaps a quarter of a million people are in these compounds. There are additional compounds in other countries, mostly in Southeast Asia. A study last week from the University of Texas estimates that between 2020 and 2024, pig-butchering scammers have likely stolen more than$75 billion internationally. Even though it is in many cases Americans falling for these scams, it's not entirely clear what the American government could do about them.

1:07:58Zeke believes that the problem, it may actually be solved in China. Most of the victims, both of the trafficking and the financial victims, are Chinese. And in August, a movie was released in China called No More Bets.

1:08:23The protagonists are a programmer and a model who are lured overseas to take, like, what seems like a high-paying job. and when they get there, they're trapped in a scam compound and forced to scam. Oh. And they don't say where they are, and they're tortured. I mean, it's a brutal movie. They seem like they're in Cambodia or Myanmar. The governments of both countries got upset about the movie because they both thought it was about them.

1:08:55I'm going to go. I'm going to be自由. You leave this place, you're自由. This was the number one movie in China. It set a record for advanced ticket sales. It became like a huge deal.

1:09:14In China, this movie is part of the fight against these scam compounds, a government-endorsed film serving as a big, expensive warning to Chinese citizens. Be careful. The film was actually banned in Cambodia. It was accused of doing serious damage to Cambodia's image and reputation.

1:09:37These days, Zeke is back in America, where he continues to chase down all manner of financial funny business. This week, it was a lender accused of making illegal loans to small businesses. Mek Dharah, who covered the scam compounds in Cambodia, perhaps closer than anyone else, no longer has a newspaper job. His paper was shut down last year by the Cambodian regime. Dharah told us he now spends his time gardening vegetables. and continuing to research criminal activity associated with the compounds. He said the one new trend in the scamming industry these days? AI. Some of these scam bosses have figured out that a chatbot can do this work just as well as a trafficked human.

1:10:18Honestly, one job AI could steal where I don't think anybody would complain.

1:10:57Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey and Jigsaw Productions. It was created by me, PJ Vogt, and Shruthi Pinamanani, and is produced by Garrett Graham and Noah John. Fact-checking this week by Sean Merchant. Theme, original composition, and mixing by Armin Vazarian. Our executive producers are Jenna Weiss-Berman and Leah Reese-Dennis. Thanks to the team at Jigsaw, Alex Gibney, Rich Pirello, and John Schmidt, and to the team at Odyssey. J.D. Crowley, Rob Mirandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Kate Hutchison, Matt Casey, Maura Curran, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney, and Hilary Schaaf. our agent is Oren Rosenbaum at UTA follow and listen to search engine with PJ vote now for free on the Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts and if you would like to help pay for this show you can become a paid subscriber and help support the show over at PJ vote.com thank you for listening we'll see you next week

1:12:04Thank you.