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

Episode Date: March 8, 2024

"Hi David, I’m Vicky Ho. Don’t you remember me?" An investigative reporter travels halfway around the world to find out who is sending him random wrong number texts and why. After you hear this story, you'll never look at these messages the same way again. You can grab a copy of Zeke's book, Number Go Up, here. If you want to support Search Engine, and access our premium feed, head over to searchengine.show. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, my name's David Weeder. My question for search engine is about all of the ridiculous text messages I get these days. They usually start with some question about how I'm doing, and then when I point out that I don't know that person, they apologize repeatedly, and then it doesn't go anywhere. I don't understand if it's a scam, maybe I don't have the patience to get to the part where they ask for money. Maybe it's some sort of AI learning. I recently got one of these that was entirely in Chinese. I ran it through Google Translate. It was the same thing. And then I got one that was so silly this week that I thought I would send it to you guys at Search Engine. It says, Hold on a second. Hello, Linda. I was introduced by Alan. Can you modify the interior of Maserati? I just don't get it. Can a robot come up with something less stupid to say?

So hopefully you guys want to take a look at this for me. Thanks. Bye. That was a voice message we got from listener David Weeder. Thank you, David. Today we will answer the question, can you modify the interior of Maserati? Not really.

Today's episode is about the answer to David's actual question. Who is behind these wrong number text messages? That question will send a reporter across the world to get to the bottom of this. I promise by the time we are done, you will never look at these messages the same way again. This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Square. Square, the easy way for business owners to take payments, book appointments, manage staff, and keep everything running in one place. Whether you're selling lattes, cutting hair, detailing cars, or running a design studio,

Square helps you run your business without running yourself into the ground. I like seeing Square in action at my local coffee shop. They use Square for payments, and it just makes everything feel effortless. quick checkout, digital receipts, sometimes even loyalty points. It really enhances the experience and lets the team focus on serving great coffee, not fumbling with the register. Square works wherever your customers are. You can manage inventory, track sales, and access reports in real time.

With Square, you get all the tools to run your business with none of the contracts or complexity. And why wait? Right now, you can get up to $200 off Square hardware at square.com slash go slash engine. That's S-Q-U-A-R-E-com slash G-O-S-E-E-O-S-E-E-R-E-R-E-R-E-R-E-R-E-R-E-R-B. A couple years ago, I started getting some weird text messages. I'm going to describe these text messages to you, but if you own a cell phone and have a pulse,

you, like our listener, have probably gotten a few of yourself. They follow a consistent but confusing M-O. An unrecognized phone number texts you, often with a 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. It feels like a scam, but the actual scam part never seems to materialize. When I've gotten these text messages, I've mostly ignored them,

but I had a conversation recently with a reporter who had chosen not to. Chapter 1. Vicki Ho. Okay. August 22, you get a text message from a woman named Vicki Ho. What did Vicki Ho want? So Vicky said to me, Hi, David.

I'm Vicki Ho. Don't you remember me? And this is kind of weird because my name is Zeeke. Zeke Fox, author of the book Number Go Up Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall. I'm now a year into my journey into Crypto Land, and I'd heard that these messages related to crypto scams

So I decided to play along, see what she was after. And so I've seen people, like, these wrong number of texts are pretty common. I've seen a lot of people almost treated as, like, an opportunity to do unsolicited improv comedy. Because the person's always, they're always texting you and pretending, like, they're picking up a conversation. Like, what was your version of playing along with it? Like, what did you do? So 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. Zeke is an unusual person. He writes for Bloomberg Business Week, 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. I had seen reports that these scammers would often ask people to send a cryptocurrency called tether. And I've been hearing a lot about illicit uses of tether.

Yeah. There's this one leaked text message from a Russian money launderer. He got arrested by the FBI. So he's texting a customer, and he's being like, you should use Tether. It works quick, like, text messages. That's why everyone does it now. 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-buttering scams. Can 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 $5,000. 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. So pig butchering is like you fatten them up, whether it's with like the promise of love, which they won't get or the promise of money that they won't get, before you butcher them. But the idea is that you're being disciplined in not swiping them right away. You're waiting.

Yeah, it's a long game. And this relationship might last months. So it's so funny, it's like you're sitting there, like, hoping both that she'll unveil the scam, but also that she'll use your preferred cryptocurrency in trying to scam you. It's like you're like, I hope she plays my favorite song. Pretty much. And I will say this is the only scammer who I ever interacted with. I did not rig this game. Okay, so you decide you were going to intentionally fall for the scam.

So you start engaging with her. How 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. Vicki 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. I sent her a picture. Did you send a photo of yourself? Yes.

How did you pick what photo to send? I was actually at a bar in Chinatown with a friend of mine, and we took a photo together, and I sent it to her. Okay. And I think she said I was handsome, 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, but she said, I like to pursue romantic things, like a hell of healthy body in the surprise and preciousness of love.

Okay. Now, she wasn't that good at this whole thing. Like, 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. So I said, let's meet up.

And she said, it's a pandemic. I don't know. She's sending me these pictures, and I could see in the background, it's not New York. I mean, she sent me, like, sort of suggestive pictures in bed. But I can see out the window, these crazy-looking buildings that are, like, clearly in, like, Singapore or something. Yeah. Zeke showed me the photos on his phone. In one, Vicki Ho sends a portrait.

She has long hair, kind of a Mona Lisa semi-smile. In another, she just sends her bare legs in a fancy-looking hotel bed. This goes on for more than a week. 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, today I'm going to go golfing and then drive my Ferrari. I think she said she owned a chain of nail salons, but that 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, and that every once in a while she'll get one of these revelations from looking at the chart. and that when she does so, she'll do a trade, and she'll make 20%, 25%.

And she starts, in between the golf and Ferraris, she'll be like, I see an opportunity in the Bitcoin market, and then she'll send me screenshots afterwards purporting to show that she made the trade and that she did earn 25%. And is short-term, I'm not a financial journalist, is short-term no trading a thing in some other contexts, or is it just a bunch of words that sound mathy and science-y? No, yeah, it's total nonsense.

Okay, okay. It sounds kind of equally plausible as like all the other random jargon in the crypto world. Honestly, even for me, like if I were at like a dinner and someone said they worked on Wall Street and it was like, what do you do? And they were like short term node trading. I'm like, okay. Yeah. Like EVM arbitrage. That's a real thing.

That's a real thing. Short term node trading. That's a big thing. But they're close. Yeah. So this goes on for a while. And I'm trying to tell her like I'm ready to try the short term. node trading.

Just like take my money. I told her, I am curious to try the technique you explained. And she's just sending me these stupid price charts, talking about golfing and short-term node trading, and not inviting me to participate in the short-term node trading. And one morning, I get yet another text that says, love, did you sleep well last night? And 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, like, I'm ready to spend. Yeah. So I sent her a picture of a goalwing Tesla that I want. I told her it cost $142,000. And I was like, Vicki, I need money to buy this Tesla. And Vicky said, I see the price is $142,000. $100, as long as you like this,

money is nothing. As long as you like this Tesla money is nothing. So she's just encouraging you. She's like, you should treat yourself. Yeah, yeah. So she told me that tomorrow we could do it.

We could do the trading. Two people on different sides of the world simultaneously bleeds the same thing, that they'd finally hooked someone in their trap. Vicki Ho, presumably, was excited to scam Zeke. Unknown to her, Zeeke was perhaps even more excited to be scammed. Vicky Ho told Zeeke her fattened pig what he had to do.

He needed to go home and download a very sketchy-looking app for his iPhone. Zeke 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 side-load it.

Oh, 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 motor. 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? No, 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, yes, the exchange of my friend, Matt Damon. Then I learned thatcropto.com is illegal in New York, and it won't work for me. Okay. 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. Why tether?

This is why. It's part of the sales pitch. Then she's like, oh, it's always worth a dollar. Don't worry about it. So one of the funny things I always learned 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 Vicki suggested, I have to pay $105.86 for 93 tethers.

So I'm paying $12 in fees. Yes. I don't know why. Vicki says it doesn't matter. We're going to make so much money on the nodes. You're going to be buying a Tesla. Yes. So it takes like hours and hours for me to acquire this crypto.

Yeah. And she's very patient. I mean, she's sending me screenshots. And they do send me this Ethereum address. And I do transfer my tethers to ZBXS. And once I do that, I see that there's money in my ZBXS account. Okay. Just as there would be on a real exchange.

Okay, so just to recap, because I fear this may be getting a little bit confusing. Vicki told Zieg 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 Zeeke 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 two. You have to relax. It's not too complicated. Then 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 Vicki Ho was more like $100. I didn't really want to lose the $500. Yeah, $500 is a lot of money. So 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 know, reply to me back, huh? 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. So I said I had to take my daughter to the doctor. She said, well, the child's body is important. Child's body is important.

Yeah. She asks, 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 Zeeke 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 Zieg. 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 Zee could look at the wallet where he'd sent his hundred bucks and see all of its other transactions, the 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 able to. be cashed out by the scammers. Zeke could see that these silly wrong number texts that most of us ignore, some Americans weren't ignoring them, and they were entering into a trap that cost them lots of money.

Do you have a sense of how do people come to lose millions of dollars in this? So I've talked with a lot of people who've sent in hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars to these pig-butchering scammers, and I've even had them send me the transatlantic transcripts of their full interaction with the scammer. And these scammers are often not any more convincing than Vicky was with me. Yeah. 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. And a lot of people, if... if you're at least middle-aged, have access to some amount of money. Or you could max out your credit card, even if you're broke. So these scammers are just trolling the entire world with these spam messages.

Eventually you hit on someone who's looking for something, who's kind of lonely, and who's willing to use their imagination to imagine a relationship with this person who's texting them. I see. Yeah, I think it's, now that you say that, I feel like part of the reason sometimes people I know will find it exciting to mess with these people. It's not just like, oh, this person's a scammer and a jerk, and it's fun to waste their time. It's also, 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 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. Because I had also been researching this. Okay.

And 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. And I just, I realized that it was time to come clean. After the break, seek comes clean. And we learn the crazy and disturbing truth about the lives of the people who send these text messages.

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That's vanguard.com slash impact. All investing is subject to risk, Vanguard Marketing Corporation distributor. This episode is brought to you by Indeed. Stop waiting around for the perfect candidate. Instead, use Indeed sponsor jobs to find the right people with the right skills fast. It's a simple way to make sure your listing

is the first candidate C. According to Indeed data, Sponsored jobs have four times more applicants than non-sponsored jobs. So go build your dream team today with Indeed. Get a $75-sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. May I say out loud that there's a familiarness to this story? A scammer from somewhere else uses the Internet to target Americans.

The scammer's efforts seem hapless and silly, except the financial losses are real. An intrepid journalist decides to go get some answers. We've been here before. Right? Except this time, everything Zeek would learn was just more complicated. The scammers would be more complicated. Their motives would be more complicated. Even saving people from the scam would prove to be complicated. I think sometimes about how the internet connects people in ways that challenge the ethics and norms that we've developed in the 300,000 years of human life that preceded its invention. Anyway, what I mean to say is, welcome back to the show. Pokes around on the internet on these wrong number scams, and he falls upon this strange volunteer group.

They claim that they are anti-scambers. Here's chapter two. Ice Toad. So I start talking to people who work at this organization with its own suspicious name. And it's called the Global Anti-Skam Organization. And I asked to talk with their crypto-tracing expert. They have a crypto tracing expert. Of course they have a crypto tracing expert.

And they all go by code names, and they're like, okay, you got to talk with Ice Toad. My name is Jason. I've been known on the internet for the last 30 years as Ice Toad. So I have this call with their elite crypto tracing expert. And Ice Toad appears on my computer. I do Web3 consulting, mostly in the areas of user security, sort of anti-scam areas, as well as community organization. He's got big, messy hair.

He's wearing a blue fish t-shirt. He talks like Stoner, and his LinkedIn said that he worked as a cannabis concierge. And he turns out to be very nice and, in fact, very helpful. 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. Before the wrong number scammers were texting people,

their old hunting ground had been Facebook. Traditionally, crypto people tend to prefer Twitter over other social networks, but I've always just used Facebook. And so I ended up in these large Facebook groups of like, I don't know, 100,000 to sometimes a half million people that just discussing various cryptocurrencies. In 2021, when crypto was booming, there were a lot of places like this on the internet, where financial outsiders traded tips on how to get rich online using crypto. People went to these places looking for money,

but one day, Ice Toad noticed that the community had been joined by a new group of people who seemed to want something else. Romance. I think I even made a post at the time like, wow, there's a lot of attractive Asian women that are contacting me right now. I don't know why, but it's really great. So you were just like, oh, I must have updated my profile picture in such a way that some of these, like, beautiful women on the internet who happen to be Asian,

are just reaching out and being like, hey, what's going on? And they were like, they were overly friendly almost. And then after a while, maybe after chatting with them for three or four weeks, they would start to like send me screenshots of their little investment in their wallet. And it would show hundreds or even millions of dollars sitting in their wall. 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. Yes. 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-buttering scams. Otherwise known as showers down, Incheon and 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. Because 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. The global anti-scam organization was even able to free

a few dozen people. When Zeke finally found Ice Toad, what he'd originally wanted would 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. He'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 Zee crack into the fake crypto trading app

that Vicki Ho had given us. 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, Zeeke 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.

What 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 some sort of quota for how many calls they need to initiate. Yeah. 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 is to send that text message 100,000 times.

And 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, Vicky One 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. And the only way to leave is if you pay a ransom of like anywhere from like five to 30 grand.

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, Zeeq was starting to understand that life in these scam compounds was pretty grim. That's why Zee said he'd felt uneasy about continuing this conversation with Vicky Howe. 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. 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. 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. After the break, Zieg 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. That's after some ads. This episode is brought to you by Nordstrom. Spring calls for a wardrobe refresh, and Nordstrom has the best styles of the season.

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slash work. Chapter 3. Cianukville. Zee could learn 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

Sianukville. Cianukville 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. 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 Sihanukville, it's a beach town. It used to be kind of like a backpacker destination. It was cheap. Hello everybody and welcome back. Today we're in Sunukville. There's actually a ton of video blogs

in this strange genre, European tourists careening around Seenuckville 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. And COVID killed the tourism.

Then there was a change in the law in Cambodia that made this live-streaming business like even less legal. Okay. So, Sianukville fell on hard times. Like, the skyline is completely unfinished. There's literally, like, thousands of unfinished buildings around Cianookville, 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. They do look abandoned. They were halfway through the projects, and then they were like, fuck this. So, yeah. 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 scamming. 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. 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. Oh, 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 bars in the middle.

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. aren't involved, but who just live in the neighborhood. And that one of these people said,

if an ambulance doesn't come every week, it's a wonder. Zieg'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. Zieg starts talking to local reporters in Cambodia who've been investigating these compounds. Danielle Keaton- Olson and Mekdera. They both worked for a paper there called Voice of Democracy. They'd been writing these exposés about Sianukville. 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. And, I mean, their stories were like the most evil police blotter like you ever read in the local newspaper. My name is Madara. I'm from Cambodia, and I have been a reporter for more than 10 years. I talked to Dura 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 like a part-time job, something that helped me to learn my English and also to,

support my study. Dara says he was selling newspapers on the street at a coffee shop. He decided that he wanted a job at the newspaper, so he started asking people he saw walking into the bill down. I keep asking them, hey, would you lend me a job, anything I can do?

And then, yeah, it's luckily one guy. One person actually helps Dura get a job. First, he set to work in the archives, but later he moves up, a fixer for foreign reporters, then a reporter himself. I start writing about crap.

And then I started moving to the human rights environment, politics. The way Dura first started to crack the scam compound story was when a Chinese friend, Braddmore Group of People, who just gotten out of one of the compounds. He brought me two or three or four people who have been released from the compound. And I start to interviewing. I start to learn what they do, you know, little by little.

Little by little, Darae learned about life within the compound wall. 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. He saw high security, barbed wire, guards, people only allowed to enter or leave with a card. Drog 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. He'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 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 company's need. People are in Cambodia. For another, quote,

large quantity of foreigners who know English. Any bosses targeting foreigners can contact, all under 32 years old. Some just got off the plane. This 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. And 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 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. So Zieg 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 Duraa 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 push the bosses under them, and the bosses push the people beneath. which in this environment often means physical torture. People being torture, people are being cut out of hand, finger, like, electric shock. Just 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... 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. These 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.

Chapter 4 The Escape Artist Zeke 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 Fang Bui. He's very popular on YouTube.

What he does is he travels the world. It makes often kind of lurid videos about the suffering of Vietnamese people in other countries. Like people who've moved abroad and are now struggling to make a living. And is it for a domestic Vietnamese audience? For a Vietnamese audience. Fongui 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 Fong 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 Fong Bui's popular interview genres involved talking to people who had just escaped these scam compounds. He'd have them show their injuries. He'd get these recently traumatized people

to tell the stories of what it just happened to them. So it's 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 can 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, Fong 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, Fong Bui, the reason he's able to make these videos about Vietnamese people who are trafficked Cambodia

to Cambodia and work in scam compounds is because he will pay their ransoms to get them out. And then he films them. It's so similar to Mr. Beast. Words 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 that. 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. Right. You could even create an economy where people are being trafficked in order to earn ransoms.

Right. Like, this is not an effective way of solving the problem. Right. 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 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.

Yes. So one of the guys who's in a bunch of Fongue's videos is named Tui. And Fong Bui And Fong Bui, and one of them, he's on the phone with Tui. Oh, right, uh, He's just paid $5,000 to rescue Tui from Chinatown. And Tui's like, I just got electrocuted a few more times before I got out.

And then Fong Bui says, I gave them the ransom. Why did they electrocute you? And Tui 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 Tui, and I start interviewing him about his experiences too. And first time we talk, it's on video chat. Yeah.

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. So he's, like, walking through the rainy streets of Ho Chi Men 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? So 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 Tui, Zieg decides he wants to meet him in person. They're not the local. All people here is not local. He flies to Vietnam. He recorded himself with Tui and the translator walking around Hōchi Men's city. Zieg says there were parts of Tui's story that struck him as possibly unlikely, but it was also very clear that he'd suffered.

When we meet up, you know, he's showing me scars that he has from his, his time inside. He has me touch his forehead to feel like a, 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 guards 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. He hit it in his butt? Yes. Okay.

And he said that he 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.

Oh, it's a full iPhone? Yes. And when he got back to his dorm room, 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.

Yes. 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 iPhone. phones into prison in their butts sometimes. Yeah, that I think is plausible. And then 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 Tweed, I'm like, Tweed, there is one part of your story that I'm kind of skeptical of. 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 an 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 Tweed to take apart any of the light fixtures. but luckily the desk lamp had an LED light bulb inside it. Yeah. What's the light bulb for? And he was like, there's like the necessary low-voltage power source inside the LED light bulb. So he took apart this iPhone.

Maybe we plug it in over here. And I gave him a... 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 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 McGiver, a dead iPhone, back to life, with only a desk clamp and his bare hands. It 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 he's just like, no, no, no, I can show you. He doesn't. So that's fascinating. So 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. Beast is quite popular. Right.

He actually had a lot of trouble getting Fang Bui's attention. And he'd only gotten his attention by writing in the comment. on a video of someone else being rescued. And then somebody else in the comment section, not an employee of Fong 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 Fong 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. The idea that one of these commenters wanted attention because he was in a kind of modern prison, experiencing a kind of modern enslavement, that Tui 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. Zieg 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. It was just the story that insisted he tell it. You can see how I got kind of sidetracked with this...

I can see how he got sidetracked. Yes. He was basically able to give you, like, what kind of life is this Vicky person having and Tweed 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. Chapter 5, the Kaibo Hotel. Zieg 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 a reporter Mekhtara, and they head to the neighborhood where all of these scam compounds are. So when we drove to Sianukville, 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 in the guard over there. One of them looked like particularly scary. It was just a black tower that had barred windows and fences top 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 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. But 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. Okay. And it's another like 12 buildings that could have held a few thousand people. And this is where Tui was held. This was the place that Zee could heard so many rumors about.

The place that the text message from Vicki 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. I see five guys dressed all in black polishing a black Mayback limousine. And then I see a Chinese guy with a red mohawk and a big belly when I'm going to be a black mayback limousine. 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 Tweed 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. Weirdly, 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. Yeah. So I walk in. I took. Took a tour of the hotel with the guy at the front desk.

Zieg 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. I like this music. This is Chinese. I like this music, Zieg observes. This is Chinese music, the staff member hopefully points out. In the exchange, Zieg 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 there are no guests.

But also completely empty. Yeah, yeah. He showed me lots of different nice rooms, each of which had views of like the place where... People were being held against their will and beaten. Then in the lobby, there's like a grand marble staircase that leads upstairs.

And when I walk up there, I see a massive restaurant, like 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 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, and you just go take it. So was your suspicion? 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.

not allowed to leave. So my thinking was that these are like hires up who work at these compounds are 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 like came over to, you know, see if I needed anything. And I was like, what's with this place? Why is it so empty? Yeah. What's with these dirty buildings next door? Yeah. And she said it only opened to the public a couple months ago, i.e. after the raids. Oh.

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. And Dera and our driver picked me up. Yeah. 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 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, like 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. In a world where, you know, you had the same authoritarian regime and you had people wanting to make money in 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 government. Like, Cambodia is under a lot of pressure to crack down, but the activity is shifting to other places. And 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 kinds of. 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. Zieg 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 Betts. The protagonists are a programmer and a model who are lured overseas to take what seems like a high-paying job.

And when they get there, they're trapped in a scam compound. It forced the 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.

This was the number one movie in China. It set a record for advanced ticket sales. It became like a huge deal. Don't go. In China, this movie is part of the fight against these scam compounds. A government-induced film serving as a big, expensive warning to Chinese citizens. Be careful. The film was actually banned in Cambodia.

He was accused of doing serious damage to Cambodia's image and reputation. These days, Zieg 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. MacDurah, 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. Dara 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. Honestly, one job AI could steal where I don't think anybody would complain. Surge Engine is a presentation of Odyssey and Jigsaw Productions. It was created by me, PJ Vote, and Shruthy Pinnam-Menni, and is produced by Garrett Graham and Noah John. Back-checking this week by Sean Merchant.

Theme, original composition and mixing by Armin Vizarian. Our executive producers are Jenna Weiss-Burman and Leah Reese Dennis. Thanks to the team at Jigsaw, Alex Gibney, Rich Perrello, and John Schmidt, and to the team at Odyssey. J.D. Crowley, Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Kate Hutchison, Matt Casey, Morah Curran, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney, and Hillary Schaff. Our agent is Orrin 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 become a paid subscriber and help support the show over at PJVote.com. Thank you for listening. We'll see you next week. in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. Hey, business owners, the NFL season is a big revenue driver. Now there's a smarter way to get ready.

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