The Jordan Harbinger Show - 1360: Scam Compounds | Out of the Loop

Episode Date: July 21, 2026

Southeast Asia's scam compounds have grown into billion-dollar criminal empires. Nathan Southern and Lindsay Kennedy bring us in from Out of the Loop here!Welcome to what we’re calling our “Out of the Loop” episodes, where we dig a little deeper into fascinating current events that may only register as a blip on the media’s news cycle and have conversations with the people who find themselves immersed in them. Investigative journalists Nathan Paul Southern and Lindsey Kennedy are here to help us understand what Southeast Asia's scam compounds are, how they've built criminal empires worth billions on the backs of trafficked humans, and how we can fight back against them.Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1360On This Episode of Out of the Loop:What are scam compounds? What started as online boiler rooms has mutated into multinational criminal empires — CEOs, crypto treasuries, diplomatic cover, billions laundered. As Jordan quipped, it's LinkedIn with torture rooms — and now fighter jets are literally bombing the compounds.Underneath it all is human trafficking. Victims are lured by fake job ads, stripped of their passports, and forced to scam. When crackdowns hit, bosses flee and hundreds of thousands get dumped onto the streets — stranded, broke, and ripe to be trafficked again.The crackdowns look like justice but function like a heist. States get "captured" willingly, seize billions in assets, and keep the cash — while victims see none of it. Bosses vanish to China, the same ruling families cash in, and compounds get rebranded as prisons.Forget the idea that only "your granny" falls for this. These scams now run on bought data, AI deepfakes, and scripts impersonating police, tax offices, and airlines. They know your debt, your address, your fears — and can rattle anyone, at any income or education level.Your best defense is a pause and a callback. When a "detective," "tax officer," or "airline" pressures you, hang up and dial the real number yourself — and tell someone before sending a cent. Verification is free, and refusing to comply has real power.And much more!Connect with Jordan on Twitter, on Instagram, and on YouTube. If you have something you'd like us to tackle here on an Out of the Loop episode, drop Jordan a line at [e-mail] and let him know!And if you're still game to support us, please leave a review here — even one sentence helps! Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course!Subscribe to our once-a-week Wee Bit Wiser newsletter today and start filling your Wednesdays with wisdom!Do you even Reddit, bro? Join us at r/JordanHarbinger!This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors: Ground News: 40% off unlimited access Vantage subscription: groundnews.com/jordanK12:  Learn more at k12.com/jordanBetterHelp: 10% off first month: betterhelp.com/jordanWayfair: Start renovating: wayfair.comSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Spend more time with your customers, your team, and the work you actually started your business to do. Trusted by over 46,000 Canadian businesses, PowerPay makes payroll feel simple. Get started today at powerpay.ca. Payroll done right? With power pay. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills are the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long-form

conversations with a variety of amazing folks, spies, CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, performers, even the occasional extreme athlete, real-life pirate, apparently they still exist, or Russian spy. If you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about the show and I appreciate it when you do that. I suggest our episode starter packs. These are collections of some of our favorite episodes on topics like persuasion and negotiations, psychology and geopolitics, disinformation, China, North Korea, crime and cults, and more. That'll help me listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today on the show, Southeast Asia's scam compounds. You've heard

about them on the show before. They've evolved from online boiler rooms into multinational criminal empires with CEOs, government connections, billions of dollars in crypto, and now fighter jets bombing their offices and compounds. Nathan Paul Southern and Lindsay Kennedy join us today from the front lines. They literally live in the area where these scam compounds are. They've helped extract human trafficking victims because many people are forced to work there. They've filmed destroyed compounds and literally run from drone strikes and security personnel and police and who, God knows who else. Today we'll explore how online fraud became a geopolitical war, why the violence gets worse when the money actually stops, and what happens when the mafia starts functioning like a government or vice versa. If you want a full background on scam compounds, human trafficking, grab our other episodes with Lindsay and Nathan. Those are episodes 833 and 1145.

We deep dive into how the scams work and the human trafficking element underneath it all. This is an update to a bunch of that. Here we go with Nathan and Lindsay. So thanks for coming back on the show. It's funny, this is kind of a weird start because, one, it's super early here and super late there. But we've tried this a few times, and you had to get a studio. But Cambodia's not very maybe, there's not a lot of studios that you guys can rent at 10 p.m. at night on a weekend. And so you're in your friend's apartment after he vacated due to a security threat, which makes me a little worried for you guys.

But he leaves and you're like, oh, good, can we use the space to record? a podcast and he's like, I don't think you understand that I left because someone's trying to kill me and you're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, but is it quiet in there? Do you have internet? The difference, the genre, is that we work for ourselves and he has a paid job for somebody else, so, like... I see. Yeah, I know there's a machete-wielding psychopath trying to kill you, but how's the Wi-Fi and I need to eat. So... Yeah, yeah, it's all Wi-Fi related to me. That's what brings always cyber scam guys here in Cambodia. That's right. Yeah, it's funny because I was thinking to myself when I was in China, how bad the internet can be in certain

places and then I thought, okay, in the middle of the jungle, they have internet that's good enough for thousands of people to be making voice over IP calls, video calls, cryptocurrency transactions, everything, because they run these massive scam compounds. So you got to sort of hand it to the internet providers in rural Cambodia because they are doing a lot of heavy lifting. They have it together, apparently. Yeah, they've actually been really, really well because if South, like, I mean, it helps for us as well when we're trying to work out what kind of area might be developed into like some transnational human trafficking and scam hub because yeah, you are in middle of nowhere and then just cell towers just start appearing everywhere. But it's also

how in Myanmar, even though these groups make billions of dollars and they could set up cell towers and their own systems and they often do, often they just try to steal the Wi-Fi from Thailand. I think for like no other real great reason than just like, well, yeah, we could do that and they like crime. But it's also one of the ways that in Thailand can actually try to hit back. out the compound so they can just turn off their energy they can turn off their Wi-Fi and that opens them up a little bit i see yeah but starlink have also been pretty active in the heavy scottom comment areas selling into cambodia and me and mahr. two very interesting choices for starlink to target at the peak of the scam trade yeah starlink is great for like if you want to support the

the the groups fighting against the the awful tant medail in me and mar then then starlink does have a role and that's great but it's also really really good for massive mafia criminal groups wanting to scam you in the middle of the jungle. So it's a catch twine to. Is the company cooperative when you're like, hey, there's a massive scam compound and they're using these Starlink terminals? Are they kind of like, well, our customer's identity and what they do is none of our business.

Are they like, oh, let's look into this? What do you think? Yeah. Yeah, they think criticize heavily and they have not been helpful at all. That's too bad. Yeah. But it's the same of all of the massive tech related companies. I mean, the vast majority of job ads and even scam recruitment.

So for bringing the people in and actually implementing the scams is done through Facebook and then a lot of the ads done through Telegram and trying to get any of these companies to take a little bit of accountability is incredibly difficult. Like some people in Facebook are good and they're working on it. But overall, I mean, what they put into it compared to what they do and how long it takes them to shut down a scam or trafficking related site is just ridiculous. And the telegram made that. Yeah, I mean, we can just find dozens and dozens of pages selling human beings like in minutes. So for people that are a little bit behind on this, that we did a few episodes with you guys, episode 833, 1145, possibly one more. But what we're talking about right now with the human trafficking element is people from countries like Burma, Thailand, other places in Southeast Asia are being essentially what, tricked, thinking, oh, we need a server at a restaurant. or a marketing person, and then you show up and then they take your passport and they go,

we're locking you in a scam prison and you're going to actually be making phone calls pretending to be interested in some old guy as long as he sends you money. Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's lots of different ways you can get pulled into it. But, yeah, broadly speaking, that's right. I mean, and a lot of the recruitment, so a lot of the channels that I have access to on things at Telegram, they use different kinds of codes to refer to whether when they're selling people or whether they're, you know, moving illicit funds or whatever.

But quite often, agents will quite openly say, we're looking for this many people. We want them to be from Brazil and speak in Portuguese, especially right now during the World Cup. It's insane the amount of recruitment because there's so much illegal gambling online. And there's very little difference between scams and illegal gambling sites, if any. And so, yeah, sometimes they'll be recruiting and not be direct. And it's people who may be desperate enough because they're already in a compound and they want to go somewhere where they think it might be slightly better. But often the ads are more targeted at other compounds. owners, other companies, other agents, by which I mean human traffickers, who are then,

so they're quite blunt about what they need and what will happen, what the job will be in the new place, basically. Right, okay. So these are criminals talking to other criminals. So they're saying, all right, you want five native Portuguese speakers, two female, three male, and you want to move them from this place. So they're like not even trying to hide what they're doing because they don't care. There's no consequences.

Yeah, so right now, right now there's a huge crackdown on scam compounds in Cambodia. and what that has meant because there hasn't really been any attempts from the humanitarian inside to really get all those people home. You're talking about hundreds of thousands of people who are trapped in Cambodia who have been forced to work at these conditions. And then that means you now have hundreds of thousands of people who maybe walked out the door when their bosses ran away because they knew their place was about to be raided who have been, you know, walking the streets like sleeping rough trying to find somewhere.

There's not really any shelters or anything. Trying to find someone that can help them or many of them don't have an embassy in this country for example as well. So you're trying to find a way to get home. And some of the ads, the ads are so cynical. So you'll see things like we're trying to find this many people to work, you know, in this kind of scam group. If they're already in Cambodia, we'll come, and they're trapped, basically, we'll come pick them up and take them to Myanmar or Laos right now. Or, you know, if we're looking for Africans who maybe were working on English targeting ones before, like English speaking targeting, I mean. And but who also speak French because we're going to

develop a French speaking scam in a compound nearby. because the French government isn't taking it as seriously as the Americans right now. So, you know, it's so cynical and so quick the way that they respond to these crises. And like, since we last spoke about this, John, it's just growing to this insane new scale. So, yeah, when it first began, we described it as someone picks up the, you know, like gets a WhatsApp message. It's like, hey, I see you with the vet the other day and then it's a big person and then you get to talking. That still very much exists, but they've become so much more sophisticated. And yeah, it was most of the people from China and Southeast Asia that were being recruited.

into the trafficking side and to actually do the scams. But now that's just grown insurmountably. So you've got thousands of people coming all across Africa. They're coming from Central Asia, again, people from Tajikistan, all of South Asia, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan. There are so so many people coming not just to Cambodia, Myanmar, but now also the scale of that's meant the places where people were being trafficked from. They're now setting up scam cities and scam empires in some of those countries. So as the crackdown came and hit in Cambodia, because also this isn't just those types of scams, the scams have become incredibly sophisticated, and there's also other cyber-related criminal activity that goes along with it. There's these

incredible money laundering and digital banking platform systems that are built into this whole scam infrastructure. Lindsay said the online gambling world is all tied into it as well. It's now the most profitable and globalised criminal trade that we've ever seen. And the crackdown here has meant that thousands have left. And like Lindsay said, the gates just get opened. Sometimes there's arrests. Sometimes people are taken and flown back to China. We don't know what happens to them.

But often the people inside, usually human trafficking victims, are just left to just roam the streets. Or if they're in the jungle, they're just sleeping in the jungle. They try to get to the city. And there's still thousands of people just in Cambodia, desperately trying to get home who have visible scars from their torture that they went under in the compounds and then as that's happening there's already a shift to places like Sri Lanka and Madagascar, Uganda, where some of the people we help get out of some compounds here are already

been trafficked into another compound in places like there and the scale of it is just growing and you've got massive criminal groups but there's also links to the Chinese state and there's links to the Russian state so it's growing into this massive global security crisis and we're still just trying to get thousands of people home from the streets of prom in. That's crazy. So if a scam compound closes down in the middle of the jungle because the boss gets arrested, people just scatter around and these are not near anything.

So they're just hanging out trying to hitchhike back to the city. I mean, is that what I'm understanding? So yeah, like essentially sometimes the cops will come in and they might actually pick up loads of people and say we've taken a thousand people from this compound or a few hundred people. But some of those really remote ones, people have just been let out. And we've spoken to a lot of people who have been in that situation. Some are scrambled together enough cash to find some taxi somewhere. They can get into the next town and whatever they need to do to exist in that town

until they can maybe get to the capital. So then often they're pretty easy targets to be recruited or trafficked again because they're really, really desperate. Other places are even in the city. There's been ones in Trompent and people just let go of those, right? they just lay out and then they look around the site and they don't have any money whatsoever so they just have to work out what to do and there's people who have been on the streets for six seven months now and just pleading with their embassies um and none of the african embassies are actually in cambodia they're all like philippines indonesia Bangkok so just trying to communicate with them to say is there any way we can go home and then at the same time the Cambodian police are arresting or detaining a lot of those people there was 19 human traffic victims outside the one human trafficking shelter in Prompin waiting to just get a bed so that they could get home. And then they were picked up by the Cambodian cops who were arrested because they have overstayed their visa because they were trafficked into the country.

And then they were taken to what was a massive scam compounds owned by the now sanctioned Prince group has now been turned into an immigration detention center because it turns out it's really, really good at holding people against their will. So now they're turning scam compounds into prisons and they're keeping them there until they can try to get home and extorting them for everything like the cost of water food when they're inside. And that's the thing that's even more depressing about this particular one because it was horrible enough when it was a scam compound. And obviously, you know, there's torture rooms, all kind of horrific things that happen in there to keep people online. But the people who've gone back into there, they've now even, I mean, when these places were scam compounds, they still, the bosses still wanted some level of comforts, right? So the aircon would be on in the offices. and, you know, it's boiling hot. I can't translate Celsius into Fahrenheit.

I just feel like I can't do that. Don't worry about it. I'll do it my best. Go ahead. It's like, you know, it's unbearable. And twice we've had calls from people telling us, open sewage was flowing through the middle of the building because the pipes had broken that haven't been fixed.

So the conditions sometimes are even worse and more people trapped in a room than when they were being used as scam compounds because they're such overcrowded prisons. Yeah. So 40 degrees is like 104. I know that because that's like the fever. where you go to the hospital if your kid has it or you have it. Right.

So imagine it's 104 degrees inside. There's raw sewage flowing down the hallway. Yeah. And that's crazy to me that it was more comfortable when it was a scam center where people were being trafficked and they would beat or kill you if you tried to leave. Now it's an immigration detention facility and people can't are also stuck there. It's hot and there's sewage and they're thinking, oh man, this was so much nicer when when Chinese organized crime threatened to kill us if we left.

Basically. That's crazy to me. It's funny, I just got a scam text as we are talking. They're always so bad. Good morning, Jordan. It's been such a long time, and I'm supposed to go, oh, gee, who are you? I don't have your number saved. And yeah, I just ignore them.

They never actually follow up, which I find interesting. I met someone last week, and they sent me one, and I just assumed because it was awkwardly written. It was a scam text and ignored it. It was like, hey, it was a pleasure meeting you on Saturday. We should do that again sometime, Nathan. I realized, no, it was. It was actually, I made. They just kind of write a bit awkwardly.

They just spell like crap. Yeah, that's funny. Yeah, like, hey, man, you need to learn how to spell check because I thought you were a Cambodian scammer, human trafficking victims stuck in a Cambodian scam center in the jungle. Anyway, it was good meeting you do. Let's hang out. But the thing is that everyone knows this particular one now, right? Everyone's used to this structure. Right.

So I think that one's not working as well anymore, right? But we've been, because so many places close so quickly and so much stuff's been, like, thrown into massive rubbish bars outside, we've managed to get hold of a lot of scripts from inside the compounds in all different languages. and also see a few of the places that were still set up for the scams that they were doing. And the complexity and the different types is just enormous. So one of the big ones are fake police stations where places will get hold of, you know, the very specific uniforms that police in a particular country will wear, or the tax services in one country will wear, or especially immigration police, that kind of thing. And then they'll be targeting maybe if you're an overseas student.

So if you're an Indian student in America and then you get a call from what you think is, like the tax office in India, telling you that you've messed something up back home and if you don't fix it, your student visa for America will be revoked. And you're so, you're nervous, you're in a foreign country, you're not quite sure you get a video call

from someone who looks plausibly like this, right? And the scripts are really quite sinister in how complex and they were. Or pretending to be your phone company, but saying that they've had like a subpoena to say that your phone's been used for criminal activity, you know, that kind of thing. So you're really nervous and you're not quite sure

who you're talking to. So I guess like there are just so many different types of scams And so they play on so many different types of fears that eventually you'll find someone that lands with, right? Yeah, you just have to play the numbers game, essentially, right? So you just have to, you call 10 people, nine of them call their parents or a friend at school who goes, this is BS. Or they say, you know what, my dad works for this? Let me call him or my uncle works.

This is nonsense. Don't worry about it. But then you find the one person who is new, doesn't have friends, is from a poor area of India, maybe, and is on a scholarship, and it's just seeing their life flash before their eyes and fear takes over. Exactly. Yeah, that's really crazy. rule and terrible. You've got a lot more scams now where they don't need to approach you cold. The investment-based ones are often actually trying to get people who are already looking

to do crypto trading and then they're on Facebook pages where they're interested in that. And then often the people who are interested in that, maybe we'll think they're savvy enough to not end up falling for something like this. So you can willingly engage in the group. Some of contacts you and said, hey, I've seen you're in that group. Are you interested in this 4X thing and then you can start talking and then often like we said before your first little bit of money you'll put in and they'll like perfectly recreate a legitimate crypto platform it looks identical you can go on put a bit of money in it and then you'll get a bit more back and then you think you're investing legitimately or successfully and then that's when the big pool comes right

and eventually you'll put in like a huge huge amount and then it comes away but that means There's so many people who get in touch already, like wanting to use their money. And then these people are ready to come in and do that. Or like airline-based scams where you are late and you try to, this has always got me. I think we're in Kenya and we, yeah, we're late, try to phone the airline to get the connection sorted and realize that the first number that comes up on Google is actually not the real number. And the chance of anyone actually notice in that is huge. And then they get your details.

And there's other scams they try to do it from there. there's so much to it. That means it's just grown so much beyond. And when we think it's just like those text messages, I think we dismiss it and we think, well, it's only going to be like your wee granny that falls for this kind of thing, right? Or how much sympathies you have for Bob, if you really think that that smoking hot women from Singapore is actually in love with him after his second divorce in Florida. But it's so, so much more than that. They can get anyone, any age, any income bracket, any education level. And like some of the scripts that we were looking at, first of all, I found the scripts from one of these places next to a massive stack of data that was clearly bought off the black, you know, off like the dark web, whatever.

So it's like you've got literally people's names, phone numbers, addresses, like personal identifying details. So you're not going in cold. You know quite a lot about them when you call them. And then the other thing is that the scripts would have different outcomes for what you say, depending on how they respond. And it was like if they start to seem like suspicious in any way or they start to be like not deferential to you, then you need to start saying things like, I need to know where you were at four o'clock of the Tuesday, the twilight, the twilight. 25 of April, you know, and then you just keep putting on the back foot and making them nervous. And then we're like, I don't understand why you won't answer this question. We don't want it to escalate this.

And like it's like, and you know, you're just constantly trying to terrify people. So, yeah, we all know not to get caught out by the obvious ones, but I just can't think how scary it must be. If someone lands you in exactly the spot where you think, oh God, this could be real. When your fraud operation has a CEO, a crypto treasury and diplomatic protection, it's no longer organized crime. It's LinkedIn, but with torture rooms. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Ground News.

The more I've worked in media, the more convinced I've become that relying on one news sources, it's really one of the easiest ways to misunderstand what's actually happening. Not because every outlet is lying or whatever. Usually it's more subtle than that. Different publications, choose different facts, emphasize different angles, decide that entirely different parts of the same story are actually the ones that are important. And if you only see one version, it really is very easy to mistake that version for the whole picture. That's why I genuinely use and recommend ground news.

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And in a world where everybody's trying to tell you what to believe, that really is worth paying for in my opinion. Go to groundnews.com slash Jordan to get 40% off their unlimited access vantage subscription. That's groundnews.com slash Jordan. Again, ground news.com slash Jordan. Use that link so we know he sent you. This is a great way to support the show and it's a great product. Again, ground news.com slash Jordan. This episode is sponsored in part by K-12. As a parent, sometimes we have to accept that the normal or conventional path is not always the right path for your kid. Maybe they need more flexibility. Maybe the classroom environment's not working for them. Maybe your family moves or travels or hits a point where the current setup is just not giving them what they

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But when companies see that listeners engage with our advertising, it encourages them to keep supporting us. So if you're planning to sign up, buy something, please remember to use our code. Most of the time it's Jordan, but the real codes are always on the Jordan. Harbinger.com slash deals page. It's a win-win. You get a great deal and you help keep the show going strong. We truly appreciate your support. Now, back to the show. Yeah, I've said this on the show before, but my wife's cousin, she almost got scammed by a scam group. And they were Americans, you know, they didn't have foreign accents or anything. They called her. They said something like, hey, we, you know, we actually towed your car because we thought it was using a criminal operation or we're going to take your car.

I can't, it was something like that. And it was like, you need to come down and talk with us. This is a detective. It just went on and on and on. She was really nervous about it. And then she finally jumps in the elevator because she's actually going to go and check on her car, which is parked elsewhere. And the call drops.

And that's when she's like, oh, wait a minute. This is weird. You know, they'd transferred her and stuff. And then she called my wife and goes, what do you think about this? And then they called back while she was on the phone with my wife. And she's like, we'd had a chance to be like, this sounds really scammy. Don't do it. And they call back and they're like, yeah, okay, sorry, I guess our call dropped.

This is San Francisco PD again, Detective So-and-so. And I was like, hey, just call SFPD back and ask to talk to this guy. So she calls back and they're like, there's nobody with that name here at all. And we would never call you to tell you that we're going to impound your car as part of an investigation. We tell you that afterwards, you know, after you call and wonder where your car is. Did they have our details then? Then you're a name and a play number and type of car, yeah? Yeah, they probably just like had that from some database or something like that.

Or yeah. Yeah, one of the most profitable aspects of this whole industry, I think, is the data. And they have specialized apps that the criminal groups are developing where some really simple things. Like, I mean, if you've got a VPN on your laptop, you can say you're in whichever country, right? But it doesn't let you drop a live pin. So these actually share your live location as being wherever, right?

And that sounds like quite a easy step from the VPN. And there's other apps that will say, give. you every bit of information and photos to match about a particular town, particularly in the US. So they have like, say you're trying to scam someone in one town in Michigan, you can put that town into this app. And it comes up with, here are all the coffee shops, right? Here are all the restaurants. Here are all the bars.

And you can say the exact address that the victim you're trying to scam lives at. They'll say, well, you can say that you're around this coffee shop. Here's a receipt from that coffee shop. Here is an AI model put into that coffee shop. shop and then we'll change that to whoever we want it to be and it will look perfect. And then they are getting this data because they have ways of taking thousands of SIM cards and then just getting those, just the phone numbers from them and they can feed them in. And then from that, they can also get this insane amount of personal information, specifically again for US citizens,

where it's like they know which university you went to. Well, your address is how much debt you have, how much college debt you have, what's your mortgage worth? So then they can tailor those specific scams to how much money you have, what would actually work. And then on top of that, make it seem like instead of being in the jungle in Cambodia or the forests of Madagascar, they're actually someone that you could meet on a dating app and you just keep missing each other because they're busy with conferences, but actually they drink at the same coffee shop as you. This is all so crazy. I want to move on to some of these massive law enforcement actions because this is, it's not as recent now as when it was,

when we tried to originally plan the show, but the two biggest scam-linked empires in the world had been hit a couple months ago by the largest coordinated law enforcement actions, probably ever. They seized billions of dollars with a B. They arrested the, I guess you can call them the CEOs. The compounds are essentially collapsing. Like you mentioned before, some of those people are ending up homeless or they turned the place into an immigration detention center. But I think it was in Burma, or maybe it was Cambodia and Thailand, some of these scam centers, are actually being bombed because they're in an active conflict zone. Tell me about this. The war with Thailand has officially sort of like, well, had a ceasefire at the start of the year.

Late December, I think it was. And so we're in a bit of a lull. Yeah. But in November, I think I was November, early December, yeah, was when we were up on the border in an area that used to be very, very jungly and it's like right on, it's right up in the mountains of the middle of nowhere. I think we might have talked about it on, on your trip before, because it's just so far in the middle. of no workplace, to Morda, that is just, there was like a scam city, basically,

that was built for no other reason. We were really, really concerned because we were, we were going to some of the other compounds along the border where we knew they'd been fighting and we knew that people were still trapped inside. And we saw, in a different part of that border stretch,

two compounds that we knew people were inside because we were in contact with them and that were bombed right in front, or had just been bombed as we came up to the hills, right? And so we were devastated because we didn't know how many people might be trapped in there. We didn't know how they would be able

to get out. There was not exactly like the ties who were bombing or the Cambodian side were sending help to get our victims, right? And I mean, it's a flagrant war crime, obviously. But then we've interviewed more recently people who were in this other one, in the Tamurah one that we couldn't get to because the only bridge in an hour had already been bombed. And I was seeing videos being shared from inside some of the compounds of drones going over, of bombs. We were getting no information about casualties whatsoever. Because both sides, Cambodia at that time, was pretending it didn't know there were any compounds there, and Thailand was pretending that they weren't bombing anything that would be civilian infrastructure. So no one was helping either side, but we've now

actually met some of the people who were trapped in those compounds and were forced to continue working continually while the bombs were going over, and who saw the next compound was be hit, and actually has sustained quite bad injuries from trying to escape from this building when, I think his Chinese boss finally did run away, from hiding, you know, sort of like hiding in the area, trying to stay out of the attacks, and then having to be. get out of this place, which is hundreds of miles up a mountain in the middle of nowhere in the jungle, right? So just the kinds of things that people have lived through, the kind of trauma that people have gone through in just trying to get out of these places. It's been so horrific.

Can you imagine being on a scam call talking about your fake investment profile and there's a massive explosion and you're just like, hey, what's that? Oh, the guys in the office next to me are watching a movie. Yeah, exactly. I mean, how do you, I want to see the script that explains that. So people have told us that exact scenario has happened. And then they've had to ask me, they just saw it's fireworks or whatever. There's like, oh, there's also a lot of screaming. Yeah, one guy we spoke to is from Nigeria. He was just like in his bedroom, like, you know, about to be involved in that. And then the, was of seven hours of attacks. And then his job, instead of doing scams that day, was to also help run upstairs and hoist Chinese flags onto the roof so that the ties would be less likely to

drone strike any of the buildings that might belong to China, even in. some unofficial way. So his scam compound was okay, but the other ones were not and they were decimated. And it's been this crazy situation where there's been two rounds of fighting now with Cambodia and Thailand in the last year. And that's a whole other thing. It's disputed land and territory and there's temples. There's also a huge business relationship between the kind of previous ruler of both that went a bit south. But in terms of the criminal related stuff, the scam compound area, were hit a lot but not mentioned in the first round of fighting in the summer. I remember this is a multi, multi-billion dollar trade.

And for hundreds of kilometres along Cambodia's border with Thailand, there are just cities and cities of scam empires being built. So a lot of that money is flowing to people in Thailand, but it's also something that Thailand wants to have some control, influence on, and then other areas are targeting Thai people. So they want to shut them down. So there's a lot to all that. But then in the next round of fighting in December,

the ties admitted that this scam industry does exist and it is raising money for the Cambodian regime. And they also claimed that they were holding weapons inside scam compounds. I don't think there was any proof of that. But because they say it was raising money for the regime and, okay, they could actually point to a lot of really well-connected relatives of the prime minister or senators who own these scam compounds or own the land they're on, they began to justify striking these buildings which were full of human trafficking victims. And then because the Taism don't want to admit

how many slaves they might have killed and the Cambodians that really want to admit how many slaves they might have had in the country, no one's looking into how many human trafficking victims might have been burnt alive in these huge, huge compounds over like a few weeks of firing. That's crazy. I also find it hell of suspicious

that they just had a bunch of Chinese Communist Party flags sitting around in this place. And they're like, great, put these on the roof in the designated place on the flagpoles that we have for them already. Well, they were probably using him for the police scams. I see. I see.

Okay, that makes sense. Because I'm thinking, if you say in Americans that, you know, we're flag people, maybe your house has one, but you don't have a bunch to put on the roof when they're drone striking your skyscraper. Well, it's something to think about for the future, you know. Yeah, that's right. I'm just going to make a note here to order a few more. We often screams I love a communism more than a hundred Chinese flags on a criminal casino. That's right.

Exactly. Just looking out for the little man, what is it to each according to, from each according to his ability to each according to his need. Yes. On top of your scam compound, Carl Marx would be stoked. So this is crazy because what starts as online fraud turns into a literal geopolitical battlefield complete with drone strikes and air superiority or whatever going on. I mean, this is just totally nuts. And Prince Group you mentioned before, let's talk about these. the organized crime syndicates because I think at one point Prince Group was the largest one of the largest crime syndicates in the whole world. I mean, this, I don't know how you measure that, but they had just billions of dollars flowing through this. It's like drug cartel scale money. Oh, yeah. I mean, I think probably grown faster than any drug cartel, I think, has a burden and became more powerful. And certainly in terms of, I mean, the head of Prince Grubtenzer was until his arrest, I think, the personal advisor to the Prime Minister here. Of Cambodia.

Yes. And to his father, when he was prime minister and to the current Interior Minister and his father, who everyone handed over to their kids about a year or a couple years ago. It's ridiculous. He's basically been advisor to everyone. Was very close with the Singaporean government in different ways. partnered with a major Singaporean state-owned construction firm to build large sections of Cambodia that we know running scam compounds out of now,

he was close to the government of Palau. He's a very well-connected man in many major places. And after the US led this enormous sanctions package, which came out in October last year, that should have been the end of the Prince group, really, the billions and billions that were seized off them and then continue to be seized off them in assets as this kind of ripple through Southeast Asia

and then further afield. He owned those of places in the UK and, like, in the US. and that should have been the end of it. But he stayed here and just seemed to be getting, things seem to be continued just as normal for France, until January when they sent him back to China very abruptly. China had been trying to get him back for a long time. And I mean, I think he's probably dead now,

but they've continued to arrest major people since then. The police action here kind of started around the same time. Basically, the simplest way of explaining the change in heart here, I would think would be that for decades and decades, Cambodia has been really, really good at playing the US and China off against each other whenever they want something for me to do with them. This was one of those rare moments when the US and China were both angry with them for the same reason and kind of wanted the same outcome, which was to shut down these scam compounds that were taking so much money out of their respective countries. And also they were now at war with Thailand and they needed to not lose their biggest supplier of weapons, which is China.

And actually they were rewarded with this because they went on this rampage and closed and closed it down. scam pounds so much as sent the warning out that they would be closed and then lots of bosses ran away and lots of trafficking victims sort of wandered out stunned into the street. These places, by the way, for folks who don't know, they were laundering billions of dollars for scams. But when you're laundering billions of dollars for your own scams, think of it like Amazon, right? You know how Amazon had, they were selling all these things online, right? So they needed better servers. So they created AWS Amazon Web Services because they needed that for their own store. And then they were like, hey, this is actually a business.

arm because we've got these massive data centers that we could actually rent capacity out to other massive tech companies instead of them having to build their own. And now they're going, well, wait a minute, we have to use UPS and Federal Express and the U.S. Postal Service to deliver all these packages. What if we create a, what's it called, like last mile delivery service of our own? So now you've got Amazon trucks. This is what's happening for money laundering from these scam compounds. So they're saying, we got billions of dollars of our own, we got a laundry. And then drug cartels go, hey, you know what, I got this problem where I have all this. this cash too. You think you could help me out? And they go, you know what, probably. And the triads go,

hey, I heard you laundering money for the cartels. You know, we kind of have to do this too. And North Korea says money laundering. Did somebody say money laundering? I've got $10 billion in stolen cryptocurrency that I need to figure out how to turn into something. Why don't we run this through there too? So you've got these massive criminal networks. That's why trafficking in people always is also trafficking in weapons and almost always is also trafficking in drugs. Because if you've got a massive underground network, railroad, if you want to call it that. Why are you only moving your product through it? You might as well have those people also hold a package full of cocaine and, you know, having a guy carry a briefcase with a couple hundred grand in cash in it while you're at it.

You know, you've got a train of slaves walking through tunnels, make them carry something else for one of your clients. Right. So that's kind of how this all dovetails together. What's particularly insane about this situation is the professionalization of it, right? So most of the major scam developers, not just Prince, because Prince also had a banker. a major bank here. Well, I mean, they deny it, but like they're kind of widely thought to be closely linked to the Yon Network and H-Pay, which is the other sort of big criminal group that was sanctioned around the same time.

And they were doing money laundering on this enormous, enormous scale. And but pretty much every single major scam compound owner, a dodgy casino owner that we've looked into over the last five, six years, they've all developed their own payment apps. So their actual own literal payment apps to transfer those that money. And within the scam compounds, they're always looking for how they're always looking for how they, they can make that little bit of extra money by making people's lives extra miserable. So they'll set up things inside there where you can buy some extra things if you do have any access to money or you are getting paid a tiny bit for your work.

But then they massively overcharge you for everything. So water will be crazy expensive. Basic amenities to be crazy expensive. You can get maybe food delivery to your building, but it will be crazy expensive. And you have to do everything through their app that they made for that area. Which also means, and we've never been able to get a kind of clear number on how much money they were making. But there was actually a really good 101 East documentary that came out last week where they had a really good undercover interview with a guy in Myanmar who was explaining how much money they make just from this. And he was like, oh, yeah, between $10 and $20 million a month just by basically essentially exploiting the people they've already trafficked into scam because they have to buy extra amenities from inside this area.

Cafeteria in the sleeve compound. Yeah, exactly. But if you think that your payment app from running what is basically, often it's like the called the super app, it's like a common. It's like a combination of like Uber Eats. Well, I guess Uber's a good example, right? Because it has Uber Eats and it has cars, right? That's kind of what a lot of these place things do, these super apps where you can also be,

you can also, if you're allowed to move around, they also let you book cars and things. So like what it means is if you have 10 to 20 million a month going into this app, but you also then make that app available outside of the compound, then people do start using it for legitimate reasons as well. So then you have millions or less than you do in the compounds, but you still have other money flowing into that same. space and you have all these criminal groups being like, oh, can we also manipulate your

payment app so that we can move all of our drug money through or all of our human trafficking money through. And it all gets blended into this massive mess of illicit and illicit capital. So that's actually been what's more damaging economically is that it's so hard to unpick that. And you just end up risking, crumbling an entire economy when you try and shut these things down as well. You know, it's interesting. A show fan told me that he'd been listening to the show for quite a while. And he'd heard the episode. we did in the past, and he actually went to the Cambodian Scam Center area and took pictures, and he went to, like, what was it, like, Kings Roman Casino or whatever that place is going.

King Roman's going triangle, yeah. Yeah, and I was like, why did you do that? And he goes, I don't know, the same reason you went to North Korea. I wanted to check me out. And I was like, oh, I got to, next time you're there, you got to meet Nathan and Lindsay because they're the other white people there. Those are the other white people. And he was saying he was outside talking to guys.

from like Sri Lanka that said that they were international bankers or something like that and he's like yeah but real talk you're leaning against a scooter and a two-took in a parking lot outside of a scam center so I don't think you're actually a banker just to call me crazy yeah the entire place of sanctions so I don't know what bank he would be in as well but it's right I think that the whole thing though the print script sanctions and kind of rise and kind of fall of them just shows you though the scale of what we're in.

Yeah. So imagine thinking about the 1980s and everyone's talking about Escobar and how much we need to bring this guy down because he's flooding the streets of Miami with cocaine. And then if you just looked at it like, oh man, drug trafficking got pretty bad under Escobar. Good that we've then done something about Escobar. And I don't realize actually when he was coming up, everyone else was as well. And he was creating a structural system that meant that drug trafficking was just, going to be part of society on a global scale and continuing to grow. This is that and then this is more.

So like Prince Group were able to come into like, yeah, okay, first of all, Cambodia, like Chinese guy comes here, he's able to buy a citizenship for the country and then he is able to set up scam compounds, he's involved in other criminal activity, but also have a legitimate relationship with the government and at the same time build the biggest property empire in Cambodia that had ever been seen. So some of those properties were used for scam compounds. Some were not and some were used for both. So you could have an apartment there and there's like 20 Thai with these guys in the apartment next to you doing scams. But it meant that they then invested all this money into Cambodia and then they were building full cities. We're building full

massive developments. They added hundreds of hectares of land onto Riem in Cambodia so that actually increased the size of the country and then they built all of this. And then they took that same model when they were still growing and they went to Palau and they developed relationships to the government there and you start seeing them develop relationships in similar groups with countries all around the world and they're often countries that like are developing a or have a diplomatic relationship with Taiwan so China kind of allows them a bit of rope to go there and get involved and have a little bit of influence for the money that's coming through but then when you do decide wait a minute this has gotten too big which always happens of every criminal

group. And when the Americans and the Chinese and the Japanese and the South Koreans and the European Union are all saying Cambodia, this is mental, you are stealing all of our money and you're stealing all of the human beings and they just keep coming here and your entire government's in on it. You have to stop. They kind of went, yeah, yeah, okay. So they did, you know, accept those sanctions in a way and they sent Jinza off to China when it felt like there was no other options. and then they've now been able to just seize those assets. So take billions of dollars and then put it back into the hands officially of the government because now they're criminal seized assets.

So you get the mafia to build you a country and then you take it back from them when you're done. Oh my gosh. Yeah, literally billions and billions and billions of dollars in assets. Like physical buildings, like infrastructure, construction that was basically funded by groups like like Prince has been now seized formally by the government, which basically means the two families, the Hun family and then like the family that have been controlling the, the Ministry of the Interior for all of time here. And those two families have many family members who have turned up as names of directors

of companies that they shared with a lot of the scam directors, right? So it's just wild that they are still benefiting. And in the meantime, like, so when I said about the reward from China, at the peak of the crackdown, Chinese foreign ministers did a delegation where they went to a few different countries in Southeast Asia. They went to Thailand, and they made it very clear in a statement afterwards that they were neutral on the war situation, but they would continue to invest in Thailand. Then they came here, they have a chat. They announced that Cambodia is doing so well on the crackdown that they have decided to give them a ton of military equipment and we're doing joint police and military operations in the near future.

So then Cambodia gets all these toys sent over that it can't afford. Thailand goes a bit quiet on the whole border issue for a while. and now it's becoming clearer and clearer that the Chinese are not very happy with where it's going here in Cambodia. And I think it is creeping back in and it is. A lot of places haven't fully been shut down and the very few actually senior people have been arrested within Cambodia at any point, right? So it might switch again, but now they've kind of got what they want. So it will probably rebound here. But in the meantime, yeah, the people who allowed this to happen or in some cases profited from it directly have profited now again from the crackdown.

And it's kind of like, you know, in Singapore, like a few years ago when they had the biggest ever money laundering crackdown of all time. Your Maurerberger? No, no. The Fujan gang who were actually linked. And I won't get into what we did it. They're kind of also linked to the Prince Group. But they'd made all their money from online gambling and scams in Cambodia and the Philippines running horrific scam compounds. But within Singapore, they were only being tried for money laundering because that's what happened in Singaporean territory.

So by the time the trial was even concluded, they'd finished their sentences. They were all out between nine and 18 months, right? And then they'd all bought passports for other countries like Cambodia, like Vanuatu, like Turkey, and they all just went off. And I didn't have to go back to China where they were still wanted. So they've never been tried for any of the really bad stuff. And in the meantime, the Singaporean government kept the billion dollars that they took off them. And they're trying currently, I think, to get some of the money that they were holding in Cambodia.

And Cambodia is saying, oh, no, that was laundered in Cambodia, just we should get it. But either way, these two governments that really, allowed this kind of, created the environments for this to happen, and have not suffered in any way personally as a result, are now getting all of the money that none of that's going back to victims of scams or human trafficking victims, you know, all that money is sitting there while so many people are suffering that have lost of their money or are trapped in the streets of Cambodia and can't go back to like, you know, Rwanda. And yeah. What's happened because you mentioned they've seized billions of dollars in physical assets. What about the 15 billion in cryptocurrencies

seized by US authorities as a result of this? It's not been used yet. And, and I don't know there's, I mean, there's some discussion over whether the US authorities even have full access to it. But I think there's a bit of internal debate right now about where that should go and how that should be spent. And there are also a lot of them, there's a lot of discussion about whether we should be trying to make some kind of legal case here to look at the victims of human trafficking and the victims of scams who have had so much money taken away from them or have had their life destroyed by being tortured every day to do that. that maybe when we're talking about billions of dollars in crypto or millions of dollars on London penhouses or helicopters in London or yachts and wherever, maybe some of that money should actually be going back to the victims. And the problem, it seems, is that there's this phrase that people use like state capture of organized crime where our criminal groups kind of take the country,

that it's probably not really the way it works. It's more that the governments are willingly being captured, but they're still in control. And I think that's now the way that it is. working and that's the really scary bit because yeah like Lindsay said when the money's getting dived out it's the states who remain those same people those same institutions remain in place and then they take that cash and then somehow you can go from being this pariah state in Cambodia where you have pissed off US America and everyone equally and now yes having joined military exercises agreed with US China India and Russia all in the same year and I don't know what other country could do that so it doesn't destroy your reputation

and now that same pattern is developing in other places where African states or South Asian states or Pacific Island states are giving themselves in a way to these mafia groups, the Chinese criminal groups specifically, but also Russian groups in Africa and saying build, build, build, do a lot of crime and then the crime overlaps with the drugs

or counterfeit cigarettes or arms trafficking, wildlife trafficking. Then it gets too much, you move to the next one. But the countries remain in the same power and the same leadership, and they benefit overall from that money that comes in. And then the criminal networks just continue to grow and develop gray market economies and all of these places that they leave behind, like the digital platform apps. So they just continue to grow their industry. They just do their sketchier and sketchier visible stuff in the next place along.

These compounds are being hit by F-16s right now. Apparently, the report spam button finally got an upgrade. Am I right? We'll be right back. This episode is also sponsored in part by BetterHelp. The stigma of mental health can be quiet. It's the idea that you should be able to handle everything yourself. It's feeling guilty for asking for help. It's telling yourself that other people have it worse, so you shouldn't complain.

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Head to Wayfair.com right now to shop all things home and get your space ready for less. That's W-A-Y-F-A-I-R.com. Wayfair, every style, every home. Wayfair, every style, every home. If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what are they smart and considerate listeners do. Take a moment, support our sponsors. They keep the lights on around here. All of the deals and discount codes in ways to support the show are searchable and clickable

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authorities, major seizures in UK, Singapore, Japan, South Korea, and Hong Kong. But the real damage is, well, the financial damage in those places is enormous, right? Older people, especially giving away all their life savings to a romance scammer or a crypto scammer. But yeah, good point, right? Because now you've got this sort of gap in your economy, and the only thing left is, well, we've got this criminal payment app and we've still got the trafficking a little bit. We have maybe the scam center's gone, but we still have all the security guys that we brought in from Africa. So now they're sort of in a gang doing whatever they're doing to survive. I mean, you leave this like disgusting crust. You take out a tumor,

right? A scam center and you throw the boss in jail in China. with the Prince Group, but all of this personnel are still there and they're still bad guys, you know, and they're still, they've still got to survive. And it's just insane that there's been no attempt. Like, so many different countries and so many different international agencies have been increasingly vocal about this being, you know, one of the biggest criminal crises in the world for the last couple of years, right? They've been increasingly understood at the size and the scale and the damage that's doing

and have been calling for things like crackdowns in Cambodia. but then the fact that there was no idea of what would happen then next. Like how did they, at the idea that like, what you finally got what you wanted, the Cambodia did do a real crackdown. And then, but there was no consideration of how 200,000 people might get back to their home countries.

And if they couldn't, what might happen then? And like, where are the option they might have? And, you know, there are people that we've talked to who were literally tortured because they refused to scam Americans when they got,

when they realized what the job was, literally tortured. And then they, They have got out of that scum compound, and then they've been told, you know, there's no help coming from any of the countries that, you know, that you refuse to hurt. And so they don't care about you now, trapped here, being re-arrested on the street. That's the message you're hearing, right? And so the next time that if you've got no way of getting home and no money left, you're going to starve on the streets of Cambodia, and someone says, do you want to come and do it willingly this time and you won't get tortured and you're good at it now, you know? You might be like, why not?

Why not just give it? Yeah. And like, I understand that. It's just so even beyond it being a humanitarian crisis, just the idea there's not been a plan for how you stop all those people from being immediately recycled into the criminal infrastructure. To me, it's my bugling, especially at a moment when so many sanctioned countries as well

are looking for ways to make a lot of money and evade sanctions, places like Russia are desperately trying to work out how they can make a ton of money and get it back into Russia. So it's like insane that you're like, oh, look, there are hundreds of thousands of people who have been trained to do this one thing that we know hurts us, I guess we'll just let them scut it back off into the ether and no further questions, you know?

No, of course. It needs to be seen as this huge warning to the rest of the world because, I mean, we were on your pod years ago screaming about scam compounds being a real thing, right? And there's some other people doing that as well and no one was really listening until it was too late, right? Until they'd taken over full countries and they just made billions and billions and billions of dollars

and that was spread out into the most sophisticated money laundering system we've ever seen, right? So we were trying to warn about it then now. we can see how that continues to grow, but now the world's starting to listen to the scam and human trafficking, but you need that humanitarian response section as the next bit that's just being ignored. And the big NGOs are really not doing anything. They don't have the funding assigned for this because it's such a specific thing, but it's a displacement crisis, right? And there's like us with eyewitness project, there's a few journalists, and there's a great new NGO called the EOS collective that is setting up and we're all trying to work together to help the victims of human trafficking who are stuck. But it should. shouldn't be us. You shouldn't be people who are writing about this, then trying to work out how to run a development system to get them food accommodation and flights home and liais with embassies, right? Like, there should be a huge international response to this because we already know that in places where Russia and France, like in this hell, are having, yes, like the competing

kind of soft power, like strategies, we know that the Russians are finding people who are pretty pissed off of the French and can put them into scam compounds willingly, right? So that you can go globally find people who do not like a specific country but you speak that language and you can find them willing to do things to that state and we say when you leave people on the streets for months like Lindsay said or even longer because there's still thousands here and we don't know what's going to happen to them then what else are they going to do and they're every day getting text saying do you want to come back into the work because we can take you to Laos we can take it to Myanmar Sri Lanka Uganda Madagascar or whatever tomorrow and they're still saying no so anyone

it's here needs that help and we're going to see the same cycle just repeated again and again for the next day and the next day. I was going to say every time a war breaks out and there's conscription, it's a matter of time before you start seeing the first scam compounds also recruiting actively for that. So I saw my first, like, a few months ago I saw the first ones looking for Hebrew speakers that was saying, you know, you don't have to be from Israel, but obviously that's who we'll be targeting. And so that was like, oh, that will be a lot of people, I imagine, who are leaving, because

it's like, you know, that don't want to be conscripted right now. And we saw the same things with Russia, with Ukraine, with countries where people were really, you know, frightened. Young people are frightened and they're leaving on mass as well. And so, and there hasn't really been much consideration of how you might think about and prevent the next ones, right? It's kind of this assumption that you must just be a really poor person from middle of in a Bangladeshi village, where there's actually quite a lot of reasons where you're suddenly vulnerable and abroad and don't have access to actual decent work either, right? Yeah, that's a really good point. It really shows the intimacy between crime and state power and that the groups are not just,

tolerated but are strategically useful. Laundering for sanctioned actors, like you mentioned, cybercrime infrastructure, financial warfare channels, political leverage inside a fragile state like Cambodia. I mean, it's just this type of money throws off the balance of power in these really fragile areas really quickly and really easily. The other point I just want to add on to that as well is because actually all of the kind of tech ecosystem around the scams

are also so huge now, right? So, like, you know, you can actually start spreading the different pieces of your business into different things. It's much harder to identify it as a single scam entity for police or for governments in that country. So I've seen some scam groups that are like, oh, our back-end developers are now based in Japan and our content makers who are often things like bloggers who are putting up, make faking fake news and AI stuff for sites so that people click on ads that take you to fake crypto platforms, that kind of thing. They're in the Philippines because that bit's not actually illegal there, right? Or it's confusing whether it is.

But then you'll put your, you know, your front line definitely trafficked horrific conditions people in, you know, in the middle of the jungle somewhere or in a country that has not figured this out yet, like Madagascar, right, or like rural Myanmar or here. So you start like really separating it out. And so it's possible as well that somewhere like Cambodia will fill that gap for a while by trying to have the more kind of like IT style jobs or financing jobs that are harder to identify instantly as being part of that ecosystem. him. Yeah, yeah, this reminds me of, I had that guy from Dubai who worked in a scam compound to reach out to me. And one of the things that he mentioned was that there was a whole company that was in charge of just their VPN and creating different IP addresses for everybody in the scam compound and keeping their data secure and making sure outside actors couldn't go in and find out who they were scamming and stuff like that. And they came in every week. And I said, wow, that's a, any idea how much it costs? He's like, I know exactly how much it costs because I'm the guy who's, he was the to one of the bosses, right? So he's like, he costs this. And I thought, wow, there's a small business, and their entire clientele is scam centers,

and all they do is obscure IP addresses. And this is like a seven-figure business for some small group of IT professionals in Dubai, and it's all they do. So one of the guys that we've been trying to help the last few months was in a few different scam compounds, but he was from an East African state, and he went to Dubai to work as a mechanic in like not great conditions but he was like really

had like a lot of knowledge on like tech and on like internet safety but could also fix a bike so he ended up like being in you know kind of shay conditions in Dubai fixing motorbikes inside of the roads I went it's okay but it's not really making any money and then someone going to I said well come in Cambodia you can I maybe it's like yeah you can work on internet like people knew that he was good with, like, developing software and protecting their systems. Like, he had a reputation for that just because it's why he liked doing. So when he got to Cambodia, they got him in and then he realized, oh, wait, I've been trafficked. And then his specific job was just maintaining the VPN.

And that was completely necessary for any of the operations to work. Otherwise, everyone is in, you know, a town in Cambodia and not where they say they were. And he, you know, basically didn't make any money. And he was, yeah, went through, like, physical abuse in this horrible situation. but he said he was able to use that position to help someone because of how much power it gave him, where there was a woman who was seven months pregnant and the Chinese bosses and some of the Moroccan guards kept beating her for not being able to scam enough people. And they were explaining, I think she's not really going to get much better lads. She's seven months pregnant and deeply traumatized, maybe just stop beating her.

And for some reason, she's still able to be alive and maybe the kid is too. so just stop it and they wouldn't and they would do other things there and he went all right i'm just going to stop doing your VPN and i went well we're going to do something to you and then the guy who was forced into running their finance and their accounts and actually paying the guys in the crypto or getting the u sdn and handing over went i'm not going to do that today and then there was like a little collection of people yeah and then they and they went all right fine and they they flew the girl back into into east africa and then they all got back to work um so i can they can work once or twice, and then they just send bigger guys then with more guns. But yeah.

The power of strikes and collective action, even in a scam compound. Put those communist flags up. Yeah. Put those Chinese flags on the roof. All jokes aside, though, it really does come down to the human cost, right? The buildings that are being airstruck by F-16s and drones, there's trafficking victims trapped in there, caught between criminal gangs, air strikes, and corrupt authorities. And I would imagine during an armed conflict, their escape routes shrink, too. You can't just walk through the jungle anymore because you're going to get shot or step on a landmine because they don't want that anymore. What have you guys been doing?

I know you have increasing involvement in some of the rescues. You've been documenting, I guess you would call it war crimes, helping negotiate releases and watching conditions deteriorate from all of these different scam centers and all these different areas and all these poor victims. And I say poor victims knowing that they've also scam people, but I think all of us can put ourselves into the shoes of somebody who's being imprisoned. and beaten and tortured and say, would you then call an old person that you don't know on the other side of the world and try to get them to send you money? And the answer is going to be yes in like every, almost every case without exception. Well, also like, yeah, not everyone was even a scammer. Like some people have been used for forced online sex work, which basically means they get raped all day. So I mean, like, you know, there are lots of things that could have happened to people. Then they all get put into the same boat when they leave. I didn't even think about that. Yeah. I mean, that's terrific. Nathan, you've been leading most, we would have a lot of driving around the country, picking people up. Yeah, maybe you should start with the story you told me in the middle of the night once, which you said, I'm sitting in a room surrounded by ballistic vests. And we're blasting, I think it was a pink pony club or something. Yeah. Tell us this story. Let's wrap with this story. Okay, right. So this was, this is actually a prince compound.

This is a few days after they announced the sanctions. We did want to see whether or anything had happened, this one particularly notorious compound, which had been named in the sanctions. So we drove over there. It's on the Vietnam border. and as we drove up to it, we were like pretty sure it's still fully occupied. It doesn't seem to have made a difference than yet. And the, they'd open the gate to allow, I think, what was a human trafficking vehicle in front of us. And Nathan just pulled in after it and followed closely behind in this car to see if we'd get in.

It's easier to get into a human trafficking compound than out. Yeah, it turns out. As we discovered it, you don't say. So, yeah. So we drove around, we took some videos and photos very quickly. We were like, yep, there's still like a lot of... People in cages, literal cages, yeah. Not that. Yeah.

Oh, my God. We were like, this is still occupied. We'd get that out of here very quickly. Drove back around in the hope that we could maybe try and do the same thing away back out. And we were being chased at this point by quite a lot of very angry guards and Chinese gangsters who started like hitting our car and like making calls. And we were like, oh, God. And then they briefly raised the barrier again to let a different vehicle out. And they had just kind of like flawed it towards like after this.

And it was kind of very filmlike with all these guards jumping out of the way. But so fast that as we went over, like, the speed bump or the way out, we could have, like, actually flew through the air a little bit as we went into oncoming traffic and then sped into oncoming traffic, drove towards the border. I was like, drive to the Vietnam border, because the immigration, like, officials and, like, border force might not be, you know, in Prince's pocket. And as we drove towards them, we saw they were already on walkie-talkies looking for our car, so we're like, oh, they are shit.

So turned around very quickly. And the only way back out is to go back past this compound. And so as we're driving out past it, with all these guys sort of like realizing, clocking our car and starting to run after us. And Nathan was like, put some music on. So I just turned the song, next song on. Yes, important. Before you do anything else, put on Billy Irish.

So we turned it on. It was Pink Pony Club, which is Nathan is apparently in the 0.1 top percent of listeners of this song globally if Teflorone would like so, you know. And so, but the opening line of Pink Pony Club is, I know you wanted me to stay so as we're driving past this we start just laughing hysterically because we can't believe we just survived this

and now it's kind of become a bit of an anthem for us Yeah I bet Victims are trapped between gangsters and airstrikes So yes your Monday was annoying But perspective people We'll be right back Running payroll should not be the thing that runs your business Meet PowerPay

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If you haven't signed up yet, I invite you to come check it out. It's a great companion to the show. Jordan Harbinger.com slash news is where you can find it. Now for the rest of my conversation with Nathan and Lindsay. So here's my next question, though. They're looking for you. They're looking for your car. Aren't you worried they're going to eventually find you because you're still kind of there?

We don't own a car. We rented different one. Oh, it was a rental. Never mind. They stopped asking us where we go. we bought when we rent them now. I mean, yeah, I mean, like we've, we've had a few frets from the Prince guys, but so have a bunch of other amazing reports and some NGOs and just a lot of people.

I think they've got bigger problems now. Like, I think they mostly don't want to get a black bag on their head and get flown to China. So right now, probably safer in a way from being able to speak about them. And there's other criminal groups that are doing the same thing. There's other groups that are connected to them. There's the existing version of Prince that continues to operate. But I mean, it's always a lot safer for us than people who are reporting on it locally or maybe cops are actually trying to arrest these people and, you know, their bosses are working for them. So, like, yeah, there's a bit of that.

But I think we're still always about saying. They got bigger fish to fry than a couple of crazy journalists who'd have really poor sense of personal preservation. Yes, exactly. But I think, yeah, but to go about your question before, like, so I think since the crack run started, there's been a lot of calls for help from people who've just been stopped. outside of compound somewhere or in an area of the country where they just can't leave on the Thai border, especially when they're particularly concerning because no one knows when the war might kick off again. And so we've been driving around the country a lot trying to like pick people up, bring

them back, Nathan's doing a lot of that. And then once they're input on Penn and trying to get them into the very few kind of shelters for trafficking because there are, or alternative housing where they can at least be sort of safe and getting food. And like, you know, all of that's been funded by like just individual people. helping out. It's a GoFundMe campaign and got a few grand and then yeah. Yeah like and then it's just or whatever own cash or donated food. Friends throwing stuff in and then even the NGOs that are

working on it are often other they're all kind of like their own cash. So I guess like what we're doing is like we're doing that. We're trying to continue support. We're trying to still investigate like these overlapsing crime and conflict and corruption around the world and then trying to get but also trying to support the victims or find a way that we can so we can investigate what's actually happening and not just Cambodia, but like go to. of Madagascar, like, look at Afghanistan, look at forced criminality, look at all of the people who are actual victims of organized crime and conflict, and then actually try to support them

as well. So you can see what's coming and then try to do something about it rather than just go, oh, well, we said that would happen. I guess we'll just go on and find the next thing, and people just sit there and completely traumatized with no support. And it's now more important never, because like USAID stopping and the amount of cash that was actually going to development and to help people is shrinking so much. So anyone who is kind of awkward to describe in like a philanthropy, like meeting that these people that had criminal stuff, but they're also traffic. And that's just a little bit too awkward.

So it means that it's really difficult to get funding and support for people in this massively growing enterprise, like forced criminality that links between crime and conflict. And it just connects every security issue in the world. Do you guys still have the GoFundMe up? We could throw it into the show notes because I think people listening might be like, oh, help human trafficking victims? Like, yeah, I've got 50 bucks for that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We do. But we also, we can update that a bit because actually the 25 people were we're trying to get home. They're all now home. They all got flights. Oh, great. We kind of partnered with another organization. And then we've ended up, yeah, using a lot of the money to like keep supporting people

day to day. So, yeah, anything is really, really helpful right now, especially. And also even just things like getting translators and here for people who don't speak English or come I and who have been imprisoned here and like, you know, all these things need money. So it's kind of that would be amazing. So we'll put the GoFundMe up or a GoFundMe and any listeners can help out with that. And then if any actual people that have proper money, we just want to fund their organization

to do this and they'll also get in touch. Yeah, yeah. If you got big money, yeah, then email us and we'll set it. Actually, yeah, if somebody really wants to like throw something at this, email me Jordan atjordan harbinger.com, I'll introduce them to you so that they're not like pinging GoFundMe to donate $7,000. Because sometimes people really do surprise me. I did a fundraise for something else and people donate.

really tens of thousands of dollars sometimes and I was really taken aback by that. And of course, what I don't want is for them to then pay like a 5% processing fee to some company to do that. That's just a waste. I'm also aware of like the irony of beginning this podcast. We're saying don't trust anyone you've never met and send them cash. That's true. And hey, here's a link to give us your money. That's right.

And you think, here's my actual email address. Just email me and send me it to me. Honestly, I'll pass it on. That's right. It's for sure not a scam at Jordan Harbinger.com. That will also work. So, man, I wonder if Cambodia is going to reform or simply rebrand. And are these scam cities, are they going to collapse and fracture like they seem to have been?

Or are they going to start to militarize? Because this is a different model of transnational crime. It's almost like a new conflict model. I really thought the whole corporations become government and the military. that was going to be some dystopian cyberpunk future in the developed world, right? Neo Tokyo, Neo Detroit. No, Southeast Asia speed running it here in 2026. It's crazy to me.

I think one thing we are really, really scared of is how many scam compounds have been taken over by the General Department of Prisons under the Ministry of Interior and and rebranded. Some of them have put out photos on Facebook and stuff, trying to claim that they're like new construction sites of prisons when we know that. was one of them was parquet. It had just been sanctioned by the UK government and we've just been there with the doors were locked. And we can recognize it still had some of the signs for the illegal gambling sites in the background. Like when they're walking around. This is our new

prison. It's a fanduil.com slash Cambodia sign in the background, but whatever. Ignore that. Ignore that. Yeah. And so we are very, very concerned about at one point we thought that as a stopgap maybe why it's one of the reasons why so many trafficking victims or survivors of scams that one of the reasons we thought that they were being targeted by the police so much was as a stop gap because, you know, yeah, it's a huge economic gap and a lot of that money was going to things like the authorities to keep an eye on scam compounds and bring people back if they ran away and office security. They're making a lot of money.

They need to fill that. A lot of money. They need to fill that, yeah. So at first we were concerned that they were just basically trying to extort the same amount of money per person that they had been being paid in protection money per person before. But now it's looking increasingly sinister because we don't know why so many new prisons are being built and scam compounds. And we don't really know whether or not. They keep talking about things like floating the idea that some of these prisons will be used, especially the youth ones, to make things for the war effort, for example.

Oh, so you're going to have sweatshops with people making mortar rounds or something and bullets. It's already happening. They say it's like, yeah, non-leaf stuff like trenches, but yeah, it's already beginning. Wow. Slave labor. Yeah. So my real concern, I mean, already. there's an issue with forced labor in prisons in Cambodia,

like making things like school uniforms depressing at one point, but there's been all kinds of things that are made in prisons by this captive market. And there's all kinds of ways in which people are exploited and extorted in prison. And so most countries don't want their prisons to be overcrowded because it's cost you money to have people in prison. Here you are making quite a bit of money from everyone who goes to prison. So I don't want it to be true, but I am really, really concerned that there is a kind of handover of literal slaves from a private criminal market to a official

government-controlled market and that we won't be able to see what happens to those people if they go back into these buildings that have been set up for scams. So the government has seen that, I mean, slaves, that does work, that does make money. And then when they can take all the facilities off that are already built to hold people against their will, the risk is that you have what are seen as fragile states, bring criminal groups in and like we said, build the country. But then when they leave, and this creates about two-thirds, roughly, a conservative estimate of the value of Cambodia's GDP when it was at its strongest a few months ago. So then there is a massive gap. Like, where do you fill that?

And drug raids have went massively up. Drug seizures have went out. Although the arrests have not, because again, most likely just taking the cash and people are going on. And then, so what do you do with it? Well, then there is the. criminal aspects of this and there are a lot of senators and people connected to the government who are making a lot of money and will find new criminal-related exploits or bring back elements and scams and some scams are still staying here but then there's also just the country that

doesn't really like journalists or political opposition or anyone who says anything online they don't want and that's a similar trend to other vulnerable states that can be taken over or worked with these kind of groups well then when they leave that infrastructure behind it's pretty great for emboldening your authoritarianism because you don't need to build more prisons. Cambodia's already got the second highest prison population in the world was great because they just got a bunch of free prisons they didn't need to spend any money on. Unbelievable. Wow. So I hope you guys stay safe. I do worry about you guys over there. Don't you still live between two scam compounds or something like that?

Yeah, they don't scam there anymore. They just sleep there officially. I wouldn't say anything else. Yeah. Well, yeah, no, they're still there. You can't even answer this question. This is why I worry about you guys. You can't even answer the question without worrying about it. Well, I mean, yeah, I think one of the bigger concerns is very near to where we are is a place that we're fairly sure is a reception center for people arriving or was, for people arriving in scams.

And then they just put out recently a few weeks ago, they put outside it. And a branded umbrella. This was amazing. There's merch as well, actually. Oh, yeah. A branded umbrella for an illegal site, which was proven to be running out. scum compound in up in babette a while ago and was at one point the sponsor of a few different football teams but anyway but it was using slavery um to staff it they just put it's actually illegal

to even advertise um like uh online gambling here and they put this directly outside next to the police bike that's always parked there um so that's fun wow yes and it's just like it's almost like you're just kind of it's there to announce that this is part of the industry and the bike is there to announce that and that's fine unbelievable yeah well thank you both so much your work incredibly important again we'll link to the go fund me in the show or similar in the show notes so get that to me when you can and if people want to do something bigger email me and i'll introduce you guys thank you so much please again please stay safe i always do sort of whenever i see a text from nathan i'm like please just be an updated or a cool story and not like hey we're in prison do you

know anybody who can bail us out great to run into you in the vet jordan yeah yeah exactly oh my gosh for you too. Thank you so much. All right. Cheers, man. You too. Okay. Bye. Bye. The most powerful longevity tool may not be in a supplement bottle or high-tech clinic. It might be the simple movement most of us barely think about. So I have plenty of patients that are in chronic pain. People's feet are weak. The footwear is compromising the function of their feet. And this is what we get. One out of three people over the age of 45 have foot pain. People don't pay attention to their feet. We talk about, you know, meeting people where they are. Getting to 5,000 steps a day decreases the risk of depression.

This is a very, very big thing that I think should be on every prescription pad. That sweet spot is about 7 to 8,000 steps a day. That's game changing. You got to put the work in. You know, you have to put the work in for anything that's worth doing. Getting outside and having that repetitive motion, we're stimulating neurotransmitters in our brain. We're decreasing cortisol. You're increasing your parasympathetic state.

which is the chill state. These are all very, very good things. If you start paying attention to this stuff, it will save you so much in the long run because I see people every single day that cannot walk because something hurts because of foot pain, every single day. My goal is to keep people walking

as much as they want to as they age, and that's going to happen by making sure that their foot is strong. Please pay attention to your feet. Look at them. Can you move your toes? Can you splay your toes? And if not, start to work.

work on things to improve the strength of your foot. Wear a shoe that's more functional that respects the anatomy of your foot. If you do just those things, you'll probably stay out of my office. Check out episode 1322 with Dr. Courtney Conley, which reveals how a few strategically timed steps can add healthier years to your life. What makes this story so disturbing is not just the scale of the fraud. It's that the people trapped inside these compounds are now caught between traffickers, corrupt governments, and actual military strikes. The scam economy might be collapsing in places, but collapse doesn't necessarily mean rescue for these people. Sometimes it just means more chaos. Links to Nathan and Lindsay's work and the GoFundMe or whatever it's going to be that we

mentioned for the human trafficking victims that they're helping rescue. That'll be in the show notes, which are always on the website. Advertisers, deals, discount codes, ways to support the show, all at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. Don't forget about six-minute networking as well over at six-minute networking.com. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. And this show is created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Tadasidlowsk, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi.

Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. In fact, the greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. If you know somebody who's interested in the human trafficking angles, scams, fraud, cybercrime, definitely share this episode with him. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn. And we'll see you next time.