The secret world behind those scammy text messages

Summary

Planet Money: The Secret World Behind Those Scammy Text Messages

Episode Release Date: May 23, 2025
Host: NPR's Planet Money | Guests: PJ Vogt, Zeke Fox

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Introduction: The Mysterious Scam Texts

In the latest episode of Planet Money, host Alexi Horowitz Ghazi delves into the enigmatic world of scammy text messages that flood our phones. These unsolicited texts often appear benign or misleading, sparking curiosity and, in some cases, leading recipients down a dark path of financial deception and human trafficking.

Notable Quote:
"These days it can feel impossible to go more than a week or two without some bizarre text from a stranger. But what is actually happening on the other side of that text bubble?"
— Alexi Horowitz Ghazi [02:28]

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Engaging with Scammers: PJ Vogt and Zeke Fox's Experiment

PJ Vogt, known for his podcast Search Engine, teams up with investigative journalist Zeke Fox to explore what happens when someone engages with these seemingly scammy texts. Their journey begins when PJ receives a text from "Vicki Ho," prompting him to investigate the scamming process firsthand.

Notable Quote:
"Zeke is the guy at the fancy business publication who is only really happy when he's investigating scams."
— PJ Vogt [02:51]

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The Mechanics of the 'Pig Butchering' Scam

Zeke Fox introduces the concept of "pig butchering" scams—elaborate schemes where scammers cultivate relationships with victims, enticing them to invest in fraudulent opportunities until they are financially drained.

Notable Quotes:
"The idea is that you need to fatten up the victim like a pig with fake romance or even with [financial schemes]."
— Alexi Horowitz Ghazi [04:11]

"The moment you write back, you get pushed up to someone who is more of, like, the closer."
— Zeke Fox [18:25]

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Cryptocurrency: The Digital Backbone of Modern Scams

Central to these scams is cryptocurrency, particularly Tether (USDT), a stablecoin pegged to the US dollar. Scammers leverage the perceived stability and anonymity of cryptocurrencies to facilitate and obscure their illicit activities.

Notable Quotes:
"USDT is always supposed to be worth $1 yes. Because I was sort of wondering, all the cryptos would probably be pretty good for Vicky's purposes."
— Alexi Horowitz Ghazi [10:08]

"A study from the University of Texas estimates that between 2020 and 2024, pig butchering scammers have likely stolen more than $75 billion internationally."
— Zeke Fox [32:49]

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Unveiling the Scam Compounds in Cambodia

As the investigation deepens, Zeke and PJ uncover a network of scam compounds in Sihanoukville, Cambodia. These facilities function as modern-day prisons where trafficked individuals are coerced into running sophisticated scam operations under brutal conditions.

Notable Quotes:
"The worst stories. [...] People being tortured, people being cut off. Hand, finger, leg. Liquid shock."
— Alexi Horowitz Ghazi [26:11]

"These scammers are actually,... they had been human trafficked into a place and then basically locked in a compound and forced to scam people."
— Zeke Fox [17:03]

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On-the-Ground Investigation: Inside Sihanoukville's Chinatown

Zeke Fox travels to Sihanoukville to witness firsthand the conditions within the scam compounds. He describes a landscape marred by abandoned casinos and dilapidated buildings, contrasting sharply with deceptive facades meant to appear legitimate.

Notable Quotes:
"Chinatown is outside the city center. It's like maybe a 15 minute drive from town. And there's a big avenue that runs through the middle of it."
— Alexi Horowitz Ghazi [26:26]

"The only way to leave is if you pay a ransom of, like, anywhere from, like, five to 30 grand."
— Alexi Horowitz Ghazi [09:53]

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The Human Toll: Lives Entrapped by Scams

The episode highlights the human suffering behind these scams, revealing that many workers in the compounds were initially seeking legitimate employment but ended up trapped in a cycle of exploitation and violence.

Notable Quotes:
"Some of them might sort of know they're getting into scamming, but they don't realize that they will be stuck there or that they'll be abused."
— Zeke Fox [24:02]

"These compounds seem to be an evolution. In the beginning, some people likely were coming in voluntarily for jobs where they'd be paid to scam Americans and Chinese people."
— Alexi Horowitz Ghazi [24:13]

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Technological Evolution: The Rise of AI in Scamming

Zeke Fox also touches on the emerging trend of using artificial intelligence to automate scam operations, reducing reliance on trafficked individuals and increasing the efficiency of these illicit activities.

Notable Quote:
"The one new trend in the scamming industry these days, AI. Some of these scam bosses have figured out that a chatbot can do this work just as well as a trafficked human."
— Mekh Durra [34:06]

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Conclusion: A Call for Global Action

The episode concludes by emphasizing the vast scale of these scams and the intricate web of human trafficking that supports them. With an estimated $75 billion stolen internationally between 2020 and 2024, the need for coordinated global efforts, particularly from countries like China where many perpetrators are based, is critical.

Notable Quote:
"Most of the victims, both of the trafficking and the financial victims, are Chinese."
— Alexi Horowitz Ghazi [33:18]

"Without digital, very difficult to trace money. You don't have a scam that's able to get that baroque and organized and stay up for that long."
— Zeke Fox [32:42]

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Final Thoughts

Planet Money provides an eye-opening exploration into the dark nexus of scammy text messages, cryptocurrency, and human trafficking. Through meticulous investigation and firsthand accounts, the episode sheds light on the sophisticated and often brutal mechanisms that sustain these global scams, underscoring the urgent need for awareness and action.

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Transcript

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

This is Planet Money from npr.

[PJ Vogt]

A couple years ago, my friend PJ Vogt started getting these weird text messages on his phone. You know the ones, they come from some number you've never seen before. And they ask you some out of context question, are we on for dinner today?

[Zeke Fox]

Are you still in Boston? If you answer and tell them it's the wrong number, they'll try to engage you in conversation. It feels like a scam, but the actual scam part never seems to materialize.

[PJ Vogt]

PJ is the host of one of my favorite podcasts. It's called Search Engine. Each week they answer a different question. Some of them are big and existential, some are tiny and hilariously specific. And with these texts, PJ got curious about what happens when you do keep these scammy seeming conversations going. When you do start to follow the crumbs, one of these texters starts leaving you. So he called up another journalist who'd also gotten obsessed with figuring out this mystery. Like who was on the other side of these messages and how were they making their money?

[Zeke Fox]

Okay, August 2022, you get a text message from a woman named Vicki Ho. What did Vicki Ho want?

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

So Vicki said to me, hi, David, I'm Vicki Ho. Don't you remember me? And this is kind of weird because my name is Zeke.

[PJ Vogt]

Zeke Fox, author of the book Number Go Up Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall. You may remember him from our episode on the explosion in meme coins.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

I wanted to get scammed, so I was like, I want to see how this scam works. So I wanted to give her what she was looking for.

[PJ Vogt]

Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Alexi Horowitz. Ghazi. These days it can feel impossible to go more than a week or two without some bizarre text from a stranger. But what is actually happening on the other side of that text bubble? Today on the show, we're going to hand that question off to search engine host PJ Vogt and his guest, Zeke Fox. Take us down the sinister rabbit hole Zeke found when he raised his hand to get scammed.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

This message comes from NPR sponsor Acura. The all new Acura ADX is a compact SUV built for versatility. Available all wheel drive for weekend escapes. Google built in for seamless connectivity as well as a Bang and Olufsen premium sound system for high quality audio. The all new Acura ADX is crafted to match your energy. Visit acura.com ADX to learn more. Google is a trademark of Google LLC. This message is from Synchrony bank who wants to remind you to stay flexible. Not the yoga bending circus performing kind of flexible, financially flexible, like with their high yield savings account.

[Zeke Fox]

Stay [e-mail] NPR member, FDIC. Zeke is an unusual person. He writes for Bloomberg Businessweek. But instead of doing what I would think he's supposed to do there, which is write about how a successful company has an IPO or something, Zeke is the guy at the fancy business publication who is only really happy when he's investigating scams. And this particular text message he'd gotten from one Vicky Ho. He wanted to play along and experience the scam because he'd heard that these wrong number texts might be somehow connected to a cryptocurrency that he's obsessed with. A cryptocurrency called Tether.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

There's this one leaked text message from a Russian money launderer who got arrested by the FBI. He's texting a customer and he's being like, you should use Tether. It's convenient, it's quick. And I'm like, okay, this is how the criminals are talking about tether.

[Zeke Fox]

Yes.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

But I don't know any Russian money launderers, but I hear that among the criminals who use Tether are these pig butchering scammers. Now, I do know one pig butchering scammer, Vicky Ho.

[Zeke Fox]

Right.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

Will she ask me to use tether?

[Zeke Fox]

Yes. Okay. And also. Wait, sorry, I should just ask you. You refer to these scams as pig butchering scams. You just explain that term.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

Yes. The idea is that you need to fatten up the victim like a pig with fake romance or even with. Once you get them to invest in your scams, maybe even let them withdraw a thousand bucks or 5,000 bucks. But meanwhile, you, the scammer, are sizing up just how much money this person has, how much you can take them for. And once they send in the maximum you think you're gonna get, which in some cases is millions of dollars, you cut off their head, you take it all, you disappear.

[Zeke Fox]

Okay? So you, you decide you were going to intentionally fall for the scam. So you, you start engaging with her. How does the conversation play out? How does the scam play out?

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

Okay, so I wrote to her. Nice to meet you. My name is Zeke Fox. I live in Brooklyn. Vicki said you have a very cool name. I'm 32 years old and a divorced woman, and she sent me a picture. She looked like a very attractive young woman with like a heavily face. Tuned face.

[Zeke Fox]

Yep.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

And I thought, all right, we're on the path to getting scammed. But, like, every day, she. I'd wake up and there'd be messages from Vicky. She'd say, like, good morning. How did you sleep, my dear? And she did try to flirt a little bit. Nothing like dirty.

[Zeke Fox]

Okay.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

Now, she wasn't that good at this whole thing. Like, I had already said I was from Brooklyn, and then she said she lived in New York. Why would. Big mistake.

[Zeke Fox]

Right? Because if she says she's somewhere else, then she never has to meet you.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

She's sending me these pictures, and I could see in the background it's not New York.

[Zeke Fox]

Zeke finds himself getting increasingly more impatient.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

She was not getting to any sort of scamming. And I would say, what are you up to? And she would list, like, a number of conspicuously expensive hobbies.

[Zeke Fox]

Like, what was Vicky up to? Like, what types of things was she doing?

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

Well, she'd be like, today I'm gonna go golfing and then drive my Ferrari. I think she said she owned a chain of nail salons. But then she also had income from trading. And I was like, okay, cool. I want to hear more about that.

[Zeke Fox]

You're starting to feel like the tug of the fishing line.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

Yeah, it's. And then she said at one point she liked to analyze cryptocurrency market trends. So I'm like, oh, crypto. I'm sort of curious about that. Tell me more.

[Zeke Fox]

Yeah.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

And so eventually she starts telling me about something she calls short term node trading.

[Zeke Fox]

Short term node trading?

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

Yeah. She's sending me these price charts, and she's basically saying that she can predict fluctuations in the price of Bitcoin.

[Zeke Fox]

And.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

And she starts in between the Golf and Ferraris, she'll be like, I see an opportunity in the bitcoin market.

[Zeke Fox]

And is short term. I'm not a financial journalist. Is short term node trading a thing in some other context, or is it just a bunch of words that sound mathy and sciencey?

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

No. Yeah. It's total nonsense.

[Zeke Fox]

Okay.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

But it sounds kind of equally plausible as, like, all the other random jargon in the crypto world, like evm, arbitrage. That's a real thing.

[Zeke Fox]

That's a real thing.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

Short term node trading. That's a big thing.

[Zeke Fox]

But they're close.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

Yeah. And one morning, I get yet another text that says, love, did you sleep well last night? And I'm like, I've got to get Vicky to scam me. What am I going to do? And so I'm like, vicky needs to know that I have money and that I have financial Goals. She needs to know that, like, I'm ready to spend.

[Zeke Fox]

Yeah.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

So I sent her a picture of a gullwing Tesla that I want. And I was like, vicky, I need money to buy this Tesla. And Vicki said, I see the price is $142,200. As long as you like this money is nothing.

[Zeke Fox]

As long as you like this Tesla, money is nothing.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

Yeah. So she told me that tomorrow we could do it. We could do the trading.

[Zeke Fox]

Vicky ho told Zeke, her fattened pig, what he had to do. He needed to go home and download a very sketchy looking app for his iPhone. Zeke was delighted.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

Once we get into it, she sends me a link to download an app that's called zbxs.

[Zeke Fox]

Zbxs.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

And this is like an iPhone app, kind of. You have to sideload it. Okay.

[Zeke Fox]

It's like, not allowed in the Apple Store, but it can be in a dodgy way put onto an iPhone.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

Let me tell you, it was not easy to install ZB xs. You have to be pretty. This is why she had to butter me up for a week.

[Zeke Fox]

Oh.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

Because, like, these instructions to get this bootleg app on your phone are not simple.

[Zeke Fox]

Okay.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

Like, my mom, I don't think would ever be able to install ZB xs.

[Zeke Fox]

Did you have to jailbreak your phone?

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

No, but it was just like, you had to adjust something in the settings that seemed very clearly designed to protect.

[Zeke Fox]

You from things like this.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

Yes. It was clear it was a bad idea. And you open up the app and it says it's a new and safe stable trading market. And it's got a lot of, like, price symbols. And it looks kind of like a bad crypto trading app.

[Zeke Fox]

Okay.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

But one thing that was promising is that all the prices are quoted in terms of tether. So first she tells me to download crypto.com. i say yes. The exchange of my friend Matt Damon. Then I learned that crypto.com is illegal in New York and it won't work for me.

[Zeke Fox]

Okay.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

So, like, Vicky probably should have researched that.

[Zeke Fox]

Yeah. As a New Yorker.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

Yeah. Then she suggests I use one called Trust Wallet. And this is where the good message comes. I'm like, what should I buy in Trust Wallet? I've downloaded it. And she says, find USDT to buy. That's tether.

[Zeke Fox]

Yeah.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

Because USDT is not affected by any rise or fall in the currency market.

[Zeke Fox]

Which is true, actually. It's pegged to the dollar.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

Yes. It's a stable coin. Each tether is always supposed to be worth $1 yes. Because I was sort of wondering. All the cryptos would probably be pretty good for Vicky's purposes.

[Zeke Fox]

Yeah.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

Why tether? This is why. It's part of the sales pitch that she's like, oh, it's always worth a dollar. Don't worry about it. So one of the funny things I always learned in investigating crypto is that in theory, there's no fees, but there's always lots of fees. They always hit you with some fees. And in order to buy Tether the way that Vicky suggested, I have to pay$105.86 for 93 tethers. So I'm paying $12 in fees.

[Zeke Fox]

Yes.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

I don't know why Vicky says it doesn't matter. We're going to make so much money.

[Zeke Fox]

On the nodes, you're going to be buying a Tesla. Okay, so just to recap, because I fear this may be getting a little bit confusing, Vicki told zeke to spend 100 real dollars on $100 worth of the cryptocurrency tether. And then she told him to transfer that crypto into a wallet, a crypto bank account on the Internet. Vicki was saying to Zeke that this wallet belonged to a crypto trading app called zbxs. More likely, the money was just going directly to the entity behind Vicki Ho. Zeke, meanwhile, was dutifully following all of these instructions so that he could learn as much about the entity as possible.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

I tell her I'm nervous, and she said, it's okay. I was nervous when I first traded too. You have to relax. It's not too complicated. Then she says, get ready. We have to be ready by 4:30. You have to make sure you have 500 tethers in ZBXs by then. And at this point, I might have been busy that day. Also, like my budget for losing money to Vicky Ho was more like $100. I didn't really want to lose 500. So I was. I was sort of hesitating and she starts calling me, asking me to send the 500.

[Zeke Fox]

Okay. Jake, what are you doing? I see you got my message. Why you not reply to me better? Why you don't pick up my phone? I'm waiting for you. Reply me. Okay.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

I don't know why. I did sort of stick to the truth in my communications with her. A lot of them. So I said I had to take my daughter to the doctor. She said, well, the child's body is important.

[Zeke Fox]

Child's body is important, yeah.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

She asks, has your daughter's health improved? She suggests that I maybe do some Trades so I could get money to buy my daughter a gift.

[Zeke Fox]

In this moment, when the person claiming to be Vicki Ho was telling Zeke to send her more money so that he could buy his ailing daughter a gift, things had gone as far as were really useful for Zeke. He actually had what he needed from this scammer posing as Vicki Ho. Cryptocurrency is traceable. When crypto is sent from one person to another, it usually leaves a public trail, which meant Zeke could look at the wallet where he'd sent his 100 bucks and see all of its other transactions. The money in, the money out. And when he looked, he saw vast sums of money flowing from suckers like him in the west to this address where it would sit for a moment and then move on to Asian crypto exchanges, presumably to be cashed out by the scammers, do you have a sense of. Of how do people come to lose, like, millions of dollars in this?

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

These scammers are often not any more convincing than Vicky was with me.

[Zeke Fox]

Yeah.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

But one thing a lot of the people have in common is that they've hit some sort of desperate circumstance in their life. Like they have a terminal illness or they've just lost a loved one, or it's the pandemic and they're unemployed and they've had to move in with their parents. And a lot of people, if you're at least middle aged, have access to some amount of money, you could max out your credit card even if you're broke.

[Zeke Fox]

Yeah. There's weirdly something exciting about knowing that this door that you're dancing in front of, some people have walked through to complete ruin. Like, you're talking to someone who is trying to push you into a process where they will take all of your money and all the money you have access to. And that's, like, a dangerous thing. But they're also doing it in such a clumsy way that you can, like, have fun with it, I guess.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

Yeah. Although once you know what's really going on on the other end of the text messages, it becomes not fun at all. And I started to wonder if Vicky might be punished for her failure to scam me. And I just. I realized that it was time to come clean.

[PJ Vogt]

After the break, Zeke and PJ start digging into how much trouble Vicki might actually be in and discover a whole web of human trafficking and scam compounds on the other end of the text bubble. More from the search engine podcast when we come back. So for Zeke, what started out as a fun side reporting project of getting Scammed starts to feel a little icky. Like, what if pretending he's going to hand over all this money and then not doing it ends up getting the person on the other end of the text bubble in big trouble. So he goes searching for someone who knows what might be happening over there, and he finds this group of volunteers who call themselves the global anti Scam organization. He ends up talking to a guy known as Ice Toad. And he handed off Ice Toad's contact information to search engine host pjvote.

[Zeke Fox]

I actually talked to Ice Toad. He told me that like many people who end up in this world, he arrived because he got scammed himself. The trick he fell for, it used to be called a romance scam. At some point, those romance scams evolved into what we now know to be pig butchering scams, otherwise known as Xiaojiang pen in Chinese. Ice Toad finds the global anti scam organization, which was started by a woman from Singapore who had also been scammed. But while the organization began in an effort to protect people being scammed, its members had started to learn about the scammers themselves. Because we realized that these scammers were actually, in a lot of instances, they weren't choosing to scam other people. They had been human trafficked into a place and then basically locked in a compound and forced to scam people. How did you begin to understand that? We got a few of them to admit the fact that they. They couldn't escape, and they would tell you what was actually going on in hopes that you would ring up law enforcement or whoever and get them, get them freed. When Zeke finally found Ice Toad, what he'd originally wanted was just help from a crypto tracing expert who might be able to follow the hundred dollars he'd sent Vicky Ho further and more forensically than he could on his own.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

Ice Toad is explaining to me how he can trace the crypto wallets, and he's like, I've personally seen hundreds of millions of dollars of tether move because of these scams.

[Zeke Fox]

Oh, wow.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

And I'm. I'm kind of thinking there might be some way to locate Vicky. Maybe not Vicky herself, but like, Ice Toad is like, you know, who you should really talk to is this Vietnamese hacker.

[Zeke Fox]

The Vietnamese hacker helped Zeke crack into the fake crypto trading app that Vicky Ho had given him. Although whoever was behind the app quickly shut down the whole operation when they realized that an intrusion was happening. But from that hacker and from other people Zeke spoke to, he was able to get a sense of what a day in the Life was like for someone in one of these scam compounds.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

What I've learned is that there's, like, a hierarchy within the compound, and the lowest level workers who've been trafficked, they got 10 phones. Each has, like, a different fake identity, and they're trolling the world, sending spam messages, sending messages on LinkedIn, on Instagram, on Tinder, whatever. And they've got, like, some sort of quota for how many calls they need to initiate.

[Zeke Fox]

Yeah.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

Once you've got somebody hooked, that person gets passed off to, like, a manager.

[Zeke Fox]

So almost like the moment you write back, you get pushed up to someone who is more of, like, the closer.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

Yeah. And it was actually Vicky. One hit me on text message.

[Zeke Fox]

Yeah.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

Once we chatted a bit, they moved me to WhatsApp.

[Zeke Fox]

Oh, interesting.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

And that's probably when a more skillful Vicky took over.

[Zeke Fox]

Right, right.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

And then the person who sent me those voice memos saying that they were Vicky.

[Zeke Fox]

Yeah.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

Presumably that's like, some poor female victim whose job is, like, recording all the voice memos.

[Zeke Fox]

I see.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

And then if you consistently don't meet your quota, they would sell you to another compound. The only way to leave is if you pay a ransom of, like, anywhere from, like, five to 30 grand. And I just. I realized that it was time to come clean. So I told her, I'm an investigative reporter, and I'm only talking to you because I wanted to figure out how this works. And I also said, I've heard bad things about the working conditions for people like you. And she wrote back and said, oh. Oh, it's not what you think. Her WhatsApp picture disappeared, and I never heard from her again.

[Zeke Fox]

Zeke had learned that many of these scam messages originated in Cambodia, and more specifically, from a single city, actually a single neighborhood there, a place called Chinatown in a beach town called Sihanoukville. Sihanoukville is a string of high rises along the water. It looks a little bit like a less glitzy Miami.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

I found a blog from, like, a kind of confused tourist who went on, like, a very detailed drive around Chinatown.

[Zeke Fox]

Hello, everybody, and welcome back.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

Today we're in Sunukville.

[Zeke Fox]

There's actually a ton of video blogs in this strange genre. European tourists careening around Chhanoukville with a camera on, unaware of what it is they're really filming. We are in Sahanockville. It seems like a very interesting place. We are in Sahukaville.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

In recent years, there was a huge casino development boom fueled by Chinese money. It's now got, like, 100 casinos.

[Zeke Fox]

This is another casino. Is that another casino? Yeah, it is Casino number seven.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

But Sihanoukville fell on hard times. Like, the skyline is completely unfinished. There's literally, like, thousands of unfinished buildings around Sihanoukville. Because this development boom just, like, stopped.

[Zeke Fox]

Just casinos and half built buildings. It doesn't make any sense.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

And the casinos, the ones that were built, had no customers coming in.

[Zeke Fox]

Right.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

So a lot of these casinos turned to scamming.

[Zeke Fox]

And, sorry, this vacation blogger. What did they report seeing on the ground floor?

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

A lot of the buildings have restaurants, barbershops, bodegas, all with signage in Chinese because, like, the intended customer is not Cambodian. But the stores are divided by metal bars in the middle because the workers might be going to the restaurant from inside the courtyard, and they don't want them going out to the street to escape.

[Zeke Fox]

Oh, so it's like a prison city almost.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

Yeah. And there's a police station right at the entrance to Chinatown. And the reports are, like, the police don't do anything. A lot of the local news, they're just. They're interviewing the people who, like, stand on the street and sell cigarettes or the guy who runs the bodega or whatever. People who aren't involved but who just live in the neighborhood. And one of these people said, if an ambulance doesn't come every week, it's a wonder.

[Zeke Fox]

Zeke's implication here is that the ambulances kept coming to the compounds because the people inside were being beaten badly enough, often enough that they frequently needed to be taken to the hospital. Zeke starts talking to local reporters in Cambodia who've been investigating these compounds. Danielle Keaton Olson and Mekh Durra. They both worked for a paper there called Voice of Democracy.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

They'd been writing these exposes about Sihanoukville, and in Chinatown, there were just like 40 or 50 buildings where, according to what they were saying, thousands of people were trapped there and forced to run these scams.

[Zeke Fox]

My name is Maddera. I'm from Cambodia, and I have been a reporter for more than 10 years. I talked to Dura over the world's glitchiest Internet connection. He was connecting from an Internet cafe in Phnom Penh, the city where he began his career as a reporter. I start writing about crime, and then I start to move into the human rights environment, politics. The way Dura first started to crack the scam compound story was when a Chinese friend brought him a group of people who'd just gotten out of one of the compounds. He brought me two or three or four people who have been, like, released from the compound. And I start to interview him. I start to learn what they do. As details emerged, he kept adjusting his picture of what life was like in there. More cruel, more brutal. He started hanging around outside the compounds, looking at how their exteriors were set up with barbed wire, with God, very street guard, you know, so he saw high security, barbed wire guards, People only allowed to enter or leave with a card. One of the questions I had about all this was just, why not just pay people to do this? Why hold them prisoner at all? What I learned is that these compounds seem to be an evolution. In the beginning, some people likely were coming in voluntarily for jobs where they'd be paid to scam Americans and Chinese people. Here's Zeke.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

Some of them might sort of know they're getting into scamming, but they don't realize that they will be stuck there or that they'll be abused.

[Zeke Fox]

And is it sort of like that? Similarly, like on the American side of it, the reason people fall for these scams is they're desperate. And, you know, something has happened in their lives that has thrown wrench into the gears. It sounds like for the people who end up being compelled to run these scams, it's similar. It's like their life hits a rough patch, and they try something risky that they might not have tried.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

Right. I mean, if someone told you, do you want to go work in customer service in Cambodia? Like, we'll give you $200 a month, that would hold no appeal for you, right? But yes, like, there are a class of people who can't find any jobs who are desperate for work. And when they see an ad on Facebook or something like that, they're like, I'll give it a try.

[Zeke Fox]

So Zeke says this may have started as a business without human trafficking, and some of these compounds may include willing workers, but the margins are thin here. It takes a lot of messages to find a sucker. And Dura told me that he talked to a boss from one of the compounds who described the financial pressure he feels he's under. One scammer, local scammer. He told me, like, we need to scam this month to get at least 1 million. If we don't get, we will go bankrupt. The boss was worried about going bankrupt, so the overbosses pushed the bosses under them, and the bosses push the people beneath, which in this environment, often means physical torture. People being tortured, people being cut out. Hand, finger, leg. Liquid shock.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

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

[Zeke Fox]

Zeke wanted to go to see these compounds in person for himself. He did not expect to get inside, but he wanted to see how close he could get. So he takes a bus from Vietnam to Cambodia. He meets up with the reporter Mech Dara, and they head to the neighborhood where all of these scam compounds are.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

Chinatown is outside the city center. It's like maybe a 15 minute drive from town. And there's a big avenue that runs through the middle of it. And on the right is this, like blue glass, X shaped unfinished casino. And on the left is two different groups of office towers. The first group, maybe a dozen buildings, could have held thousands of people. These ones, as we get there, they're clearly empty and the gates are open and we're able to walk into the courtyard. But if you keep going, you get to a second group of buildings that surround a hotel called the KB Hotel. People call Kaibo because it's next to this KB or Kaibo Hotel.

[Zeke Fox]

Okay.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

And it's another, like, 12 buildings that could have held a few thousand people.

[Zeke Fox]

This was the place that Zeke had heard so many rumors about. The place that the text message from Vicky Ho had drawn him to a boom town gone bust, half built that had turned into this. A string of nondescript buildings modified to become more like prisons.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

This whole area is weird because it's clearly built to be like a fancy casino. But all of the office towers that held the trafficked workers were super run down and dirty and totally out of place. But at the center of it, there's this KB hotel, which has this gold facade. It's like a pretty fancy looking hotel. Weirdly, though, like, it actually appeared to be open to the public.

[Zeke Fox]

The hotel?

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

Yes. And a small adjoining casino.

[Zeke Fox]

So did you try to just walk in?

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

Yes. I decided, yeah, I wanted to see what was going on in this hotel, But I'm out of my depth. I don't speak Chinese. It's hard for me to know what anything means. I had gone in by myself. I didn't bring a translator or anything.

[Zeke Fox]

Yeah. Zeke is a fantastic investigative reporter in print. He was not there in the field as an audio reporter, but he did record one 12 second clip inside the hotel, which he sent me.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

I like this music.

[Zeke Fox]

This is Chinese. I like this music. Zeke observes, this is Chinese music. The staff member helpfully points out, we.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

Saw no one anywhere. Like, the hotel's fully staffed, but, like, there are no ones.

[Zeke Fox]

But also completely empty.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

Yes. He showed me lots of different nice rooms, each of which had views of, like, the place where two of them.

[Zeke Fox]

Were being held against their will and beaten.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

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

[Zeke Fox]

So is your suspicion, like, obviously it's hard to prove, but the hotel was almost just like the base of operations for the people profiting from the compound.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

Yes. Like, the workers are not allowed to leave. So my thinking was that these are like, hires up who work at these compounds are connected to them somehow. And this is like their cafeteria. But again, I really have no idea what's going on.

[Zeke Fox]

Yeah.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

So one of the hostesses spoke English and so, like, came over to, you know, see if I needed anything. And I was like, what's with this place? Why is it so empty?

[Zeke Fox]

Yeah.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

What's with these dirty buildings next door?

[Zeke Fox]

Yeah.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

And she said it only opened to the public a couple months ago, I. E. After the raids.

[Zeke Fox]

Oh.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

And she said that before that only people who worked in the buildings had been allowed to come to the hotel. And I'm like, why is there all these armed guards? And she says, this is Chinatown, don't you know? And I'm like, no, I don't know. And she's like, the people inside, they can't go outside.

[Zeke Fox]

Oh, wow. She just said it.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

And then I made like a horrible face, I think. And she tried to reassure me and she's like, don't worry. The staff here, we have our freedom. And I was just like, oh, no. I just thought like, this is horrible. And Dara and our driver picked me up.

[Zeke Fox]

Yeah.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

And we're driving out of Chinatown and right by the police station. On your way out of Chinatown, I see a closed currency exchange and the signs have been taken down, but you can still sort of see the shadows of, like, the letters that they had on the facade.

[Zeke Fox]

Yeah.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

And it's usdt. And it's advertising that they will, like, trade tether for cash.

[Zeke Fox]

God. So for you, it's like you see all that misery. So many things have to happen to create that situation. But what you see undergirding it is tether. Like this cryptocurrency that you had originally been curious about like that. I mean, if it weren't tether, it might be a different form of crypto, but that without digital, very difficult to trace money. You don't have a scam that's able to get that baroque and organized and stay up for that long. That in a world where, you know, you had the same authoritarian regime and you had people wanting to make money and human misery, that just the money trail of banking would mean that it was easier for even, like other countries to prosecute this.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

Yes. But I will say, in recent months, this has become like a bigger issue among government.

[Zeke Fox]

A study from the University of Texas estimates that between 2020 and 2024, pig butchering scammers have likely stolen more than $75 billion internationally. Even though it is, in many cases Americans falling for these scams, it's not entirely clear what the American government could do about them. Zeke believes that the problem it may actually be solved in China.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

Most of the victims, both of the trafficking and the financial victims, are Chinese.

[Zeke Fox]

These days, Zeke is back in America, where he continues to chase down all manner of financial funny business. This week, it was a lender accused of making illegal loans to small businesses. Mekh Daraa, who covered the scam compounds in Cambodia, perhaps closer than anyone else, no longer has a newspaper job. His paper was shut down last year by the Cambodian regime. Dara told us he now spends his time gardening vegetables and continuing to research criminal activity associated with the compounds. He said the one new trend in the scamming industry these days, AI. Some of these scam bosses have figured out that a chatbot can do this work just as well as a trafficked human. Honestly, one job AI could steal, where I don't think anybody would complain.

[PJ Vogt]

That was PJ Vogt, host of the search engine podcast with his guest, Zeke Fox, who's an investigative reporter at Bloomberg. You can hear the full episode in the search engine feedback, which is available wherever pods are cast. If you're new to Planet Money, welcome. The water is warm. Feel free to scroll back through our episode feed for dispatches from the trade war stories on how the economy got addicted to subscriptions and the optimal way to price an egg during an egg shortage.

[Zeke Fox]

Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey and Jigsaw Productions. It was created by Me, PJ Vogt and Shruti Pinnivanani and it's produced by Garrett Graham and Noah John. Fact checking this week by Shawn Merchant. Theme, original composition and mixing by Armin Bazarian. Our executive producers are Jenna Weiss Berman and Leah Rhys Dennis.

[PJ Vogt]

This episode of Planet Money was produced by Emma Peasley and edited by Marianne McCune. It was engineered by Gilly Moon. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer. I'm Alexi Horowitz Ghazi. This is npr. Thanks for listening.

[Zeke Fox]

This message comes from Square. Your favorite neighborhood spots are using Square to do everything from covering cash flow gaps to expanding to new locations. Wherever your business is growing, Square meets you there. Go to Square. Com Go NPR to learn more.