1360: Scam Compounds | Out of the Loop

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Jordan Harbinger Show, Ep. 1360 — Scam Compounds | Out of the Loop

Released: July 21, 2026
Guests: Nathan Paul Southern & Lindsey Kennedy

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Overview / Main Theme

This episode dives into the dark underbelly of Southeast Asia’s scam compounds: vast, mafia-run operations that have morphed from small-scale boiler rooms into multinational crime empires, complete with geopolitical entanglements, advanced cybercrime infrastructure, billions in laundered money, and shocking degrees of human trafficking and exploitation. Journalists Nathan Paul Southern and Lindsey Kennedy, who operate on the ground in Cambodia and neighboring regions, offer a harrowing update on the latest developments, from drone strikes on scam compounds to the enduring plight of trafficking victims, the evolving tactics of organized crime, and the failure of governments and NGOs to grapple with this fast-morphing crisis.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Evolution and Scale of Scam Compounds

• Southeast Asia's scam compounds have escalated from online boiler-room scams to full-fledged criminal cities, wielding enormous economic and political power.
• The sophistication has grown: they now have CEOs, formalized structures, diplomatic protections, and their own financial systems. (“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.” – Jordan Harbinger, 20:47)
• The lines between criminal enterprise and state apparatus blur, as mafia groups operate with government connections and offer state-like functions.

Notable Quote

"These are multinational criminal empires...with CEOs, government connections, billions in crypto, and now fighter jets bombing their offices."
— Jordan Harbinger (02:25)

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2. Human Trafficking: From Victims to Enforcers

• Hundreds of thousands, mainly from Asia, Africa, and South America, are lured under false pretenses (e.g., restaurant jobs, marketing) and then trafficked, with passports seized and subjected to forced cybercrime or online sex work.
• Crackdowns often just scatter victims—leaving them homeless, stateless, and even more vulnerable to being re-trafficked or exploited by other criminal enterprises.
• Compounds are often repurposed by governments into overcrowded, brutal detention centers, sometimes offering even worse conditions than under criminal control.
• Many former victims, with no means of returning home and no outside assistance, are left with little choice but to re-enter the scam trade, now as willing participants.

Notable Quotes

"There are people who have been on the streets for six, seven months now and just pleading with their embassies."
— Nathan Paul Southern (12:27)

"Not everyone was even a scammer. Some people have been used for forced online sex work, which basically means they get raped all day."
— Lindsey Kennedy (63:33)

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3. Tech Infrastructure, Data, and Law Enforcement Challenges

• Scam compounds are highly tech-savvy: using stolen data, tailored scripts, and technologies like Starlink to avoid detection and maintain communications.
• Their recruitment and trafficking are often facilitated openly on platforms like Facebook and Telegram.
• Attempts to get tech companies (including Starlink, Facebook, Telegram) to act have been mostly futile.
• Sophisticated apps allow scammers to convincingly tailor scams to specific victims, including spoofing location and providing local details.
• Law enforcement, when it intervenes, often results in further chaos: compounds may be bombed (sometimes with trafficking victims inside), assets seized, but little real aid for victims.

Notable Quote

"Telegram...we can just find dozens and dozens of pages selling human beings like in minutes."
— Nathan Paul Southern (06:11)

"They've set up their own literal payment apps to prioritize that money...$10 to $20 million a month just by essentially exploiting the people they've already trafficked."
— Lindsey Kennedy (39:26)

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4. Money Laundering and Global Criminal Convergence

• The scam economy now rivals or outpaces traditional drug cartels in terms of scale and profit, entwining with other forms of organized crime (drug trafficking, arms smuggling, etc.).
• Criminal super-apps and payment platforms blend illicit and legitimate funds, making it almost impossible to unravel criminal money from the licit economy.
• Money laundering services have become so sophisticated that drug cartels, triads, and sanctioned states (like North Korea) now route money through the scam economy.

Notable Exchange

"Trafficking in people is always also trafficking in weapons and almost always also in drugs...You might as well have those people also hold a package full of cocaine..."
— Jordan Harbinger (37:31)

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5. Geopolitical Tensions and the State–Mafia Nexus

• Scam compounds are now entangled in cross-border conflicts, especially between Cambodia and Thailand. Some have been targeted in actual drone and airstrikes, killing unknown numbers—including trafficking victims.
• Massive, family-owned crime syndicates like Prince Group controlled billions and were deeply entwined with government power. Crackdowns, driven by US-China pressure, have resulted in assets and infrastructure simply being absorbed by local elites.
• Rather than real reform, governments often just recapture or repurpose scam infrastructure for their own authoritarian or criminal uses.
• Scarcity of humanitarian relief leaves a "toxic crust" of dispossessed, skilled scammers, perpetuating a “criminal diaspora” that moves from country to country.

Notable Quotes

"You get the mafia to build you a country and then you take it back from them when you’re done."
— Nathan Paul Southern (43:36)

"A lot of places haven’t fully been shut down…The people who allowed this to happen, or in some cases profited from it directly, have profited now again from the crackdown."
— Lindsey Kennedy (45:14)

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6. Humanitarian Vacuum and the Looming Crisis

• Despite international awareness, there's almost no coordinated humanitarian response to the crisis. NGOs and journalists are effectively on their own to rescue and support trafficking victims.
• The criminal-to-state pipeline means scam compounds simply become prisons or sweatshops, often with forced labor for government use.
• As each crackdown scatters personnel and victims, the expertise and infrastructure simply “infect” new countries, especially fragile and developing states—risking endless repetition on broader scales.

Notable Quotes

"Just the idea that there’s not been a plan for how you stop all those people from being immediately recycled into the criminal infrastructure to me is mind boggling."
— Lindsey Kennedy (54:39)

"Anyone that's here needs that help. And we're going to see the same cycle just repeated again and again for the next day."
— Nathan Paul Southern (56:07)

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Memorable Moments and Anecdotes

• Adventures in the Field: Lindsey and Nathan recount sneaking into an active Prince Group compound after sanctions were announced, witnessing literal cages, and executing a movie-style escape while blasting Pink Pony Club in the car.

  “It’s easier to get into a human trafficking compound than out.” — Nathan Paul Southern (64:40)

• On-the-Spot Scams: As the conversation unfolds, Jordan receives a scam text—highlighting the reach and banality of these ploys.
• “Communist” Flags for Survival: Trafficked workers hoisted Chinese flags onto compound roofs to deter drone strikes during conflict.

  “His job instead of doing scams that day was to also help run upstairs and hoist Chinese flags onto the roof so that the Thais would be less likely to drone strike any of the buildings…” — Nathan Paul Southern (30:17)

• Strikes and Survival: Victims sometimes use collective action (refusing to maintain a compound’s vital tech infrastructure) to pressure bosses into releasing the most vulnerable.

  "For the power of strikes and collective action, even in a scam compound." — Lindsey Kennedy (62:26)

• Black Humor:

  “I’m aware of the irony of beginning this podcast by saying don't trust anyone you've never met and send them cash – and then, hey, here's a link to give us your money.” — Nathan Paul Southern (73:01)

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Important Timestamps

| Timestamp | Segment / Content | |-----------|---------------------| | 02:23 | Introduction of the scam compound topic & guests’ backgrounds | | 04:45 | Rural internet infrastructure and its role in scam operations | | 06:11 | Tech companies’ failures to intervene in trafficking/scamming | | 09:51 | Expanding victim pool: now global recruitment | | 12:27 | Aftermath for victims: homelessness, detention, new trafficking | | 14:13 | Conditions in detention centers worse than scam centers | | 19:54 | Script complexity and data-driven targeting in scams | | 27:09 | Law enforcement action: bombings, compounded human cost | | 36:16 | The “Amazonification” of money laundering | | 39:26 | Creation of criminal super-apps and exploitation “infrastructure” | | 49:36 | Billions seized—victims still suffer, and economies warped | | 55:18 | Call for humanitarian response and NGO failures | | 58:23 | Scams’ tech ecosystem spreading internationally | | 64:08 | Field story: escaping a Prince Group compound | | 76:30 | Government repurposing of compounds, forced labor risks | | 78:14 | Corruption openly displayed—advertising illegal gambling next to police | | 79:06 | Appeals for real reform and support for victims |

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Final Reflections

• Crime and Government Overlap: The case of Cambodia shows how deeply intertwined criminal syndicates and political power can be; crackdowns often simply shift assets and infrastructure without real reform or accountability.
• Victims Abandoned: With little to no international or governmental support, thousands of trafficking victims are left to fend for themselves, at risk of falling back into the same cycle—or becoming tools for other international actors, including hostile states.
• Scam Economy’s Future: The crisis is likely to replicate in new states, further professionalizing, fragmenting, and spreading harm globally unless faced with genuine, coordinated intervention.

“Victims are trapped between gangsters and airstrikes. So, yes, your Monday was annoying, but perspective, people.”
— Jordan Harbinger (66:32)

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Resources & Support

GoFundMe for Human Trafficking Victims:
If listeners wish to help fund the extraction and support of trafficking victims—see the show notes or contact Jordan directly for large-scale support/partnership.

Further Learning:

• Previous episodes with Kennedy & Southern for deeper history on scam compounds: Episodes 833, 1145.

Journalistic Coverage:

• Follow Lindsey Kennedy and Nathan Paul Southern’s investigative work and updates for more on the scam economy, trafficking, and humanitarian crisis.

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Summary Prepared by: [Expert Podcast Summarizer — 2026]
For those who haven’t listened, this episode stands as a chilling account of how cybercrime, trafficking, and state sanction can merge into an almost unstoppable force—and why the crisis is far from over.

Transcript

[Jordan Harbinger]

This episode is sponsored in part by LinkedIn. Running a small business means every hire matters. A bad hire can cost you time, money and momentum. A good hire that can help you grow your business. This gives me flashbacks to a nightmare

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

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[Jordan Harbinger]

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[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

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[Jordan Harbinger]

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[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

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[Jordan Harbinger]

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[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

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[Jordan Harbinger]

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[Lindsey Kennedy]

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[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

your job for [e-mail] harbinger terms and conditions apply. I started Ornod in 2013 and we make bike apparel. The best part of Shopify for me is our ability to run the business as essentially non technical people. We're able to admin everything on the back end, front end and sell things online easily. If Shopify were a bike accessory, I think it would actually be the bicycle. It's the thing that you do the thing on. We run the business on Shopify so start your free trial on shopify.com.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills of 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

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

a better informed, more critical thinker through

[Jordan Harbinger]

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 negotiation, psychology and geopolitics, disinformation, China, North Korea, Crime and cults and more that'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com start or search for us in your Spotify app. To get started today on the show, Southeast Asia's scam compounds.

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

You've heard about them on the show before.

[Jordan Harbinger]

It's 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 Lindsey Kennedy join us today from the frontlines. They literally live in the area where these scam compounds are. They've helped extract human trafficking victims because

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

many people are forced to work there.

[Jordan Harbinger]

They've filmed destroyed compounds and literally run from drone strikes and security personnel and

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

police and God knows who else.

[Jordan Harbinger]

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

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

like a government or vice versa.

[Jordan Harbinger]

If you want a full background on scam compounds, human trafficking, grab our other episodes with Lindsay and Nathan. Those are episodes 8:33 and 11:45. 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.

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

So thanks for coming back on the show.

[Jordan Harbinger]

It's funny, this is kind of a weird start because one, it's super early

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

here and super late there, but you

[Jordan Harbinger]

had, and we've tried this a few

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

times and you had to get a

[Jordan Harbinger]

studio, but Cambodia's not very, maybe there's not a lot of studios that you

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

guys can rent at 10pm at night on a weekend. And so you're in your friend's apartment after he vacated due to a security

[Jordan Harbinger]

threat, which makes me a little worried for you guys. But you, he leaves and you're like, oh good, can we use the space to record a podcast?

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

And he's like, I don't think you

[Jordan Harbinger]

understand that I left because someone's trying to kill me.

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

And you're like, yeah, yeah, yeah. But is it quiet in there?

[Jordan Harbinger]

Do you have Internet?

[Lindsey Kennedy]

The difference though, Jordan, is that we work for ourselves and he has a paid job for somebody else. So like, I see, Yeah, I know

[Jordan Harbinger]

there's a machete wielding psychopath trying to kill you, but how's the WiFi?

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

And I need to eat. So.

[Nathan Paul Southern]

Yeah, exactly. It's all wi fi related to me. That's what brings all these cybersecurity. Cambodia.

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

That's right.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah. It's funny cause I was thinking to

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

myself when I was in China how bad the Internet can be in certain places. And then I thought okay, in the

[Jordan Harbinger]

middle of the jungle they have Internet that's good enough for thousands of people

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

to be making voiceover IP calls, video calls, cryptocurrency transactions, everything. Because they run these massive scam compounds.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So you, you got to sort of

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

hand it to the Internet providers in rural Cambodia because they are doing a lot of heavy lifting. They have it together apparently.

[Nathan Paul Southern]

Yeah, they've actually done a really, really well because they've set up, I mean it helps for us as well. And 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 the 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 in 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, they like crime but it's also one of the ways that then Thailand can actually try to hit back at the compounds. They can just turn off their energy, they can turn off their WI fi and that opens them up a little bit.

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

I see.

[Lindsey Kennedy]

Yeah. But Starlink have also been pretty active in the heavy Scotland areas, selling into Cambodia and Myanmar. Two very interesting choices for Starlink to target at the peak of the scam trade.

[Nathan Paul Southern]

Yes, Starlink is great for like if you want to support the, the groups fighting against the, the awful tatmodel in Myanmar then, then Starlink does have a role and that's great. But it's also really, really good for massive mafia criminal groups want to scam you in the middle of the jungle.

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

So It's a. Yeah.

[Nathan Paul Southern]

Catch 22.

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

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.

[Lindsey Kennedy]

What do you think? Yeah, yeah, they think criticize heavily and they have not been helpful at all.

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

That's too bad.

[Lindsey Kennedy]

Yeah, yeah.

[Nathan Paul Southern]

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 for 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. Telegram that. Yeah, I mean, we can just find dozens and dozens of pages selling human beings like in minutes.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So for people that are a little

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

bit behind on this, that we did a few episodes with you guys, episode eight, 33, 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,

[Jordan Harbinger]

tricked, thinking, oh, we need a server

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

at a restaurant and, 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.

[Lindsey Kennedy]

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 like Telegram, they use different kinds of codes to refer to when they're selling people or whether they're 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 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 it'll be direct. And it's people who maybe are 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 compound owners, other companies, other agents, by which I mean human traffickers who are then. So that's the quite blunt about what they need and what will happen, what the job will be in the new place, basically.

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

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 to this. So they're like not even trying to hide what they're doing. Because they don't care. There's no consequences.

[Lindsey Kennedy]

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 side to really get all those people home. You're talking about hundreds of thousands of people who are trapped in Cambodia who are being forced to work in 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 walking the streets, sleeping off, 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 in this kind of, this kind of scam group. If they're already in Cambodia and they're trapped, basically we'll come pick them up and take them to Myanmar or Laos right now. Or if we're looking for Africans who maybe were working on English targeting ones before, like English speaking targeting, I mean, 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 it's so cynical and so quick the way that they respond to these crises.

[Nathan Paul Southern]

And since we last spoke about this, John, it's just growing to this insane new scale. So, yeah, when, 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 at the vet the other day. And then it's a free person. And then you get to talking that still very much exists, but they've become so much more sophisticated. And yeah, it was mostly people from China and Southeast Asia that were being recruited into the traffic inside and to actually do the scams. But now that's just growing insurmountably. So you've got thousands and 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 it'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 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. Lindsey said the online gambling world is all tied into it as well, is now the most profitable and globalized criminal trade that we've ever seen. And, 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 that, 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 like visible scars from their torture that they went under and the compounds. And then as that's happening, there's already a shift to places like Sri Lanka, Madagascar, Uganda, where some of the people we help get out of some compounds here are already being 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

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

of physically, 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, that's. Is that what I'm understanding?

[Nathan Paul Southern]

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, you know, we've spoken to a lot of people have been in that situation. Some are scrambled together enough cash to find some taxi somewhere. They can get into the next town and do 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 Trompeh, and people just let go of those, right? They just lay out and then they look around the city. 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. None of the African embassies are actually in Cambodia. They're all 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's 19 human trafficking victims outside the one human trafficking shelter in Phnom Penh 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 compound 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.

[Lindsey Kennedy]

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 and kind of horrific things that happen in there to keep people in line. 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 compass, 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. But I don't worry about it. When it's like my best 40 degrees here, 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, they hadn'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.

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

Yeah, 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. 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 are also stuck there. It's hot and there's sewage, and they're thinking, oh, man, this was so much nicer when Chinese organized crime threatened to kill us if we left.

[Lindsey Kennedy]

Basically.

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

That's crazy to me. It's funny, I just got a scam text as we are talking.

[Jordan Harbinger]

They're always so bad. Good morning, Jordan.

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

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.

[Nathan Paul Southern]

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 mean, they just kind of write a bit awkwardly, and I felt they

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

just spell like crap. Yeah, that's funny. Like, he. You need to learn how to spell check. Because I thought you were a Cambodian scammer. Human trafficking victim stuck in a Cambodian scam center in the jungle. Anyway, it was good meeting you, too. Let's hang out.

[Lindsey Kennedy]

But the thing is that everyone knows this particular one, right? Everyone's used to this structure. So you don't. 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 piles outside. We've managed to get a 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 complexity and the different types is just enormous. So one of the big ones are fake police stations where places will get hold of 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.

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

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, now this is bs. Or they say, you know what, my dad works for this, let me call him. Or my uncle works. This isn't 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 is just seeing their life flash before their eyes and fear takes over.

[Lindsey Kennedy]

Exactly, yeah.

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

That's really cruel and terrible.

[Nathan Paul Southern]

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 will think they're savvy enough to not end up falling for something like this. So you can willingly engage in a group. Someone contacts you and said, hey, I seen you were in that group. Are you interested in this forex 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 pill comes, right? And eventually you put in A 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 almost got me. I think we're in Kenya and we, yeah, we 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 noticing that is huge. And then they get your details and there's other scams they try to do from there. So there's so much to. It 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 sympathy do you have for Bob if you really think that that smoking hot woman from Singapore is actually in love with him after his second divorce in Florida. But it's so, so much more than that. It can get anyone, any age, any income bracket, any education level.

[Lindsey Kennedy]

Unlike some of the scripts that we were looking at. First of all, I found the scripts 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. 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've got, 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 4:00 clock on the Tuesday, the 25th of April, you know, and then you just keep putting on the back foot and making them nervous and then be like, I don't understand why you won't answer this question. We don't want to have 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

[Jordan Harbinger]

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

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

more convinced I've become that relying on one news source is it's really one of the easiest ways to misunderstand what's actually happening.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Not because every outlet is lying or whatever.

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

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

[Jordan Harbinger]

that are important, and if you only see one version, it really is very

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easy to mistake that version for the whole picture. That's why I genuinely use and recommend Ground News.

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Before I discuss a major story on

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the podcast, or even form a strong

[Jordan Harbinger]

opinion about it, I want to know how it's being covered across the political spectrum. What details are showing up everywhere?

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What's being emphasized by one side and ignored by another?

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What part of the story might I be missing? Ground News puts all of that in one place. It helps you compare coverage, spot blind

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[Jordan Harbinger]

reaction before you even realize it's happening. For me, it's not another news app. It's a tool for thinking more clearly. And in a world where everybody's trying

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to tell you what to believe, that

[Jordan Harbinger]

really is worth paying for, in my opinion.

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

Go to groundnews.comjordan to get 40% off their unlimited access Vantage subscription.

[Jordan Harbinger]

That's groundnews.comjordan again, groundnews.comjordan use that link

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so we know we sent you.

[Jordan Harbinger]

This is a great way to support

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the show, and it's a great product.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Again, groundnews.com jordan this episode is sponsored in part by K12. As a parent, sometimes we have to

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

accept that the normal or conventional path

[Jordan Harbinger]

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 need to succeed. Nick Pell, who's a contributor to the

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

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[Jordan Harbinger]

where the school choices for his kids

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are very, very limited.

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Not a long list of campuses, programs,

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or specialized options nearby.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So his family chose an alternative approach to schooling that gives his kids an education better suited to their needs. And that really changed the way that I think about school choice as well. While our kids are not currently enrolled in K12 powered schools, I'm relieved to know that an option like this even exists. Because if one of our children ever

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

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[Jordan Harbinger]

K12 powered schools offers tuition free accredited online public education for students in kindergarten through 12th grade. Kids learn from home with dedicated teachers, life support, and an online community where parents have a clearer window into what the kids are learning and how they're doing. And because enrollment is available throughout the whole school year, families can make a change when they need one, not just when the calendar says it's convenient. Every kid learns differently. Having more options means you have a better chance of finding the environment where your child can actually thrive. Learn [e-mail] Jordan that's the letter K, the number 12.com Jordan Here's a little

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

scoop you might not be aware of.

[Jordan Harbinger]

When you use our promo codes, you're not just scoring a discount, you're also giving the show a boost. We don't earn commissions from each sale or anything like that, but when companies see that listeners engage with our advertising and 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 JordanHarbinger.com 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

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

before, but my, 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 actually towed your car because we thought it was used in a criminal operation or we're gonna take your car. It was something like that. And it was like, you need to come down and talk with us. This is a detective.

[Jordan Harbinger]

It just went on and on and on.

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

She was really nervous about it. And then she finally jumps in the elevator. Cause she's actually gonna 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

[Jordan Harbinger]

goes, what do you think about this?

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

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 Called 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 gonna impound your car as part of an investigation. We tell you that afterwards, you know, after you call and wonder where your car is.

[Nathan Paul Southern]

Did they have our details then? They knew her name and plate number and type of car? Yeah, yeah.

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

They probably just, like, had that from some database or something like that or.

[Nathan Paul Southern]

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 then 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 an easy step from the vpn. There's other apps that will say, give you every bit of information and photos to match about a particular town, particularly in the U.S. 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. Like, and you can say the exact address that the victim you're trying to scam lives. That 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. 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 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, what 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 are 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.

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

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 of 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 turn the place into an immigration detention center. But I think it was in Burma that, 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.

[Lindsey Kennedy]

The war with Thailand has officially sort of like had a ceasefire at the start of the year, late December, I think it was. And so we're in a bit of a.

[Advertisement Voice]

A lull.

[Lindsey Kennedy]

Yeah. But in November. I think it was either November, early December. Yeah, was when we were up on the border in an area that used to be very, very jungly and is like. Right on. Yeah, it's right up in the mountains in the middle of nowhere. I think we might have talked about it on your show before because it's just so far in the middle of nowhere to Muda that is just. There's like a scam city basically that was built for no other reason. We were really, really concerned because 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 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 Thais who were bombing or the. The Cambodian side was 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 Timor Dar, one that we couldn't get to because the only bridge in and out 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 sustained quite bad injuries from trying to escape from this building. When I think his Chinese forces 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 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 has been so horrific.

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

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?

[Jordan Harbinger]

Oh, the guys in the office next

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

to me are watching a movie.

[Lindsey Kennedy]

Exactly.

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

I mean, how do you.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I want to see the script that explains that.

[Nathan Paul Southern]

So people have told us that exact scenario has happened and then they've had to ask and they just oh, it's fireworks or whatever. There's like, oh, there's also a lot of screaming. Yeah, one guy we spoke to from Nigeria, he was just like in his bedroom like you know, about to be involved in that. And then there was 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 Thais 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 about south. But in terms of the criminal related stuff, the scam compound areas were hit a lot but not mentioned in the first round of fighting in the summer. I remember this is a multi, multibillion dollar trade and for Hundreds of kilometers 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 Thais admitted that this scam industry does exist and is raising money for the Cambodian regime. 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 Thais don't want to admit how many slaves they might have killed and the Cambodians don't really want to admit how many slaves they may 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 fighting.

[Jordan Harbinger]

That's crazy.

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

And I also find it hella suspicious that they just had a bunch of Chinese Communist Party flags sitting around in this place and they're like, great, put

[Jordan Harbinger]

these on the roof in the designated

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

place on the flag poles that we have for them already.

[Lindsey Kennedy]

Like, well, they were probably using him for the police scams. So.

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

I see, I see. Okay, that makes sense because I'm thinking

[Jordan Harbinger]

if you say in Americans that, you

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

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 scam skyscraper.

[Lindsey Kennedy]

Something to think about for the future, you know?

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

Yeah, that's right. I'm just gonna make a note here to order a few more muffin screams

[Nathan Paul Southern]

a love of communism. More than a hundred Chinese flags on a criminal casino.

[Jordan Harbinger]

That's right, exactly. Just looking out for the little man. What is it?

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

To each according to from each according to his ability. To each according to his need. Yes. On top of your scam comp pound, Karl Marx would be stoked.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So this is crazy because what starts

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

as online fraud turns into a literal geopolitical battlefield complete with drone strikes and air superiority or whatever going on.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I mean, this is just totally nuts. And Prince group you mentioned before, let's

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

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.

[Lindsey Kennedy]

Oh yeah. I mean I think probably grown faster than any drug cartel I think has ever and became more powerful certainly in terms of, I mean the head of Prince Griptinza was until his arrest, I think the personal advisor to the Prime

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

Minister here of Cambodia.

[Lindsey Kennedy]

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 couple of 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, many places. And after the, the U.S. 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 continued to be seized off them in assets as this kind of ripple through Southeast Asia and then further afield. And he owned those places in the UK and in the US that should have been the end of it. But he stayed here and just seemed to be getting. Things seemed 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 from either of 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 for this because they went on this rampage and didn't close down scam house 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.

[Jordan Harbinger]

These places, by the way, for folks

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

who don't know they are laundering billions

[Jordan Harbinger]

of dollars for scams, but when you're laundering billions of dollars for your own

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

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

[Jordan Harbinger]

is actually a business arm because we've

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

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.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And now they' going, well, wait a minute, we have to use UPS and

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

Federal Express and the US Postal Service to deliver all these packages.

[Jordan Harbinger]

What if we create a.

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

What's it called, like, last mile delivery service of our own? So now you've got Amazon trucks.

[Jordan Harbinger]

This is what's happening for money laundering

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

from these scam compounds. So they're saying, we got billions of dollars of our own, we got to launder. And then drug cartels go, hey, you know what? I got this problem where I have all 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're laundering money for the cartels. You know, we kind of have to do this too.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And North Korea says money laundering. Did somebody say money laundering? I've got $10 billion in stolen cryptocurrency

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

that I need to figure out how to turn into something.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Why don't we run this through there too?

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

So you've got these massive criminal networks.

[Jordan Harbinger]

That's why trafficking in people always is

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

also trafficking in weapons and almost always is also trafficking in drugs. Because if you've got a massive underground network of 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.

[Lindsey Kennedy]

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 bank, a major bank here. Well, I mean, they deny it but, like, they're kind of widely thought to be closely linked to the Wyon network and HPay, 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. But pretty much every single major scam, compound owner, 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 prioritize that money. And within the scam compounds, they're always looking for how 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 one on One east documentary that came out last week where they did 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 immunities from inside this

[Nathan Paul Southern]

area cafeteria in the slave compound.

[Lindsey Kennedy]

Yeah, exactly. But if you think that your payment app from running what is basically. Often it's like, they call them super apps. It's like a combination of like, Uber Eats. Well, obviously, 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 are 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 licit 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.

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

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 episodes 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, King's Roman Casino or whatever that place is called.

[Nathan Paul Southern]

King's Roman's Golden Triangle. Yeah.

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

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 it out.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And I was like, oh, I got it. Next time you're there, you got to

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

meet Nathan and Lindsey because they're the other white people there.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Those are the other white people. And he's. He was saying he was outside talking

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

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,

[Jordan Harbinger]

you're leaning against a scooter and a

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

tuk tuk in a parking lot outside of a scam center. So I don't think you're actually a banker. Just call me crazy.

[Nathan Paul Southern]

Yeah. The entire place of sanction. So I don't know what bank he would be in as well, but it's.

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

Right.

[Nathan Paul Southern]

I think that the whole thing, though, the Prince group sanctions and kind of rise and kind of fall of them just shows you, though, the scale of what we're in.

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

Yeah.

[Nathan Paul Southern]

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 realize actually when he was coming up, everyone else was as well, and he was creating like 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, Chinese guy comes here, he's able to buy a citizenship for the country, and then he is able to set up Scam compounds, 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 Taiwanese 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, were building full massive developments. They added hundreds of hectares of land onto reem in Cambodia so that they 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 develop relationships with 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 are developing 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 with 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, okay, so they did, you know, accept those sanctions in a way. And then they sent Jianzhou 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 criminals, seized assets. So you get the mafia to build you a country, and then you take it back from them when you're done.

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

Oh, my gosh.

[Lindsey Kennedy]

Yeah. Literally billions and billions and billions of dollars in assets like physical buildings, infrastructure, construction that was basically funded by groups like Prince has been now seized formally by the government, which basically means the two families, really, the Hun family, and then the family that have been controlling 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, so When I said about the reward from China, at the peak of the crackdown, Chinese foreign minister did a delegation where they went to a few different countries in Southeast Asia. They went to Thailand. 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 grows a bit quiet and 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 they 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.

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

Yeah, Maurer Burger.

[Lindsey Kennedy]

No, no, the. The Fujian gang who were actually linked and I won't get into. We did. 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 to 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 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. So. 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, 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 sitting there while so many people are suffering, they've lost their money or are trapped in the streets of Cambodia and can't go back to like, you know, Rwanda and

[Jordan Harbinger]

yeah, what's happened because you mentioned they've

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

seized billions of dollars in physical assets. What about the 15 billion in cryptocurrencies seiz by US authorities as a result of this?

[Nathan Paul Southern]

It's not being used yet. I don't, there's, I mean, there's some discussion over whether the US authorities even have full access to it. But I mean, 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 lives destroyed by being tortured every day to do that. Then maybe when we're talking about billions of dollars in crypto or millions of dollars on London penthouses 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 come in and take the country, but 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 that's now the way that it is working. And that's the really scary bit because, yeah, like Lindsey said, when the money's getting debuted 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 show these mafia groups, the criminal, 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 they leave behind, like the digital platform apps. So they, they just continue to grow their industry. They just are sketchier and sketchier visible stuff in the next place along.

[Jordan Harbinger]

These compounds are being hit by F16s right now. Apparently the report spam button finally got an upgrade. Am I right? We'll be right back.

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

This episode is also sponsored in part by BetterHelp.

[Jordan Harbinger]

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[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

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[Jordan Harbinger]

Don't let stigma stand in the way of support. Start therapy with BetterHelp. Sign up and get 10% [e-mail] Jordan that's betterhelp.com Jordan this episode is also sponsored by Wayfair. We bought a ton from Wayfair over the years. When we built our home, we used Wayfair for lighting, mirrors, furniture, outdoor furniture, you name it. So when Jen decided she wanted a birdbath water fountain for the front yard,

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

because, of course, Wayfair was the obvious place to look.

[Jordan Harbinger]

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[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

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[Jordan Harbinger]

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[Jordan Harbinger]

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[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

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[Lindsey Kennedy]

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[Jordan Harbinger]

If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other 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 and ways to support the show are searchable and clickable on the [e-mail] deals if you can't remember the name of a sponsor or you can't find a code, something's not working for you. Email me jordanordanharbinger.com, we're happy to surface codes for you. It is that important that you support those who support the show. Now back to Lindsey and Nathan.

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

So it's like a disease because it's 15 billion seized in crypto by the US 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.

[Jordan Harbinger]

But, yeah, good point, right? Cause now you've got this sort of

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

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, like with 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.

[Lindsey Kennedy]

And it's just insane that there's been no attempt. Like, it's not 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 increasingly understood the size and the scale and the damage it'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, the idea that you finally got what you wanted, that Cambodia did do a real crackdown, 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 what other option they might have. And 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 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, or, you know, that you refused to hurt. And so they don't care about you now. Trapped here, being rearrested 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 you've no money left, you're going to starve in 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 in?

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

And like, I understand that.

[Lindsey Kennedy]

It's just even beyond it being a humanitarian crisis, just the idea that there's not been a plan for how you stop all those people from being immediately recycled into the criminal infrastructure, to me is mind boggling. Especially at a moment when so many sanctioned countries as well are looking for ways to make a lot of money and evade sanctions. Right? 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've been trained to do this one thing that we know hurts us. I guess we'll just let them scuttle back off into the ether. And no further questions.

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

No, of course it needs to be

[Nathan Paul Southern]

seen as this huge warning to the rest of the world, because 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 fuel 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 that. 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 an expert 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 US 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 shouldn't be us, it shouldn't be people who are writing about this then trying to work out how to run a development system to get him food, accommodation and flights home and liaise 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 the Sahel, are having, yes, like competing kind of soft power, like strategies. We know 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 texts saying, do you want to come back into the work? Because we can take you to Laos, we can take you to Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Uganda, Madagascar, whatever, tomorrow. And they're still saying no. So anyone that'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 gonna

[Lindsey Kennedy]

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 were saying, you know, you don't have to be from Israel, but obviously that's who you'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 very frightened, young people are frightened and they're leaving en masse as well. 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 lower in a Bangladeshi village where there's actually quite a lot of reasons why you're suddenly vulnerable and abroad and don't have access to actual decent work either.

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

Right, yeah, that's a really good point. It really shows the intimacy between crime and state power in that the groups are not just tolerated, but are strategically useful. Laundering for sanctions actors like you mentioned, cybercrime infrastructure, financial warfare channels, political leverage inside a fragile state like Cambodia. I mean it just this type of money throws off the balance of power in these really fragile areas really quickly and really easily.

[Lindsey Kennedy]

Another 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 and then, but then you'll put your, your frontline definitely trafficked, horrific conditions, people in the middle of the jungle somewhere or in a country that has not figured this out yet or like Madagascar or rural Myanmar or here. So you start 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 IT style jobs or financy jobs that are harder to identify instantly as being part of that ecosystem.

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

Yeah, yeah, this reminds me of I had that guy from Dubai who worked in a scam compound 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

[Jordan Harbinger]

how much that cost? He's like, I know exactly how much

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

it costs because I'm the guy who's, he was the assistant to one of the bosses, right? So he's like, cost this way.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And I thought, wow, there's a small

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

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.

[Nathan Paul Southern]

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, he's from, from an East African state and he went to Dubai to work as a mechanic and 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 shitty conditions in Dubai, fixing motorbikes inside the roads. I went, it's okay, but it's not really making any money. And then someone got in touch, said, oh, come to Cambodia, you can. I may was like, yeah, you can walk 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 what he liked doing. So when he got to Cambodia, they got him in and then he realized, oh, 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, went through like physical abuse and 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. 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 were doing other things to her. And he went, all right, I'm just going to stop doing your vpn. 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 USDN and handing over went, I'm not going to do that today. And then there was like a little collection. Yeah. And then they. And they went, all right, fine. And they flew the girl back into East Africa and then they all got back to work. So, yeah, they can work once or twice and then they just send bigger guys in with more guns.

[Lindsey Kennedy]

But, yeah, for the power of strikes and collective action, even in a scam compound.

[Nathan Paul Southern]

Yeah, put those communist flags up.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, put those Chinese flags on the roof. All jokes aside, though, it really does

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

come down to the human cost, right? The buildings that are being airstruck by F16s and drones, there's trafficking victims trapped in there, caught between criminal gangs, airstrikes, 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 gonna get shot or step on a landmine because they don't want that anymore.

[Jordan Harbinger]

What have you guys been doing?

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

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 victim knowing that they've also scammed people. But I think.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I think all of us can put

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

ourselves into the shoes of somebody who's being imprisoned and beaten and tortured and

[Jordan Harbinger]

say, would you then call an old person that you don't know on the other side of the world and try

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

to get them to send you money? And the answer is going to be yes in, like, every. Almost every case, without exception.

[Lindsey Kennedy]

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 it.

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

I didn't even think about that.

[Lindsey Kennedy]

Yeah, I mean, it's terrible, but.

[Dr. Courtney Comeley]

Yeah.

[Lindsey Kennedy]

I mean, Nash and Nathan, you've been leading most. We did a lot of driving around the country, picking people up.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah. Maybe you should start with the story

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

that you told me in the middle of the night once, which you said,

[Jordan Harbinger]

I'm sitting in a room surrounded by

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

ballistic vests and we're blasting. I think it was Pink Pony Club or something on the.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, tell us this story. Let's wrap up this story.

[Lindsey Kennedy]

Okay. Right, so this was. This is actually a Prince compound. A few days after they announced the sanctions, we did want to see whether or not anything had happened to this one particularly notorious compound, which had been the Golden Fortune 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 pretty sure it's still fully occupied. Doesn't seem to make a difference to them yet. And they'd opened the gate to allow, I think, what was a human trafficking vehicle in. In front of us. And Nathan just pulled in after it and followed closely behind in this car to see if we get in.

[Nathan Paul Southern]

It's easier to get into a human trafficking compound than out.

[Lindsey Kennedy]

Yeah. It turns out, as it turned out, as we discovered.

[Jordan Harbinger]

You don't say.

[Lindsey Kennedy]

Yeah. So we drove around, we took some videos and photos very quickly. We were like, yep, there's still people in cages.

[Nathan Paul Southern]

Literal cages. Yeah.

[Lindsey Kennedy]

And we were like, this is still occupied. We'd get out of here very quickly, drove back around in the hope that we could maybe try and do the same thing the way back out. And we were being chased at this point by quite a lot of very angry guards and Chinese gangsters who started hitting our car and making calls. And we were like, oh, God. And then they briefly raised the barrier again to let a different vehicle out, and they just kind of floored it towards after this. And it was kind of very film like, with all these guards jumping out of the way, but so fast that as we went over the speed bump on the way out, we kind of 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 officials and border, of course, might not be in Prince's pocket. And as we drove towards them, we Saw they were already on walkie talkies looking for our car. So we were 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 cars, sort of like realizing clocking our car and starting to run after it's. And Nathan was like, put some music on. So I just turned the song. Next song on.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yes. Important. Before you do anything else, put on Billie Eilish.

[Lindsey Kennedy]

We turned it on. It was Pink Pony Club, which is. Nathan is apparently in the 0.1 top percentage of listeners of this song globally. If Chapel Rome would like so, you know. Yeah. 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 like 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.

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

Yeah, I bet.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Victims are trapped between gangsters and airstrikes. So, yes, your Monday was annoying, but perspective, people. We'll be right back. This episode is brought to you in part by Lufthansa. When people talk about travel, they usually focus on the destination, the hotel, the restaurants, all the stuff that happens after you land. But the flight is part of the experience, too. Just like a great hotel can shape an entire trip, so can a great flight. That's exactly what Lufthansa Allegris is built around. On a long haul route, comfort matters more than people realize. If you're cramped, tired, and can't relax, you feel it the second you land. But when a flight is comfortable, you can actually stretch out, rest, work, or just enjoy the ride. It changes the whole trip. I was thinking about that on my recent Intercontinental Lufthansa flight. I got so comfortable, I honestly didn't

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

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[Jordan Harbinger]

Don't forget about our newsletter. Wee bit wiser the idea something specific and practical that'll have an immediate impact on your decisions, psychology and relationships in under two minutes. If you haven't signed up yet, I invite you to come check it out. It's a great companion to the show. Jordanharbinger.com 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?

[Lindsey Kennedy]

We did an article, we rent a different oh, it was a rental.

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

Never mind.

[Lindsey Kennedy]

They stopped asking us where we go and we bought when we rent them now.

[Nathan Paul Southern]

I mean, yeah, I mean like we, we've had a few threats from the Prince guys but so have a bunch of other amazing rapport and some NGOs and 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 for being able to speak about them. 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 their bosses are working for them. So yeah, there's a bit of that but I think we're still always about

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

they got bigger fish to fry than a couple of crazy journalists who'd have really poor sense of personal preservation.

[Lindsey Kennedy]

Yes, but I think, yeah, but to go back to your question before like, so I think since the crackdown started there's been a lot of calls for help from people who've just been stuck outside of compound somewhere or in an area of the country where they just can't leave on the Thai border, especially when 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 pick people up, bring them back. Nathan's been doing a lot of that. And then once they're in Phnom Penh, trying to get them into the very few kind of shelters for trafficking people that 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.

[Nathan Paul Southern]

It was a GoFundMe campaign. I got a few grand and then. Yeah, yeah, like, and then it's just whatever owned cash, donated food, friends throwing stuff in. And then even the NGOs that are working on it are often. Oh, they're, they're all kind of like their own cash. So I guess like, what we're doing is like we're, we're doing that. We're trying to continue support. We're trying to still investigate like these overlaps in crime and conflict and corruption around the world and then trying to get. But also try and 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 Madagascar, like look at like 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 completely traumatized with no support. And it's now more important 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 in a kind of awkward to describe and like Rafway like meeting that these people did criminal stuff but they were 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.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Do you guys still have the GoFundMe up?

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

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.

[Lindsey Kennedy]

Yeah, yeah, we do actually, but we also, we can update that a bit because the. Actually the 25 people recently were trying to get home. They are all now home. They all got flights.

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

Oh, great.

[Lindsey Kennedy]

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 Khmer and who've been imprisoned here and like, you know, all these things need money. So it's kind of. That would be amazing.

[Nathan Paul Southern]

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, then also get in touch.

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

Yeah, yeah. If you got big money. Yeah, then email us and we'll set it up. Actually, yeah, if somebody really wants to like throw something at this, email me jordanordanharbinger.com, i'll introduce them to you so that they're not like pinging gofundme to donate $7,000.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Cause sometimes people really do surprise me.

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

I did a fundraise for something else and people donated really tens of thousands of dollars sometimes. And I was really taken aback by that. And, 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.

[Nathan Paul Southern]

I'm also aware of, like the irony of beginning this podcast was saying don't trust anyone you've never met and send them cash.

[Jordan Harbinger]

That's true.

[Nathan Paul Southern]

And then, hey, here's a link to give us your money.

[Jordan Harbinger]

That's right.

[Lindsey Kennedy]

Here's my actual email address. Just email me and send me it to me. Honestly, I'll pass it on.

[Jordan Harbinger]

That's right.

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

It's for sure not a scam@jordan harbinger.com

[Jordan Harbinger]

that will also work. So I man, I wonder if Cambodia is going to reform or simply rebrand. And are these scam cities, are they

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

going to collapse and fracture like they

[Jordan Harbinger]

seem to have been, or are they

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

going to start to militarize? You know, because this is a different model of transnational crime. It's almost like a new conflict model.

[Jordan Harbinger]

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 Token Tokyo. Neo Detroit. No, Southeast Asia Speed running it here in 2026.

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

It's crazy to me.

[Lindsey Kennedy]

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. Yeah. And the Ministry of Interior 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 Park 8. It had just been sanctioned by the UK government and we'd just been there when the doors were locked and we could recognize they still had some of the signs for the illegal gamb lights in the background, like when they're walking around.

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

This is our new prison. It's a FanDuel.com Cambodia Sign in the background, but whatever. Yeah, ignore that. Ignore that.

[Lindsey Kennedy]

Yeah. And so we're quite good. We are very, very concerned about. At one point we thought that as a stopgap maybe why. One of the reasons why so many trafficking victims or survivors of the scams, that one of the reasons we thought that they were being targeted by the police so much was as a stopgap because, yeah, there's this 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.

[Nathan Paul Southern]

And obviously cops are making a lot of money. They need to fill that.

[Lindsey Kennedy]

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 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.

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

Oh, so you're gonna have sweatshops with people making mortar rounds or something and bullets?

[Nathan Paul Southern]

It's already happening. They say it's like. Yeah, non lethal stuff like trenches, but yeah, it's already beginning. Yeah.

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

Wow. Slave labor.

[Lindsey Kennedy]

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 me 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 they don't. 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.

[Nathan Paul Southern]

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 created 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 went up over 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 aspect of this and there are a lot of, 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 of 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 has already got the second highest prison population in the world. Was great. They just got a bunch of free prisons they didn't need to spend any money on.

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

Unbelievable.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Wow.

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

So I hope you guys stay safe. I do worry about you guys over there.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Don't you still live between two scam compounds or something like that?

[Nathan Paul Southern]

Yeah, they don't scam there anymore. They just sleep there officially. Okay. Yeah, well, yeah, no, they're, they're still there.

[Jordan Harbinger]

You can't even answer this question. That's, this is why I worry about you guys.

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

You can't even answer the question without worrying about it.

[Lindsey Kennedy]

Well, I mean, yeah, I think one of the bigger concerns, 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 is what's amazing as merch as well, actually.

[Nathan Paul Southern]

Oh, yeah, Gangsters.

[Lindsey Kennedy]

A branded umbrella for an illegal site which was proven to be running out of a scam 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 to staff it. They just put. It's actually illegal to even advertise like online gambling here. And they put this directly outside next to the police bike that's always parked there. So that's fun.

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

Wow.

[Lindsey Kennedy]

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.

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

Unbelievable.

[Lindsey Kennedy]

Yeah.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Well, thank you both so much.

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

Your work is incredibly important. Again, we'll link to the GoFundMe 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 again, please stay safe. I always do, sort of whenever I see a text from Nathan, I'm like, please just be an update or a cool story and not like, hey, we're in prison. Do you know anybody who can bail us out?

[Lindsey Kennedy]

Great to run into you in the vet, Jordan.

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Oh, my gosh.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Stay safe, you two.

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

Thank you so much.

[Nathan Paul Southern]

All right, cheers, man.

[Lindsey Kennedy]

You too. Okay, bye.

[Nathan Paul Southern]

Bye.

[Jordan Harbinger]

The most powerful longevity tool may not

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

be in a supplement bottle or high tech clinic.

[Jordan Harbinger]

It might be the simple movement most of us barely think about.

[Dr. Courtney Comeley]

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 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.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Check out episode 1322 with Dr. Courtney Comeley, 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 gonna be that we mentioned for the human trafficking

[Jordan's Co-host or Guest (possibly a producer or secondary host)]

victims that they're helping rescue that'll be

[Jordan Harbinger]

in the show notes, which are always on the website. Advertisers, deals, discount codes, ways to support the show, [e-mail] deals Please consider supporting those who support the show. Don't forget about six minute networking as well. Over at sixminutenetworking.com I'm ordanharbinger 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, Tata Sidlowskis, 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 them. 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.

[Lindsey Kennedy]

Grainger knows.

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[Lindsey Kennedy]

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[Lindsey Kennedy]

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[Lindsey Kennedy]

by Grainger for the ones who get it done.

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