He said yes to an IT job. He ended up enslaved in a scam compound.

Summary

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Apple News Today: "He said yes to an IT job. He ended up enslaved in a scam compound."

Date: April 4, 2026
Host: Sam Sanders (in for Shumita Basu)
Guest: Andy Greenberg, Senior Writer at Wired

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Episode Overview

This episode of Apple News Today dives into the dark underbelly of human trafficking and cybercrime, focusing on “pig butchering” scams in Southeast Asia. Wired journalist Andy Greenberg shares his investigation, which started with an anonymous tip from inside a scam compound. Through Greenberg’s reporting and his relationship with a whistleblower known as “Red Bull,” listeners gain rare access into the inner workings of these scam operations, the lives of trafficked workers forced into scamming, and the ethical quandaries journalists face when sources are in danger.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The First Contact: The Email from Inside ([00:26]–[01:50])

• Andy Greenberg receives a no-subject email from “Red Bull” via ProtonMail. Red Bull claims to be an Indian computer engineer, trapped and forced to run crypto scams from a compound in Laos’s Golden Triangle.
• Red Bull offers to share internal documents and evidence but stresses his risk:

  “I am still inside the compound so I cannot risk direct exposure, but I want to help shut this down.”
  (Andy recounting Red Bull’s message, [00:54])

• The email kicks off months of encrypted communication and investigation.

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2. What is "Pig Butchering"? ([02:34]–[04:39])

• Definition: Scammers build faux romantic relationships with victims (“the pig”), fattening them with trust, and ultimately persuade them to invest in fake cryptocurrency platforms.
• Term Controversy:

  “Law enforcement is asking us not to use this term anymore because it’s not very nice to the victim.”
  (Andy Greenberg, [02:52])

• Scale: Greenberg describes this as the world’s single biggest cybercrime:

  “Tens of billions of dollars a year stolen from victims, mostly in the West… what people really don’t know is that the scammers are victims too. Hundreds of thousands of human trafficking victims are trapped in compounds…”
  (Andy Greenberg, [04:00])

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3. Red Bull’s Story: From Job Offer to Enslavement ([05:06]–[07:00])

• Background: Young, educated Indian man from Kashmir, lured by a fake IT job.
• Entrapment: Passport confiscated, coerced across the Thai-Laos border, forced to scam on long shifts.
• Conditions: Dorm with five others, a single toilet, exhausting hours tailored to Western time zones.

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4. Inside the Compound: Documentation and Daily Life ([07:13]–[09:28])

• Red Bull provided:
  • Written exposés and flowcharts detailing scam processes.
  • Photos of ceremonial drums for high-value scams, scammer leaderboards, office interiors.
  • Videos showing the dorms, cafeterias, and work floors.
• Daily Routine:

  "He would pretend… I was his uncle back home if anybody overheard us."
  (Andy Greenberg, [08:23])

• Work environment: Rows of cubicles, color-coded flags for performance, lines of trafficked South Asian and African men in the cafeteria.

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5. Modern Slavery – The Corporate Illusion ([09:28]–[11:26])

• Not Classic Slavery:

  “It was slavery pretending to be a corporation.”
  (Andy Greenberg quoting an expert, [09:37])

• Victims held in poverty, owed “debts” for room and board, unable to leave.
• Even basic food was withheld for minor rule breaches.

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6. The Art of the Scam: Training and Execution ([11:26]–[13:38])

• Workers trained with detailed scripts for online manipulation:
  • Initial mass outreach on social media.
  • Polished fake identities (often wealthy women).
  • Gradual trust-building and “slaughtering” moments when money is extracted.
• Psychological Preparation:

  “By mentioning... that your bank warned you about a scam, the guides train victims to ignore warnings.”
  (Andy Greenberg, [12:42])

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7. The Reporter-Source Relationship and Ethical Tensions ([13:38]–[16:45])

• Risks and Boundaries:
  Red Bull requests hidden cameras and spyware; Greenberg refuses due to risk and ethics.

  “He wanted to install spyware on his boss's computer. I determined one by one that they were way too risky, that they would probably get him killed.”
  (Andy Greenberg, [14:56])

• Resisting Humanitarian Aid:
  Temptation to pay Red Bull's ransom, but journalistic integrity forbids it.

  “You can't reward a human trafficking operation. You can't pay a source. Even in journalism, that's a violation of journalistic ethics.”
  (Andy Greenberg, [15:25])

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8. Doubts, Paranoia, and Verification ([16:45]–[18:21])

• Greenberg describes questioning whether Red Bull was scamming him—a meta “pig butchering” scam targeting a journalist.

  “Is this a kind of pig butchering romance scam, where it's a romance between a journalist and a source…? For all I knew…I thought he was a legitimate source, but I had to consider that suspicion.”
  (Andy Greenberg, [17:04])

• Leans on external experts and NGOs, who also fear being scammed.

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9. The Escape Attempt Gone Wrong ([18:21]–[21:38])

• Red Bull forges documents trying to convince bosses to let him return to India—he’s caught, beaten, starved, held for ransom.
• Devastating Email:

  “The people catch me and they get my phone, everything. They beat me, and now maybe they kill me.”
  (Email from Red Bull, read by Andy Greenberg, [19:13])

• Greenberg feels guilt, enters “remote rescue mode,” reaching out to local activists.
• Still, doubts linger about being manipulated for ransom.

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10. Liberation and Aftermath ([21:20]–[23:47])

• Authenticity Confirmed:

  "Absolutely it was not a scam. Unfortunately, this nightmare was entirely real. Red Bull was real. The whistleblowing was real."
  (Andy Greenberg, [21:20])

• Red Bull is unexpectedly released amid chaos from a looming police raid.
• He escapes across five countries with just flip-flops, ultimately returning home to India.
• Scarred by trauma and immense guilt for victims he scammed, Red Bull (now revealed as Muhammad Muzahir) continues to assist Greenberg post-escape.

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11. Broader Reflections: Why Does This Continue? ([23:47]–[27:42])

• Western law enforcement has been slow to recognize the scale and human trafficking side of the crime.
• Emphasis has been solely on protecting Western victims, ignoring the massive trafficking crisis.
• Crackdowns in Southeast Asia often "performative" due to corruption, with trafficked workers quickly released back into scamming.

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12. Personal and Societal Impact ([27:42]–[30:43])

• On Greenberg:

  “…what the wealth disparity of the world truly feels like. I was on my roof playing with my kids in my privileged American life, and then this guy reaches out to me… such a different universe…”
  (Andy Greenberg, [27:55])

• Meeting Muhammad in person confirmed he was real; Muhammad insists on publicizing his ordeal and identity, risking further retaliation.

  "Muhammad is probably the bravest source I've ever worked with, and he understood that his story might inspire other people to come forward, and that's what he wants."
  (Andy Greenberg, [30:43])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Modern slavery as “corporation”:
  “It was slavery pretending to be a corporation.” ([09:37])
• The moral dilemma:
  “You can't reward a human trafficking operation. You can't pay a source.” ([15:25])
• On the cycle of victimhood:
  “There has to be a recognition that the scammer on the other side is a victim too.” ([25:40])
• The moment of rescue:
  “He had to travel across five countries in a pair of flip flops.” ([23:03])
• Human cost:
  “He is traumatized and has survivor's guilt… he confessed to me that he had scammed two people… and he has enormous guilt about that too.” ([23:10])

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Red Bull's first email: [00:26]
• Pig Butchering explained: [02:41]
• Scale and dual-victim aspect: [04:00]
• Red Bull’s recruitment: [05:23]
• Inside the compound: [07:13]
• Scripts and scam techniques: [11:42]
• Escape plan and capture: [18:21]
• Email pleading for life: [19:13]
• Red Bull’s release: [21:38]
• Meeting Muhammad: [29:12]

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Conclusion

Andy Greenberg’s investigation exposes not only the technical machinery of pig butchering scams, but also the deeply human suffering at their core—both financial victims in the West and trafficked laborers in Southeast Asia. Muhammad's extraordinary bravery in whistleblowing under lethal threat personalizes a crime too often dismissed as faceless internet fraud, and the story raises urgent questions about law enforcement, global inequalities, and ethical journalism.

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Transcript

[Sam Sanders]

This is in conversation from Apple News. I'm Sam Sanders in for Shamita Basu. Today, inside the dark world of foreign scam compounds. One evening last June, journalist Andy Greenberg was on the roof of his apartment building playing with his kids when he

[Andy Greenberg]

got an email, no subject line sent from the encrypted email service ProtonMail.

[Sam Sanders]

Andy was immediately intrigued by what he read.

[Andy Greenberg]

Hello, I'm currently working inside a major crypto romance scam operation based in the Golden Triangle. I am a computer engineer being forced to work here under a contract.

[Sam Sanders]

The message claimed the sender had documents and other evidence that revealed how this scam operation really worked. And there was one more line that really caught Andy's attention.

[Andy Greenberg]

I am still inside the compound so I cannot risk direct exposure, but I want to help shut this down.

[Sam Sanders]

Andy is a senior writer at Wired. And that email was the start of a months long reporting journey for Andy and his source. That source went by the pseudonym Red Bull. Together, Red Bull and Andy would uncover the hidden world of so called pig butchering scams where scammers build relationships with victims online before persuading them to invest in fake cryptocurrency platforms. But the scammers are often victims themselves, held in compounds across Southeast Asia, forced to carry out the fraud. This is a story about the inner workings of a covert criminal operation, but it's also the story of a journalist and a source. The ethics of such a relationship and what happens when that source tries to escape the world in which he is trapped.

[Interviewer]

Let's just dig in. Tell us that first email you got from Red Bull. When you read that email, what's your first thought?

[Andy Greenberg]

Well, my first thought was that I needed to figure out if this was real. I covered this beat of crypto crime. I'm aware of the crypto scam compound industry. I've read the stories of people who have survived these compounds and escaped. But what I had never heard of before was somebody on the inside offering to be a whistleblower to leak documents to a journalist in real time. And that it was, I don't know, as a journalist it felt both too good to be true, but also very, very scary. I knew that the stakes here were really high, that he was in an incredibly sensitive and risky position if he was who he said he was.

[Interviewer]

And this scam, it's widely known as pig butchering. How would you define pig butchering?

[Andy Greenberg]

Well, the reason it's called pig butchering is because this is a very particular form of cryptocurrency scammer. You fatten up the pig with a romance scam.

[Interviewer]

And the pig is like a Westerner.

[Andy Greenberg]

The pig is the victim. In fact, law enforcement is asking us not to use this term anymore because it's not very nice to the victim. But the idea is that you build trust through a kind of romantic relationship. The scammer pretends usually to be a wealthy woman, a wealthy, attractive woman who is interested in the victim and builds a relationship with them. And then only sometimes after weeks or even months of building that relationship do they make this pivot to saying, you know, by the way, I can help you get rich like me. I can show you, in fact, this investment platform where you can buy cryptocurrency and double your money or triple it. And I really think that you should be brave and try this. And then you can be wealthy like me. And of course, the investment platform is fake. The money is gone. People lose hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions of dollars of their life savings this way.

[Interviewer]

These are the things that we see in the news where it's some unassuming auntie or uncle falls in love with someone via text, and before you know it, they wired their retirement savings away. Those scandals, those scams.

[Andy Greenberg]

Yes. And I think, you know, people don't know this is the biggest form of cybercrime in history.

[Interviewer]

Wait, in history? How much money are we talking about?

[Andy Greenberg]

Tens of billions of dollars a year stolen from victims, mostly in the West. But the other thing that people really don't know, like this is even less known, I think, is that the scammers are victims too. Hundreds of thousands of human trafficking victims are trapped in full compounds in these countries in Southeast Asia, where they are forced day and night, or sometimes, you know, 15, 16 hour shifts to spam out scam messages and are not allowed to go home and are, in fact, sometimes beaten and punished and held in a kind of indentured servitude and forced to scam.

[Interviewer]

Wow. Red Bull claimed to be one of those individuals when he contacted you, right?

[Andy Greenberg]

Exactly.

[Interviewer]

Why the name Red Bull?

[Andy Greenberg]

Yeah. He would later tell me that he was looking at an empty can of a Red Bull energy drink. Like in the middle of our first phone call on Signal, when I asked him to come up with a pseudonym, he was like, you can call me anything you want. And I was like, well, you need to give me some name to call you. And he was like, okay, how about Red Bull?

[Interviewer]

I want you to explain to us how he ended up being trafficked. Because in the piece you describe him as someone who is pretty well educated, has A college degree, seems to be a smart guy. How did he get trapped?

[Andy Greenberg]

It was a very typical human trafficking situation where he had actually really pulled himself up by his bootstraps. He was a young man from India or from the kind of disputed region of Jammu and Kashmir on the border with Pakistan. And he had managed actually to get into the Kashmir Polytechnic Institute and get a degree in computer engineering. And then after that university program, he was lured with, it turns out, a fake job offer to be an IT manager somewhere in Southeast Asia by, you know, what appeared to be a kind of hiring agent who asked him to come to Thailand and then to cross the border into Laos. It turned out it was the Golden Triangle region of Laos. The Golden Triangle is this very small city sized special economic zone inside of Northern Laos that is in fact, a kind of lawless zone, but a small and kind of formalized one controlled essentially by Chinese organized crime now. And even the police are very often on the payroll of those. Those criminals. So it has become a hotbed of this particular criminal industry, which is scam compounce. So his passport was taken away by this hiring agent. And then before he knew it, he was told what his real job would be, which was not to be an IT manager in any office, but to be a scammer. And. And by that point, it was too late. He was trapped. He had no way of leaving and had to essentially get to work. And, you know, these 15, 16 hour night shifts timed to the time zones of his victims, and then sleep through the days in this dorm room with five other men in a toilet in the corner. That was his life.

[Interviewer]

Yeah. He then goes on to start sending you documentation and communication to expose what he's going through. What does he send you? What does he show you?

[Andy Greenberg]

Well, we started talking on the encrypted messaging and calling app signal, and he did immediately start to send me, like, really detailed material. He sent me his own written report explaining how everything worked in the compound, a flowchart of the processes of how they hook victims, how they build trust with them, how they essentially cash them out in the end. He sent me photos of things inside of the office. You know, the big Chinese ceremonial drum that people are allowed to play when they scam someone for more than $100,000. He showed me a whiteboard. There was a kind of leaderboard of who had scammed the most that month with each of their pseudonyms and their total scam amounts. He would even send me videos sometimes inside the compound.

[Interviewer]

What did those look like?

[Andy Greenberg]

Well, there was this brief period every day when he would like, get up in his dormitory and then walk around outside before he headed into his office to begin his 15 or 16 hour night shift. And during that time, we would sometimes speak on signal. He would pretend. He would call me uncle and pretend that I was his uncle back home if anybody overheard us. And we would check in that way every day. And then a couple of times he would say, okay, record your screen now. And then he would turn on his camera on signal and show me where he was and pretend to keep talking to me, but actually be filming his surroundings. It's not maybe what you would imagine. There were no, like barbed wire walls around it. He was not held in shackles. It was a collection of buildings inside this kind of strange city state that is the golden triangle. He could walk around freely between these buildings. He slept in this dorm. And he, you know, would walk into this kind of bare office building where he worked. He would show me the cafeteria where you could see like, you know, lines of these very depressed looking South Asian and African men who were all human trafficking victims lining up for food before their work shift began. And once he actually showed me the inside of his office where you could see, you know, rows of cubicles, you could see, in fact, flags on the desk of different worker groups that were colored based on how well they had succeeded at scamming that month, whether they were meeting their quotas.

[Interviewer]

So, I mean, you used the phrase human trafficking. Is it fair to call this slavery?

[Andy Greenberg]

I think it is a form of modern slavery, but what I would realize is that it's not. Doesn't take the form that you might expect. There are in fact crypto scam compounds where people are held in shackles and beaten every day. But this was modern slavery, too. I'm stealing a line here from a scam compound expert that I showed this to, but it was slavery pretending to be a corporation. Wow, Red Bull. Eventually, he would share with me lots of the communications, the internal communications of this scam compound, the ways that the bosses talked to workers. And you could see this bizarre Orwellian talk of like, let's all band together and meet our goals and we'll leave this place with our head held high and go home rich and, you know, fulfill our mission. It's not, you shall meet your quota. You need to do this many scams a day or you will be beaten. It's sort of like capitalism on steroids with this illusion that of actually making a profit, of winning along with the bosses. But that is fully an illusion. Red Bull was held in debt, essentially. They told him that he owed a certain amount of money to the company, essentially, and that he would have to earn it back.

[Interviewer]

Why did he owe the money?

[Andy Greenberg]

Well, I don't think that there was any legitimate reason. There was this kind of explanation of like, well, we paid for you to start work here. We're paying for your room and board, so you owe us. Of course, none of this was his choice. And this idea that he would be able to pay off that sum through enough scam was also a kind of illusion. Everybody there was held in absolute poverty to the degree that they completely depended on the cafeteria, even for subsistence, and even the food in the cafeteria, which Red Bull described to me as often tasting like strange chemicals, even that would be withheld if you broke any rules, as simple as, like, showing up late for a work shift or not going to sleep at lights out at exactly the right time in the dormitory.

[Interviewer]

Describe for our listeners what exactly these victims were trained to do and how did they do it? What was the strategy and protocol these folks were following to get to that?

[Andy Greenberg]

Well, some of the materials that Red Bullet shared with me were dozens of scripts and guides to scamming. You know, they would spend almost all of their time just spamming out these initial contact messages to people on Facebook or Instagram. They spent a lot of time, as well, kind of polishing and honing the fake profiles that they would create for these, you know, fake wealthy female Personas. And then once they did hook someone, they had these very detailed scripts of, like, how to continue the conversation, how to build trust, how to make people feel close to you, how to share your own personal stories, kind of like lists of, like, a hundred topics of conversation, 100 anecdotes that you can share from your life or your day. You know, how to, like, build from kind of trivial conversation to deeper and more intimate subjects. And then finally, you know, how to actually, you know, slaughter the pig in this pig butchering scam.

[Interviewer]

Stop right there and tell me what that would look like, the slaughtering of the pig.

[Andy Greenberg]

Well, there, of course, is this kind of moment when you want to get them onto a fake trading platform. But before you even do that, these guides, for instance, will recommend that you mention, I tried to make a transaction from my bank account to a crypto platform. And you know what? My bank actually warned me that it was a scam, and they froze the transaction. And by mentioning that, by kind of of like, preparing the victim in this way, the idea is that when they get that warning, they'll have been trained to ignore it and be ready to actually send that money. It's a kind of very careful preparation of the victim over long periods of time. And most of these scammer teams, in fact, were not meeting their quotas, were really bad at this, were not actually pulling off these hundreds of thousands of dollars in scams. But a few were. And the bosses would share the transcripts of successful scams, very often ones that they pulled off themselves as kind of models of the scams that they are performing.

[Interviewer]

So while he's feeding you all of this information, hoping that you'll help expose this, he's also, at a certain point, trying to escape himself. What does he tell you about his plan to escape or his efforts to escape?

[Andy Greenberg]

Well, initially, he didn't want to escape. He actually wanted to stay inside, to be the perfect source and to expose this place. He said to me things like, I don't care if I live or die, as long as I can expose this place and shut it down. And I would say to him, like, I care if you live or die also. We are not gonna shut this place down. Let's be clear about, like, we're going to expose it. We're going to, you know, make clear to the world how these places operate. But, you know, I can't promise you that I will be able to shut this place down. But his own safety was not his first priority. Nor was. It was only really when I said to him, like, okay, I think you've taken enough risks. You've sent me enough stuff. My editors at Wired were even, like, saying to me, like, they were very nervous about this process.

[Interviewer]

Why were your editors nervous?

[Andy Greenberg]

Well, you know, I've left out the part where Red Bull asked me to help him get a hidden camera, a button camera, for instance, to wear. To wear a hidden microphone, like a wire, a watch that could record his surroundings.

[Interviewer]

He wanted you to send him a mic to wire himself?

[Andy Greenberg]

Yes. I mean, his appetite for risk was enormous. He wanted to install spyware on his boss's computer. And I had to research all of these things and determine one by one that they were way too risky, that they would probably get him killed. And there was no. We didn't have any illusion about the fact that if he were caught, he probably would be killed.

[Interviewer]

Well, I'm also guessing that your editors are concerned about you blurring the line between journalist and humanitarian aid agent. What is your job in this kind of scenario?

[Andy Greenberg]

Well, in fact, there were moments when Red Bull would mention to me too, that he pay his way out. You could essentially pay off your debt, pay a ransom, and be released. There was several thousand dollars. And that to me was like, that's not that much money for a man's life. I thought we could just do this for him. But of course, my second thought is, you can't reward a human trafficking operation. You can't pay a source. Even in journalism, that's a violation of journalistic ethics. And especially when you're paying that money to criminals and rewarding them essentially for kidnapping someone. So sadly, you know, we could not pay that. And he. When I said this to him, Red Bull was very clear. Like, I never asked you to. But it did really raise this question of, like, where are the boundaries here? How can we help this guy without violating that journalist source relationship?

[Interviewer]

What did you think the boundary was in the midst of it?

[Andy Greenberg]

I always wanted to do more for him, but I also knew that he was risking his life to achieve this act of whistleblowing. And I didn't wanna corrupt that by paying him. He never asked me to. I should be clear, but I should say too, you know, we're getting onto this subject. I feel like I need to address, like, another thing that was in the back of my mind the whole time, which was this suspicion that maybe he was scamming me.

[Sam Sanders]

So stop right there.

[Interviewer]

This is a pretty big turning point in your piece. In the midst of communicating with this guy for a while, at a certain point, you start to question whether or not he's scamming you. When did you first have that aha moment?

[Andy Greenberg]

Well, it was when he mentioned the fact that he could pay his way out. Then I started to wonder, like, is this a kind of pig butchering romance scam where it's a romance between a journalist and a source and we build a relationship? I come to feel like I owe him something for the incredible risks that he's taking. And then he asked me to pay a few thousand dollars to get him out. Maybe that's the end game of the scam. For all I knew, I didn't believe that was the case. I kind of had like the 60, 40 probability in my mind. Like I thought he was a legitimate source, but I had to consider that suspicion, that possibility that I was being scammed too. So I couldn't pay him. I couldn't pay his way out. But I thought, you know, I can at least connect him with people. Maybe other groups would be will even to pay his ransom and get him out. I wanted to do everything I could to help him. So I connected him with scam compound experts with a kind of activist group that had dealt with political refugees in the region who had to escape in their own ways. And I thought, maybe this will help. But I have to say, they also worried that he might be a scammer.

[Interviewer]

Really?

[Andy Greenberg]

That he might be scamming them.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, yeah. And then eventually he tries to escape. What happens there?

[Andy Greenberg]

Right. So he had this plan. He was going to forge an Indian police document. The police, like, you know, from back home in India. He was going to pretend that they were investigating him and had visited his family, and that if he didn't go home to India to address this, to talk to the cops, then it would create problems not just for him, but for the whole scam compound. So he was gonna show this letter to his bosses and ask them to let him go home, just temporarily. Was the. And I told him, like, I don't think this is gonna work. I think they're gonna detect it. It's a forgery. But he has a big appetite for risk, as I said. And he just went ahead with it. And the next thing that I heard from him was probably one of the worst emails I've gotten in my life. And I can read it for you. Yes, the email read. The people catch me and they get my phone, everything. They beat me, and now maybe they kill me.

[Sam Sanders]

Wow.

[Interviewer]

How did you feel?

[Andy Greenberg]

My mind really went, like, blank, almost with panic. I had been trying to work with this guy and help him protect himself for weeks at that point, and now this was, like, the nightmare scenario. He had tried to escape and I would later learn was now being held in a room where he was beaten and starved, drugged, questions, and, you know, I thought he might die in there.

[Interviewer]

Did you, in that moment, regret not doing something more or doing things differently for him?

[Andy Greenberg]

Well, absolutely. I mean, I felt incredible guilt that, like, I had not been able to do more for him. I felt like I had tried everything I could within the boundaries of journalism, by the way. Like, his bosses had not detected that he was in contact with me. They never, as far as I know, found out that he was speaking to a journalist. They were punishing him for trying to escape. And I went into full on, kind of like remote rescue mode, which is not my expertise or my job. But I was, like, trying to find people in the area who could help him, who could advise him. He was given back his phone so that he could find someone to pay his ransom. He was essentially now just being held ransom inside the compound by his Bosses and threatened, like, if you don't find someone to pay for your freedom, we're just gonna kill you, is what seemed to be the situation now. But still, I have to say, this actually was the kind of peak moment of also fearing that he might be scamming me, because now I knew that somebody needed to pay his ransom to save his life. And maybe this all along had been the end game of him scamming me. What if this was all part of the scam? That he would pretend to be caught by his bosses, tell me that I needed to pay thousands of dollars to save his life. And even again, the people who I put him in touch with, the human rights activists and other folks who I thought might be able to help escape, they thought still that this might be a scam.

[Interviewer]

So today, now talking to me, have you answered that question? Was this a scam or not?

[Andy Greenberg]

Absolutely it was not a scam. Unfortunately, this nightmare was entirely real. Red Bull was real. The whistleblowing was real. He is a fully legitimate source. His motivations were nothing but pure in his intention to expose this place.

[Interviewer]

How did he get up?

[Andy Greenberg]

So for weeks, in fact, he was held in that room and starved and beaten. He was fed, like, only sometimes, like spoiled leftovers. His bosses came to treat him almost like a dog. He slept on the floor. He was told to get back to work sometimes, but mostly he was just held as a kind of captive. Then, in another kind of twist in the story, the bosses get a tip that there's going to be a police raid on the compound because they have, you know, their own sources inside the Laotian police. So they move the whole operation to another building for a while. They even have to work out of their dormitories. Everybody's very cramped. Their kind of scamming work is disrupted. They're not pulling in revenue like they usually are. The bosses are scrambling and trying to evade this raid. And it was during this time that Red Bull said to his bosses, essentially, look, I can tell that you. You don't have enough space for everyone. I'm just dead weight here. Like, I can't find anyone in the world, as you can tell, who will pay my ransom, so please just let me go. And they do. I don't know. I was a bit surprised, but they did. They kicked him out. Essentially. They told him to get lost. He said, okay, then please just let me get my things from my dorm room. They didn't even let him do that. They didn't let him get his shoes. He had to travel across five Countries in a pair of flip flops.

[Interviewer]

Wow.

[Andy Greenberg]

But he got home okay.

[Interviewer]

I know you can't reveal exactly where he is, but to the extent of your knowledge, is he okay?

[Andy Greenberg]

Well, okay is a relative term. He got out. You know, he is free, and that's huge. There were times when I really was terrified that he was gonna die inside that room, inside the compound. He made it out, but he is traumatized and has survivor's guilt. I didn't say this, but there was a moment too, in his darkest hours of thinking he might die in the compound, that he confessed to me that he had scammed two people, one for just $500, one for $11,000. And he has enormous guilt about that too. He is a very depressed and traumatized person.

[Interviewer]

Yeah. You've told us this riveting story. You and Wired published this massive expose revealing the extent to which these scams are putting a lot of people into modern day slavery and human trafficking. If everyone knows this is happening, how does it keep happening? Why has no one stopped this?

[Andy Greenberg]

For years, I've just been baffled that US Law enforcement hasn't taken this more seriously on behalf of just like American victims losing their life savings to these scammers. I think that there was this kind of a terrible approach from law enforcement, like, well, you know, you fell for the scam, you sent them the money, they didn't steal it, or something like that. There was this kind of victim blaming mentality, like, this is not the most serious form of cybercrime, when in fact it clearly is in terms of the sheer number of American Western lives that it's ruining. But now we are starting to see the US Government pay attention to this problem. We see like a focus on protecting Americans from scammers. There was just last week a hearing in the Senate about this where the FBI and other law enforcement were kind of held to account about what are you doing to address this problem? We're seeing task forces set up at the highest levels. What we are not seeing, I think still is a recognition of the victims on the other side of this crime. The human trafficking that is happening at an enormous scale.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, I think most Americans, at least when they are confronted with the beginnings of this kind of pig butchering scam, their only thought is themselves and how to navigate it. It's really hard for people, I think, to imagine that the scam coming at them is attached to a real person who is suffering.

[Andy Greenberg]

Well, I do think that there has to be a recognition that the scammer on the other side is a Victim, too. In many cases, it's very difficult for, you know, Western victims of scams to know that for sure. Like, there are some scammers who are doing it fully, voluntarily and profiting themselves. But in many cases, that scammer is a victim. We see lots of people trying to, like, you know, engage with scammers, to waste their time to.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, I've done that before myself, and now I feel guilty. I feel guilty having done that.

[Andy Greenberg]

Sadly, I do think it's very often really counterproductive because those people are victims, sometimes to an even greater degree than the victim of the scam. You know, they're somebody who's being held in a system of modern slavery. What I think the larger point I would want to make, this is not a message for the scamming victims, but for the American government, for law enforcement, is that this is what happens. If you take this approach of only trying to protect people from scams, but you don't care about the hundreds of thousands of people who are victims of human trafficking across South Asia and Africa being pulled into Southeast Asia. If you treat all of that as somebody else's problem, then this giant money funnel stealing from Americans, bankrupting an entire generation of Americans, that will persist. You need to think about it internationally. You need to think about the victims in those other countries as well.

[Interviewer]

Do authorities around the Golden Triangle have the desire and capacity to stop some of this themselves?

[Andy Greenberg]

It's very hard to say. Like, we see raids like the one I mentioned that targeted the compound that Red Bull was in, but they're very often kind of performative raids. It turns out even that one that his bosses were evading was kind of a catch and release raid where, like, other compounds got hit and people were rounded up, but then released immediately to continue scamming. There's so much corruption in this area that a lot of the raids and crackdowns are fake, and it's very hard to tell the difference.

[Interviewer]

What is the biggest way that reporting this story changed how you handle communication, potential scams, all of this stuff? The biggest way this story changed you?

[Andy Greenberg]

I'm a cybersecurity reporter. I feel like I'm pretty skeptical. I'm pretty aware of scams, as you could tell. I was skeptical even of Red Bull at times. But what it really drove home for me is, and this is not a surprise to anybody, but. But what the wealth disparity of the world truly feels like. I was on my roof playing with my kids in my privileged American life, and then this guy reaches out to me who I would then spend months and still, I'm still texting with him every day, who is in such a different universe, such a different experience of life, impoverished from childhood. And even the one kind of opportunity that he thought that he'd found in the world turned out to be the opposite, to be a trap that held him in slavery. And he's one of hundreds of thousands of people. The world is a darker place than I maybe had felt. You know, I think we all know that intellectually, but the number of people living lives of abject poverty and in fact, captivity, it really hits home when you are in a daily relationship across the world with somebody feeling that.

[Interviewer]

Yeah. Did you ever meet him, get his real name?

[Andy Greenberg]

Yes, when he got out and got home to India, I did fly there and meet him. I shouldn't say where I met him, but I met him face to face. And by that point, I didn't have any doubt that he. I didn't think he was a scammer. I think I dispelled all those doubts when he continued, in fact, to send me incredibly valuable material even after he escaped. Like, when there was no sense that I would ever. I never paid him anything. Wired never paid him. I was not going to pay him. And yet he continued to act as a whistleblower and sent me, you know, really good, important documents, materials, things he'd smuggled out of the compound. But when I met him face to face, that was still another level of, oh, I see. Like, this is a real person that I've been communicating with all this time. And, you know, he also told me his real name at that point, which is Muhammad Muzahir, and allowed me to use it in the story and let us, in fact, show his face in pictures and in a video that we made to accompany this story. Because Muhammad, I can call him Mohammed now, not Red Bull, wants his story told. He doesn't just want to expose the materials of this compound, but he understood the value of telling his personal story with his name and face attached to it, with all the risks that entails. Like, I still worry every day that the Chinese mafia is going to find him and try to retaliate somehow, which is part of why we can't talk about where he is. But Muhammad is probably the bravest source I've ever worked with, and he understood that his story might inspire other people to come forward, and that's what he wants.

[Interviewer]

Well, thanks to Muhammad, I mean, incredible bravery and incredible bravery on your part to really see this story through.

[Andy Greenberg]

Thank you, Sam.

[Sam Sanders]

We'll include a link to Andy Greenberg's reporting for Wired on our Show Notes page. And every weekend you can find new episodes of Apple News in conversation in the Apple News app. Just tap on the Audio tab, the little headphones at the bottom, to find.