Fresh Air - Best Of: Kyle MacLachlan / Inside the ‘romance scam’

Episode Date: October 3, 2026

Kyle MacLachlan was just 23 when he auditioned for Lynch's adaptation of Dune. The two would go on to work together on the cult classics Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks. “The worlds that [Lynch] creates are real in his mind — they exist,” he tells Terry Gross. MacLachlan's new memoir is Fictional Selves.Also, Wired reporter Andy Greenberg describes the story he broke about a cyber crime operation in Southeast Asia that entraps computer engineers into defrauding victims around the world of billions of dollars. And book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews Min Jin Lee’s new novel, American Hagwon. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

From W. H.Y.Y. in Philadelphia, I'm Terry Gross with Fresh Air Weekend. Damn good coffee. And hot. That's today's guest, Kyle McLaughlin and Twin Peaks, one of the most eccentric series on pre-cable TV. It was created by David Lynch, who also made the groundbreaking film Blue Velvet, starring McLaughlin. But their first movie together flopped. McLaughlin has a new memoir. Also, Andy Greenberg from Wired Magazine describes the story he broke about a size of cybercrime operation in Southeast Asia that entraps computer engineers into participating in schemes that defraud victims around the world of billions of dollars.

And I'll tell him about a cyber scam that fraudulently uses our show's identity. And book critic, Marie Karegan, reviews Minjin Lee's new novel. That's coming up on Fresh Air Weekend. This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Terry Gross. Diane, 1130 a.m., February 24th, entering the town of Twin Peaks. It's five miles south of the Canadian border, 12 miles west of the state line. I've never seen so many trees in my life. What the W.C. Fields would say, I'd rather be here than Philadelphia.

You may recognize that as my guest, Kyle McLaughlin, in the first episode of the David Lynch TV series, Twin Peaks, as FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper recording a message, as he drives. At the time, Twin Peaks was the strangest, most dreamlike series ever on TV. Like a lot of dreams, the meaning of the imagery and story were often elliptical, hard to interpret. To everyone's surprise, Twin Peaks became a big hit. McLaughlin says he wouldn't have become the person he is without David Lynch. Just months after acting school, McLaughlin seemed destined for a meteoric rise. Lynch was making an adaptation of Frank Hurstead. Herbert's 1965 science fiction novel, Dune, and he cast the young McLaughlin as the lead.

Along with the part came a multi-picture deal with its producer, Dino DeLorentis. After the movie flopped, the deal was canceled. McLaughlin had to rewrite his plans and wasn't sure how. His next break came when Lynch cast him in Blue Velvet, which was a turning point in American film for its nightmarish imagery and threatening performances. Lynch and McLaughlin teamed up again for the TV series Twin Peaks and the return of Twin Peaks and for the Twin Peaks movie Fire Walk with Me. While McLaughlin was writing his new memoir, Lynch died.

The memoir is called Fictional Sells. The title is a reference to who people think he is based on his roles and who he really is, and how confusing that can be for him. You may also know Kyle McLaughlin from his roles, including showgirls, sex in the city, desperate housewives, Portlandia, overcompensating, and fallout. Kyle McLaughlin, welcome to fresh air and congratulations on your memoir.

I'm very grateful to be here and thank you for having me on the show. So in the scene we just heard, David Lynch was in the backseat of the car directing you as you read the message you were recording. Is it reassuring to have your director in the back seat or is it making you more self-conscious? It's both. First of all, I, you know, and we'll get into David in our relationship, but having him near always made me feel better.

So that wasn't even part of it because there was never judge. I never felt there was judgment coming from David. It was always just joy and pleasure. You know, in a strange way, I think the pressure was really sort of self-delivered by, you know, by me. And it's like, I want to do a great job here. and I want to get everything the way I imagine it to be. And David's help and input was always to expand what I'd started and just more to think about more colors, more ideas, more suggestions

about how to really deepen and enrich the character, the scene, the moment, whatever it might call for. You read that you didn't use your real speaking voice for the role. What did you change? Well, it was heavily influenced by David because I recognized that Cooper shared so many of David's quirks, I guess, personality, attitudes. So I tried to... Straight-laced, but weird? Yeah, yeah, just a little bit off, right?

And I feel like, I don't know it. Oftentimes things come and I do them and I'm like, I'm not exactly sure why I'm doing it this way, but I'm just going to trust it. but it was kind of a, you know, now listen, Sheriff, you know, and it had a little bit of an almost a nasal quality to it. And David's speaking voice, you know, not all the time, but he can be, you know, he'd be, Cale, hey, you know, sorry, I'm thinking, blowing out the speakers here, but it had a certain pitch. And I just found myself kind of burrowing into that. David Lynch, who was your mentor, your director, and your good lifelong friend, died while you were writing the memoir.

How did his death change what you wanted to say, changed the mood of the rest of the book, change your mood while you were writing it? Well, yeah, at first it was a significant loss. obviously when someone passes so suddenly like that, it's as a shock, you know, and you just disbelief. And the beautiful thing about a memoir is that you then can go back and say, and from that I grew to this, or I learned this, or this changed in me. Obviously, I didn't know how he would feel about some of the stories that I tell some of the difficult times that we went through as friends and as creatives. He was such a private person, you know, that to share those intimacies and those moments,

I felt like he would need to be okay with that. You didn't want to feel like you were violating him. I didn't. Is there an example of one of the first of? of those dark times that you refer to in your relationship with Lynch? Yeah, we, during the course of the making of Twin Peaks, the original Twin Peaks, there was a struggle. I felt I was definitely trying to, you know, it wasn't the sinking ship necessarily, but I felt like I was trying to keep something afloat that I didn't know how to

keep afloat. I didn't have the skill set. I didn't have the knowledge. Well, David Lynch had left the series during the second season. And he was the sensibility behind the show. So with him gone, there were new writers. And you felt as like the person whose point of view we most often see, and as someone who was very close to Lynch, that you should be an anchor and you should help keep the ship afloat. I did feel that responsibility.

And it was difficult. And at the same time, I'm like, I can't. blame anyone, honestly, knowing David as I did and his personality and his creative self, running a show is not what David wants to do. Every day is going to be a different place, you know. So it was foolish of me to expect that he would remain in place and basically be there every day and do the writing and answer the questions and all the things that a good showrunner has to do. So that wasn't the answer. So there was no answer.

There was no, what can we do to bring back that essence, you talk about, that thing, you know, that made Twin Peaks so special, which is really David. And Mark Frost, the co-creator, because it was sort of the combination of the two of them. But in terms of the direction and the unusual nature of Twin Peaks, the mood, That's pretty much David. And it came back occasionally when he was directing, because he came back to direct a couple of episodes in that second season. And you could feel the cast, myself included, just open. You know, it was like suddenly, you know, there was moisture in the air,

and everybody was like, oh, my gosh, everything, we can breathe. The creative energy had returned, you know. and then it was taken away again, you know, and you're like, oh, you can't help but yearn for that when it's not there. Lynch had a way of getting to the dark underside of things, the things that aren't necessarily visible, the people who you don't necessarily know who are kind of crazy, and the danger that you may be attracted to in some way, but if you're in the middle of it, it's really dangerous. That's not, it's like not fun. So I'm wondering, acting in so much of David Lynch's work

and being absorbed in his sensibility, did it bring out a dark side of you that you hadn't been in touch with so much before? You know, I think there was only one instance in the newest season, the Twin Peaks return. I played three different characters, actually a few others,

but three main characters during the filming of that. And one of those characters was, as you described, very dark, psychopath. And that was really the only time I felt like, okay, I am now going to enter

into a dark world. And that was a deliberate putting on of the character in the morning when I got to set. and that would happen as I was getting my makeup done, and then I would put on the wardrobe, and as I put on everything,

I began to breathe like that character. At the end of the day, I was like, I am now ready to let this guy go, and it was such a relief. I said, I do not want to carry any of this energy back to my home, back to my family, and I left and put him away in the closet, in the trailer,

when I would get undressed and get back into my regular clothes. Did you feel like Lynch saw something dark in you that you'd been trying to keep your distance from? Yeah, I think so. I think, you know, when we did that, we'd known each other for 30 years, you know. So he had seen behavior from me, and I'm pretty good at hiding that,

but he'd seen it, you know, as a good friend would. And, you know, he creates these incredible things. incredible worlds, incredible environments, and slightly separate realities. And I recognized pretty early on, particularly in Blue Velvet, that I was tasked with the job of going into these worlds, maintaining an innocence which got singed, let's say, in Blue Velvet, until I came back out again. But ultimately, I was the audience's guide into a very scary place and dealing with a scary situation and an extremely scary person, and Frank Booth played so brilliantly by Dennis Hopper.

And I understood that, and I saw that, and I said, okay, this is, it's like I'm sort of David's submersible. You know, it's not alter ego. It's not, you know, doppelgaring, whatever. It's, I feel like it's more of a submersible. So I'm tethered to the mothership, right? But then I'm now kind of on my own exploring this dark place. That's a great enough.

Was it frightening acting opposite Dennis Hopper because he is so scary in that movie. He's so out of control and he inhales some kind of drug from a gas mask, which makes him even more threatening. And he's so believable in the role. I mean, he puts everything into it and he's doing it right in your face in some scenes. Yes, he is. So what was, like, did you experience actual fear from him? Yes, I did, I did.

It was so funny because Dennis was so charming, so lovely, so delightful, so soft-spoken, so much fun, you know, around the set and, you know, during filming and the trailers and stuff, and the minute we were getting into the environment to shoot and he began to sort of descend

in the character, I didn't need to do anything, all I needed to do was stand there in the scene and react basically to what he was giving me because it was incredibly frightening and manipulative and I was truly in shock

and then we would cut and he'd do that great got you on that you know with a hopper laugh you know and I was just like oh my God Dennis you were so frightening he said I know and he

I think he really really he really loved the role he really just he played the heck out of that my guest is actor Kyle McLaughlin. His new memoir is called fictional selves. More of our conversation. After a break, I'm Terry Gross, and this is Fresh Air Weekend. This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Terry Gross. Let's get back to my interview with Kyle McLaughlin. His new memoir is called fictional selves. He became known for

his starring roles in the David Lynch film Blue Velvet and Lynch's TV series Twin Peaks. He's been in a lot more since then. When you were young, your father changed. careers instead of doing what his father wanted him to do, which was be a lawyer. He was very unhappy as a lawyer. So he changed careers and went into finance. I think he became a stockbroker. Did that give you a sense of permission to pursue what you were really passionate about, which was acting, as opposed to doing something that had more security? Yeah. That was part of the deal. His father, my grandfather, wanted him to become a lawyer, which was of the time and place and certainly the family history was my grandfather's attempt to sort of have my father

propel forward, you know, and never have to have the life that he had, which was very difficult, you know, traveling salesman kind of difficult. And my dad went to law school and he passed the bar and he started working practice in Yakima. He changed careers when I was five or six or seven, And somewhere in there, very young and not really aware of what was happening. That change affected his relationship with his father, with my grandfather. And there was definitely some icing that went on there. And the story goes there didn't speak for a couple of years. Then gradually that thawed and everything was fine.

But my dad was happy as a broker. He loved it. And I think from that experience, my dad never insisted that any, that me or my brothers pursue a certain career. There was conversation. There was like, hey, what about, you know, this? But it was never like you do this or we're disowning you kind of thing. So you were 23, just a few months out of drama school,

when you auditioned for your first movie, which was Lynch's adaptation of the 1965 Frank Herbert science fiction novel, Dune, which is set on a desert planet. The movie was released in 1984. You first read Dune when you were 14. You used to write quotes from Dune on the blackboard in high school. And one of the quotes that you put on the blackboard, it's a line, it's a paragraph that you get to say at a key moment in the film adaptation of Dune. So what was it like for you to actually inhabit the part with the quote that you put on the blackboard when you were in high school because the novel meant so much to you?

Isn't it just the strangest thing, Terry? I mean, there's no way I could have ever imagined the love that I had for this book when I was 14, 15, perfect age as a young man to read this heroic journey of a boy on the cusp of manhood who is unaware that he's been brought to this point through generations, like thousands of generations, of breeding to culminate in this,

basically a super being, not unlike Neil, I guess, in the Matrix, the One, you know. And to have this strong connection to that character to the point where it really sort of sustained me through those very difficult junior high years and high school years to, you know, get a call on my answering machine

saying, there's a casting agent coming to Seattle and they want to meet you for the role of Paul in Dune and I thought for sure this was a complete joke. You know, he's been 40 years or something more years. I don't think I have yet sort of figured out how. Maybe I don't think I'll ever figure out how that happened. So I want to read the full quote here. I'd rather you do it, but do you want to do the whole thing?

I don't know if I can remember it. I'm not going to get it exactly right. It starts with I must not fear. I must not fear. Fear is a mind killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me.

And when my fear is gone, I will turn and see where it was gone. No, I don't have exactly, the last part is not exactly right. But you basically turn and see where the fear is gone, and only I will remain is the last line. So you had big expectation. You had a multi-picture deal with Dino Dillarentis, with Dune being the first, several sequels, and then other films as well.

And then the film flop, the deal was canceled, and suddenly you were just floating. I mean, there was also a clause in your contract that there was a certain amount of time, two years, in which you wouldn't be allowed to be in any other movies. I guess they wanted, like, a fresh face. So, like, I mean, it wasn't even a question of not having auditions or not getting parts you weren't allowed to.

So you went to Europe instead. And, you know, how to figure out the next part of your life. And that changed when David Lillard. sent you the script for blue velvet? David actually gave me blue velvet during the filming of Dune. So we were actually shooting, and he sent me the script

that I found incredibly exciting. We were going to film that right after Dune was released. Dune was released, and we went to go film that in January of February of that year. When Dune was, sadly, was not well-received,

everything, as you said, fell away. Oh, is Blue Velvet supposed to be part of that deal? One of the pictures that you'd make for Dina De LaRantis? It was one of the non-dun option pictures that I was required to do for the company. But gosh, it was like the street with tumbleweeds going down. You know, there was nothing going on.

And there was no way for me to hedge, let's say I'd finished filming Dune, and then I was allowed to work. I could have used the potential of what Doom was going to be to maybe nail down a couple other leading type roles in interesting films

that I could have banked. You've had two relationships with people who you were acting with. One was with Laura Dern when you were in Blue Velvet. That relationship lasted a long time. You fell in love while your characters were falling in love on screen.

And you and Lara Flynn Boyle fell in love when you were doing Twin Twin Peaks. So how did chemistry on screen affect falling in love and how did falling in love affect chemistry on screen? Well, Laura is just magical. She's one of our great actresses. Laura was so present and the things that Jeffrey and Sandy were experiencing together, you know, Kyle and Laura were experiencing together as well. And, you know, there's your character life, screen life. And then there's your character, life, and there's of your real life, you know, and these were definitely blending.

And honestly, I don't think, you know, David didn't necessarily discourage it either. He said, you know, you recognize that this is actually something that is going to be good for the film. And he really loved the idea that Jeffrey and Sandy were going to be a couple. And that's a crazy thing about David. The worlds that he creates are real, you know, in his mind. They exist. So the fact that this was happening was very pleasing to him. David Lynch and Isabella Rassolini, one of the stars of the film,

they had a relationship too. So that must have been just like so unusual. And I think you were all staying. I'm not sure about Isabella or Rassolini, but at least three of you were at the same bed and breakfast. Yeah, so Isabella and Laura were at the same bed and breakfast. I had a separate place, but I was over at Laura's place all the time. And then David had a place out on the beach.

He had a place out there who we were filming in Wilmington. You know, we were all pretty, I don't know if respectful is the word, but we were not running around, making out of every corner of the set. You know, we were like trying to keep it low key. But there was definitely a lot of love around on the set, which was kind of remarkable considering the tone was quite dark and intense. And I think what happens sometimes on films, at least in this case,

the positivity, the love, the joy that was there kind of carried us through some of the darker scenes, darker moments of which there were quite a few. But we were able to separate somehow, you know, who we were with, who these characters were, in a very healthy way. Con McCleckham, thank you so much for talking with us.

I really appreciate it. Terry, has just been a good. complete pleasure. I'm such a huge fan. Thank you for having me on the show. Kyle McLaughlin's new memoir is called fictional selves. This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Terry Gross. Minjin Lee's new novel, American Hagwan, is the third in her projected four novel series about the Korean diaspora. Pichinko, the second in the series, was a finalist for the National Book Award. Our book critic, Marie Nicaragan, says she didn't think Pachinko could be topped until

she read American Haguan. Here's her review. Minjin Lee's new novel, American Haguan, has been nearly ten years in the making. If it had taken 20, I'd still wonder how she held all these stories, these lives, such pain and love in her imagination for the time it took to find the words to embody them on the page. A simultaneously sweeping but intimate novel about the complexities of the, of immigration, the fragile promise of America, and the purpose of education. American Haguan is also a classic page turner, populated by characters who are hard to leave behind at the end of 600-plus pages. It's an overwhelming reading experience, one that appeals to the head

as well as the heart. The Coe family is at the center of this teeming narrative, which spans the years 1992 to 2007. When we meet them, John and Helen Coe have just returned to Seoul, South Korea, from six years in Sydney, Australia, where John, a senior manager for a Korean conglomerate, had been stationed. Before Australia, the Coes were in the U.S. All three of their now adolescent children, Bo, D.H. and Meadow, were born in Paramus, New Jersey. But given their on-the-move family life, Korea doesn't exactly feel like home anymore, and 13-year-old daughter Mido, the shy youngest child, is having an especially hard time in school. Korea, however, will turn out to be yet another temporary post, thanks to a cowardly betrayal by John's oldest friend and superior at his company.

Tehoun Shin, we're told, was a man who was a man who, who was clear in his professional goals and muddy in his private life. Shin, a married man, an exuberant cheater, has become besotted with a beautiful, sexually adventurous young employee named Donby. Because Donby is pressuring him to leave his wife, Shin orders John to set up Donby to fail at the company and then fire her. John, a man of integrity, objects, but finally must obey his best friend's orders. That's when Donby, a femme fatal to the max, turns the tables and sets John up for a fall.

The novel soon jumps to 1997, when the Asian financial crisis wreaks more havoc. Most of the co-family, along with a multitude of other fully realized character, wind up in Southern California. Even Shin and Donby eventually land there. A network of family, as well as friends from school and the Korean church, help prevent the newcomers from going under, although the coes must settle for less. John finds work in the kitchen at Shrimp Castle, a fish place in a Korean shopping mall. By the end of a long day, his hair was matted down, with sweat and oil beneath the net, and his crisp white apron from the morning

was spotted with oil and soapy disinfectant. Almost everyone else we meet works themselves to the bone. Late in the novel, our omniscient narrator surprisingly introduces another key character, Shins estranged wife, Mary, who works in a florist shop in New Jersey. Mary pointedly reflects that, Over the years at her church, poor men and women her age had died of different cancers, and sometimes Mary wondered if hard work alone could kill people. The co-offspring, in whom all hopes for a better future reside, also work.

All three of them, at one time or another, are employed by a haguan and after-school private prep academy. Most haguans in Korea and here in America prepare their students to excel academically and preferably go on to Ivy League schools. But the Haguans the Co-Kids work at is run by an idealistic Korean-American nicknamed Lion, who thinks differently. The bittersweet set piece towards the end of this novel, where Lion addresses a gymnasium packed with some 500 parents, all ethnically Korean, and tells them education should be transformative, not just transactional,

is so powerful. It should be read by anyone called upon to defend a liberal arts education. Lee's style throughout American haguan is striking, in that it counters the old show-don-t-t-tell writing adage. Instead, there's plenty of exposition in this novel, and yet not. not a page is workmanlike. In fact, Lee is so deft that she conjures epiphanies out of the simplest material. I wish I could read to you the very last sentence of American haguan to demonstrate her mastery. But instead, I'll just say that the simple possessive pronoun, his, unexpectedly appears in that sentence, and its effect is spiritually redemptive and emotionally shattering. What a novel.

Maureen Corrigan is a professor of literature at Georgetown University. She reviewed American Hogwain by Minjin Lee. Coming up, we talk about cyber scams with Wired Magazine writer Andy Greenberg. He broke a story about a cybercrime operation in Southeast Asia that traps computer engineers into entrapping the financial victims of the scam. We'll also talk about a scam fraudulently using the name of our show. I'm Terry Gross, and this is Fresh Air Weekend. This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Terry Gross. Have you ever been targeted by a cyberscam, maybe through an email or text message that sounds convincing and tries to get you to send money or your bank information? There are so many cyber scams out there now. As you'll hear,

our show has been fraudulently represented in one of those. AI is making these scams easier to pull off, making fraudulent schemes even more lucrative. The romance scam is the most lucrative. That's when someone reaches out to you via text or online, who you've never been in person, and eventually you fall in love. The object of that affection professes to love you and eventually lures you into what they say is a great investment opportunity. You send the money, and then more money. Soon, all your money's gone, and you never hear from that person again. Some major crime organizations behind scams like this are based in Laos and Cambodia. My guest, Andy Greenberg, wrote about one such organization for Wired Magazine, where he's a senior writer.

That story involves human trafficking. Greenberg was contacted by a young computer engineer using the pseudonym Red Bull, who was tricked into moving from India to Laos with the promise of a good IT job. When he got to the compound where his job was supposed to be, his passport was confiscated. He was turned into an indentured servant and forced to engage victims in cyber romance scams. Living conditions were awful. So was the work. Red Bull managed to leak over three months of internal videos from inside the crime operation, including WhatsApp group chats, revealing details of how this operation actually functioned. This investigation will be included

in Greenberg's forthcoming book, The Gray Scale, True Stories of Hackers, Outlaws, and Vigilantees from the Online Underground. He's also the author of books about the crime lords of cryptocurrency and about Russian hackers. Andy Greenberg, welcome back to Fresh Air. Very glad to be here. Thank you, Terry. So I want to start with a scam that has fraudulently used Fresh Air, and you've been targeted by a similar scam.

We've heard from authors who have gotten invitations allegedly from our show, in my name, in our co-host, Tanya's name, or someone else on the show, one of our producers, saying, we love your work and that therefore the writer is invited to be a guest on fresh air. And the reason why the authors contacted us is that something seems suspicious about the email. And in fact, if the writer contacted the person who sent the email, they would be told, you have to pay, and it's typically about $250 or $350,000, in order to defray the costs of the interview and help support the show. So this is horrible because some people actually pay and are defrauded of money. Other people are just let down because they think they're going to be on a national show and they're not. not. And also, it sullies our name. We would never dream of asking a guest to pay, to be on our show. Tell what your similar scam is.

Yes, I've gotten these emails. I'm an author. So I've gotten emails from, you know, fake agents, from fake publishers. Just yesterday, I got an email from someone describing themselves as an editor at Penguin Random House, praising my last book and wanting to work with me on another project. I don't think that this scammer realized that my My last book was published with Penguin Random House, so it was kind of a giveaway, but it was very flattering. And, you know, I'm sure if I pursued that conversation, it would have led eventually to them demanding a payment before we could go any further, just as the scammer is impersonating fresh air are asking for these fake so-called production fees. And yes, this is incredibly common to the degree that I think, like most authors I know, have faced something like it. So I know you haven't written about this, you haven't done an investigation into it. Are there any insights that you have into how this works or who's behind it? Well, you know, I don't know exactly who was impersonating fresh hair, of course. But I did ahead of this interview reach out to one of my favorite cybercrime researchers Gary Warner.

And he actually has, on behalf of authors, investigated this and found that those phone numbers had the plus 234 country code pretext. that's Nigeria's country code. He even in some cases identified the scammers by name and they were Nigerian nationals. So it seems likely that this is kind of the latest flavor of email scam

being sent by a kind of older, pretty well-known cabal of, you know, cyber criminal organizations, sometimes known as the Yahoo Boys based in Nigeria and who have been sending, I mean, we've all heard

of the Nigerian prints. Exactly. I've been sending these email scams for many years, for decades, in fact. But this is somehow the latest version of it, and it is absolutely being supercharged by AI, the ability to literally instantly create a personalized and polished, perfect English, zero grammatical errors email to an author that flatters them specifically, and to do this for hundreds or thousands of targets

simultaneously. So let's move on to your big story, because that's a huge story. So you broke a story about human trafficking, where there are victims on both sides of the scam. The person making the ask, who is allegedly falling in love with you and then offers you the opportunity for this, like, great investment, they're basically enslaved. So just like flesh out that scam a little bit before we talk about how it's done. So we were just talking a minute ago about, you know, these kinds of Nigerian scammers who are voluntarily carrying out this scam and profiting from it. But there's another much more profitable, more contemporary form of actually text message-based scam known as pig-butchering that is now the most profitable cybercrime in history that is stealing

tens of billions of dollars a year from victims. And as you alluded to, is being run out of these scam compounds, mostly across Southeast Asia, where hundreds of thousands of another kind of victim are being enslaved and forced to carry out these scams. So what does pig butchering mean? Pig butchering is really the term used by the scammers, and it's this notion that the pig, the victim, is being fattened for slaughter. And they're fattened through a romance scam,

one that sometimes develops over weeks or months or even more than a year, as the scammer builds trust with the victim. In fact, sometimes the victim becomes completely emotionally dependent on the scammer, and only at the end of this very, very long, Khan does the scammer who has been impersonating usually a wealthy, single, attractive woman, you know, bring up this subject of like, well, if you want our relationship to continue, it would be good if you were also wealthy.

And I can introduce you, in fact, to an investment firm, an investment platform where just by sending, you know, a few thousand, a few tens of thousands, a few hundred thousand dollars, you can become rich like me. This is a sure bet, and I can help you do it. So the people who are communicating with the victims are victims themselves. Tell us the story of how the person who leaked all this information to you became a victim and was forced to target people and ask them to invest. Well, there's been a lot of focus on the victims of these scams. But last summer, I got an email from the encrypted email service protons.

mail, no subject line, but it said, I am a computer engineer. I am trapped in a scam compound in the Golden Triangle region of Laos. I am unable to get out of here, and I'm still forced to work here, but I want to leak to you, Andy, everything I can to expose this place and the crime that is being committed here. And so I respond to this. I was of course, wasn't sure if this was real or a scam itself, but I switched over with this source. to the encrypted messaging app signal with disappearing messages for his safety and began this conversation

that would go on for months. In fact, I'm still in touch with this person. And by the way, he asked me to call him in this first conversation. He asked me to call him Red Bull. He told me his story of how he was a computer engineer who had gotten a diploma from the university in India. He had been offered a job as an IT manager,

he thought, in Southeast Asia, but he was told he had to fly to Thailand and then cross the border into the Golden Triangle region of Laos, this kind of special economic zone that is largely controlled by Chinese business interests, and I would later learn, you know, largely controlled by Chinese criminal organizations. So once he got to the compound, they not only confiscated his passport, they told him the only way you can get it back is to buy it back and, you know, you will be paid for doing this work. What was the problem with that logic? It's interesting because some of these human trafficking-driven scam compounds are actually, you know, prisons where people are shackled and beaten.

But this, as you're getting at, was more of a debt bondage situation. He was told that he owed thousands of dollars to his captors. That's, you know, the cost of getting him there, that his room and board meant that he was in debt to them. And he could only pay that back by scamming victims and earning a... a commission, which he could eventually use to pay off his contract, in quotes, because all of this was an illusion. There was this very deceptive kind of model where the bosses of this compound would tell them that you can get rich here. You can go home with money to the village that you came from, but only if you're motivated enough to carry out really big scams, and you'll be paid

a tiny percentage of that and get, you know, wealthy yourself. But he and all of his co-operative who were enslaved in this building, were actually just fined constantly for not meeting their quotas of outreach, for not maintaining their fake profiles online sufficiently, for not arriving to work exactly on time, just truly tragic modern slavery situations, but dressed up as a kind of corporate sales floor.

How is AI used in writing the scenarios and coming up with dialogue, in creating like fraudulent, personas. Red Bull told me that he used chatyp-t and the Chinese AI chatbot deep seek and that everyone in the compound was trained to do this. And this was just kind of a basic way that they would come up with new topics of conversation and polish their language, sort of never run out of these inviting turns of phrase, and even bits of inspirational, you know, poetry and things. And so these AI chatpots were just kind of their constant companion

and very helpful for them in terms of their language, but just as importantly, was that they would use video deepfakes as well. This was rare, and they were told by their bosses to try to talk the victim out of doing a video call. Of course, the person on the other end is always trying to do a video call

to see the person that they're in love with, but they were told, like, come up with excuses, say you don't, you know, you can't do it during your workday, you're too tired or whatever, something to just delay until once in a while they could make use of a model who basically worked throughout the day in this one room of the compound and was their video deep fake model. They would then have a video chat with this model, but use deep fake software to alter their appearance to match whatever photo they had initially sent to the victim so that it truly looks to the victim like they're speaking to exactly the person they've seen a photo of,

and the illusion is complete. Now, video deep fake software can be very sophisticated, but it's not perfect. And I think that what matters here is that the victim, by the time that the video call happened, just wanted to believe that it was real. And so they overlooked the flaws. They see them, maybe just a glitch in the internet or something, and they take the bait. So what do you expect AI might contribute to future scams? For now, AI is this kind of tool that helps human scammers.

But I think the next step, and we're already starting to see this, is fully autonomous AI scamming. And in fact, just last week, Anthropic, the AI company, revealed this case study in a report where 20 dating apps were created by some Chinese organization that were fully populated with AIs that were just carrying out, essentially romance scams where the victim just had to keep paying to continue the conversation. And on this dating app, most of the people in quotes that the victims were talking to were actually fully autonomous AI. And they were entirely deceived and paying into this app to continue the conversation with someone who they thought was real and interested in them,

but was actually just a large language model. So your source was discovered, not for talking to you, but for trying to escape. So would you describe the punishment he was subjected to? So after about a month of Red Bull leaking materials to me, we at Wired said, you know, this is very risky. In fact, it felt like security was increasing in the compound. Red Bull told me that he had seen new surveillance cameras installed like in his office, one of which was above his desk. So we at Wired said we need to call this quits.

Our reporting has ended for now and we'll talk when you get out of the compound. And we won't run the story, of course, until then either. So Red Bull at that point surprised me by saying, well, I need to leave now and told me that he was going to try to escape. And the way that he tried to do that was by forging a document from the Indian police, from his hometown, a fake Indian police letter, saying that he was under investigation. And he wanted to show this to his bosses and say, I need to go home to deal with this or you'll get in trouble too. I'll come back as soon as I've convinced the police that everything is okay. I tried to talk him out of this, but he went forward with this plan, and forgery was detected immediately, and his bosses put him in a room and beat him and kicked him and starved him and interrogated him. And at one point even drugged him, gave him this white powder in a cup of water and told him to drink it.

And I think it must have been a stimulant of some kind and made him feel more talkative, but actually made his skin break out in hives. I think they wanted to get the truth out of him of what his real intentions were. When, in fact, all he wanted to do was go home, they did not ever learn that he was speaking to me. And if they had, I'm quite sure that he would have been killed. How did he finally get out? He learned that the compound had to relocate, that the bosses had seemed had gotten a tip about an impending police rate

by the Laotian Golden Triangle Police. It would turn out that this was kind of a performative raid that didn't actually shut anything down, but the bosses didn't seem to know that. So they did have to move, initially they moved the office into their dormitory, and everyone had to just try to work out of the very overcrowded dorms. And so this actually allowed Red Bull amazingly to get even more secrets from his work phone, sending them to his personal phone. And he also saw an opportunity to say to his bosses, you know, I'm clearly just deadweight to you during this time when you're already having a lot of trouble. carrying out your work, just let me go. And surprisingly, to me anyway, they agreed and they

essentially kicked him out. So in the initial contact with you, he used a pseudonym, Red Bull, but he eventually revealed his real name, which is? Mohamed Muzahir. And in fact, I visited Muhammad in India after his return from the compound before we published our article and interviewed him there and talked with him at length about whether he wanted to reveal this name publicly, and he very clearly decided that he did, that he wanted to show his face. He actually appeared in a video we made as well.

And that's because he wants to inspire people, to fight these criminal organizations, to stand up for themselves as he did. And he wants to do that with his own name and face. That was his choice. It, of course, came with risks that haunt me even now, but it was, I think, a very brave thing to do.

And he is, in fact, a remarkable person, one of the most incredible sources I've ever had the opportunity to work with. Andy Greenberg, thank you so much. Thank you, Terry. I appreciate the conversation. Andy Greenberg is a senior writer for Wired Magazine, an author of the forthcoming book, The Gray Scale, True Stories of Hackers, Outlaws, and Vigilantes from the Online Underground. Fresh Air Weekend was produced this week by Susan Yacundi.

Our executive producer is Sam Brigger. Our technical director and engineer is Orgy Bentham. Our engineer this week is Adam Stanishefsky. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Roberta Shorock, Lauren Crenzel, Anne-Marie Baudenato, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Anna Bauman, and Nico Gonzalez Whistler. Our digital media producer is Molly C.V. Nesper. Our co-host is Tanya Mosley. I'm Terry Gross.