The secret world behind those scammy text messages

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Speaker 1 This is Planet Money from NPR.

Speaker 2 A couple years ago, my friend PJ Vogt started getting these weird text messages on his phone. You know the ones.

Speaker 2 They come from some number you've never seen before, and they ask you some out-of-context question.

Speaker 2 PJ is the host of one of my favorite podcasts. It's called Search Engine.
Each week, they answer a different question. Some of them are big and existential.
Some are tiny and hilariously specific.

Speaker 2 And with these texts, PJ got curious about what happens when you do keep these scammy-seeming conversations going, when you do start to follow the crumbs when these texters start leaving you.

Speaker 2 So he called up another journalist who'd also gotten obsessed with figuring out this mystery. Like, who was on the other side of these messages? And how were they making their money?

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 August 2022, you get a text message from a woman named Vicki Ho. What did Vicki Ho want?

Speaker 3 So Vicki said to me, Hi, David. I'm Vicki Ho.

Speaker 3 Don't you remember me? And

Speaker 3 this is kind of weird because my name is Zeke.

Speaker 2 Zeke Fox, author of the book Number Go Up Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall. You may remember him from our episode on the explosion in new meme coins.

Speaker 3 I wanted to get scammed. So I was like, I want to see how this scam works.
So I wanted to give her what she was looking for.

Speaker 2 Hello, and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi.
These days, it can feel impossible to go more than a week or two without some bizarre text from a stranger.

Speaker 2 But what is actually happening on the other side of that text bubble? Today on the show, we're going to hand that question off to Search Engine.

Speaker 2 Host PJ Vogt and his guest Zeke Fox take us down the sinister rabbit hole Zeke found when he raised his hand to get scammed.

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Speaker 1 Zeke is an unusual person.

Speaker 1 He writes for Bloomberg Business Week, but instead of doing what I would think he's supposed to do there, which is write about how a successful company has an IPO or something, Zeke is the guy at the fancy business publication who is only really happy when he's investigating scams.

Speaker 1 And this particular text message he'd gotten from one Vicki Ho,

Speaker 1 he wanted to play along and experience the scam because he'd heard that these wrong number texts might be somehow connected to a cryptocurrency that he's obsessed with, a cryptocurrency called Tether.

Speaker 3 There's this one

Speaker 3 leaked text message from a Russian money launderer who got arrested by the FBI. So he's texting a customer and he's being like, you should use Tether.
It's convenient. It's quick.

Speaker 3 And I'm like, okay, this is how the criminals are talking about Tether. Yes.

Speaker 3 But I don't know any Russian money launderers, but I hear that among the criminals who use Tether are these pig butchering scammers. Now I do know one pig butchering scammer, Vicki Ho.
Right.

Speaker 3 Will she ask me to use Tether? Yes. Okay.

Speaker 4 And also, wait, sorry, I should just ask you, you refer to these scams as pig butchering scams. Can you just explain that term?

Speaker 3 Yes.

Speaker 3 The idea is that you need to fatten up the victim like a pig with fake romance or even with, once you get them to invest in your scams, maybe even let them withdraw a thousand bucks or five thousand bucks.

Speaker 3 But meanwhile, you, the scammer, are sizing up just how much money this person has, how much you can take them for.

Speaker 3 And once they send in the maximum you think you're going to get, which in some cases is millions of dollars, you cut off their head. You take it all, you disappear.

Speaker 4 Okay, so you decide you were going to intentionally fall for the scam. So you start engaging with her.
How does the conversation play out? How does the scam play out?

Speaker 3 Okay, so I wrote to her, nice to meet you. My name is Zeke Fox.
I live in Brooklyn. Vicki said, you have a very cool name.
I'm 32 years old and a divorced woman. And she sent me a picture.

Speaker 3 She looked like a very attractive young woman with like a heavily face-tuned face. Yep.
And I thought, all right, we're on the path to getting scammed.

Speaker 3 But like every day she'd, I'd wake up and there'd be messages from Vicki. She'd say like, good morning.
How did you sleep, my dear? And she did try to flirt a little bit. Nothing like dirty.
Okay.

Speaker 3 Now, she wasn't that good at this whole thing. Like I had already said I was from Brooklyn.
And then she said she lived in New York. Why? Big mistake.

Speaker 4 Right, because if she says she's somewhere else, then she never has to meet you.

Speaker 3 She's sending me these pictures, and I could see in the background, it's not New York.

Speaker 1 Zeke finds himself getting increasingly more impatient.

Speaker 3 She was not getting to any sort of scamming. And I would say, what are you up to? And she would list like a number of conspicuously expensive hobbies.

Speaker 4 Like, what was Vicki up to? Like, what types of things was she doing?

Speaker 3 Well, she'd be like, today I'm going to go golfing and then drive my Ferrari.

Speaker 3 I think she said she owned a chain of nail salons but then she also had income from trading and I was like okay cool I want to hear more about that.

Speaker 4 You're starting to feel like the tug of the fishing line.

Speaker 3 Yeah. And then she said at one point she liked to analyze cryptocurrency market trends.
So I'm like, oh, crypto, I'm sort of curious about that. Tell me more.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 And so eventually

Speaker 3 She starts telling me about something she calls short-term node trading.

Speaker 4 Short-term node trading. Yeah.

Speaker 3 She's She's sending me these price charts and she's basically saying that she can predict fluctuations in the price of Bitcoin. And she starts in between the golf and Ferraris.

Speaker 3 She'll be like, I see an opportunity in the Bitcoin market.

Speaker 4 And is short-term, I'm not a financial journalist. Is short-term node trading a thing in some other context? Or is it just a bunch of words that sound mathy and science-y?

Speaker 3 No, yeah, it's total nonsense. Okay.
But sounds kind of equally plausible as like all the other random jargon in the crypto world. Like

Speaker 3 EVM arbitrage. That's a real thing.
That's a real thing. Short-term node trading.
That's a fake thing. But they're close.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 And one morning, I get yet another text that says, love, did you sleep well last night? And I'm like, I've got to get Vicki to scam me. What am I going to do? And so I'm like, Vicki

Speaker 3 needs to know that I have money and that I have financial goals. She needs to know that like I'm ready ready to spend.
Yeah. So I sent her a picture of a Goldwing Tesla that I want.

Speaker 3 And I was like, Vicki, I need money to buy this Tesla.

Speaker 3 And Vicki said, I see the price is $142,200.

Speaker 3 As long as you like this, money is nothing.

Speaker 4 As long as you like this Tesla, money is nothing.

Speaker 3 Yeah. So she told me that tomorrow we could do it.
We could do the trading.

Speaker 1 Vicki Ho told Zeke, her fattened pig, what he had to do. He needed to go home and download a very sketchy looking app for his iPhone.
Zeke was delighted.

Speaker 3 Once we get into it, she sends me a link to download an app that's called ZBXS.

Speaker 4 ZBXS. And this is like an iPhone app?

Speaker 3 Kind of. I have to sideload it.
Okay.

Speaker 4 It's like not allowed in the Apple store, but it can be in a dodgy way put onto an iPhone.

Speaker 3 Let me tell you, it was not easy to install ZBXS. You have to be pretty motivated.
This is why she had to butter me up for a week. Oh.
Because

Speaker 3 these instructions to get this bootleg app on your phone are not simple. Okay.
Like my mom, I don't think would ever be able to install ZBXS.

Speaker 4 Did you have to jailbreak your phone?

Speaker 3 No, but it was just like you had to adjust something in the settings that seemed very clearly

Speaker 4 designed to protect you from things like this.

Speaker 3 Yes. It was clear it was a bad idea.
And you open up the app and

Speaker 3 it says it's a new and safe, stable trading market. And it's got a lot of like price symbols, and it looks kind of like a bad crypto trading app.
Okay.

Speaker 3 But one thing that was promising is that all the prices are quoted in terms of tether.

Speaker 3 So first she tells me to download crypto.com.

Speaker 3 I say, yes, the exchange of my friend, Matt Damon. Then I learned that crypto.com is illegal in New York and it won't work for me.

Speaker 3 So like Vicki probably should have researched that. Yeah, as a New Yorker.
Yeah. Then she suggests I use one called Trust Wallet.

Speaker 3 And this is where the good message comes. I'm like, what should I buy in Trust Wallet? I've downloaded it.
And she says, find USDT to buy. That's Tether.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 Because USDT is not affected by any rise or fall in the currency market.

Speaker 4 Which is true, actually. It's pegged to the dollar.

Speaker 3 Yes, it's a stable coin. Each tether is always supposed to be worth $1.
Yes. Because I was sort of wondering,

Speaker 3 all the cryptos would probably be pretty good for Vicky's purposes. Yeah.
Why Tether? This is why. It's part of the sales pitch that she's like, oh, it's always worth a dollar.
Don't worry about it.

Speaker 3 So one of the funny things I always learned in investigating crypto is that In theory, there's no fees, but there's always lots of fees. They always hit you with some fees.

Speaker 3 And in order to buy Tether the way that Vicki suggested, I have to pay $105.86 for 93 tethers. So I'm paying $12 in fees.
Yes. I don't know why.
Vicki says it doesn't matter.

Speaker 3 We're going to make so much money on the nodes.

Speaker 4 You're going to be buying a Tesla.

Speaker 1 Okay, so just to recap, because I fear this may be getting a little bit confusing. Vicki told Zeke to spend $100 real dollars on $100 worth of the cryptocurrency Tether.

Speaker 1 And then she told him to transfer that crypto into a wallet, a crypto bank account on the internet. Vicki was saying to Zeke that this wallet belonged to a crypto trading app called ZBXS.

Speaker 1 More likely, the money was just going directly to the entity behind Vicki Hoe.

Speaker 1 Zeke, meanwhile, is dutifully following all of these instructions so that he could learn as much about the entity as possible.

Speaker 3 I tell her I'm nervous, and

Speaker 3 she said, it's okay. I was nervous when I first traded two.
You have to relax, it's not too complicated.

Speaker 3 Then she says, get ready. We have to be ready by 4:30.
You have to make sure you have 500 tethers in ZBXS by then.

Speaker 3 And at this point, I might have been busy that day. Also, like, my budget for losing money to Vicky Ho was more like $100.
I didn't really want to lose this $500.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 I was sort of hesitating. And she starts calling me, asking me to send the 500.

Speaker 5 Okay, Jake, what are you doing? I see you got my message. Why do you not reply to me back?

Speaker 5 Why you don't pick up my phone?

Speaker 5 I'm waiting for your reply to me, okay?

Speaker 3 I don't know why. I did sort of stick to the truth in my communications with her, a lot of them.
So I said I had to take my daughter to the doctor. She said, well, the child's body is important.

Speaker 3 The child's body is important. Yeah.
She asks, has your daughter's health improved? She suggests that I maybe do some trades so I could get money to buy my daughter a gift.

Speaker 1 In this moment, when the person claiming to be Vicki Ho was telling Zeke to send her more money so that he could buy his ailing daughter a gift, things had gone as far as were really useful for Zeke.

Speaker 1 He actually had what he needed from this scammer posing as Vicki Ho.

Speaker 1 Cryptocurrency is traceable.

Speaker 1 When crypto is sent from one person to another, it usually leaves a public trail, which meant Zeke could look at the wallet where he'd sent his hundred bucks and see all of its other transactions, the money in, the money out.

Speaker 1 And when he looked, he saw vast sums of money flowing from suckers like him in the West to this address where it would sit for a moment and then move on to Asian crypto exchanges, presumably to be cashed out by the scammers.

Speaker 4 Do you have a sense of how do people come to lose like millions of dollars in this?

Speaker 3 These scammers are often not any any more convincing than Vicki was with me. Yeah.
But

Speaker 3 one thing a lot of the people have in common is that they've hit some sort of desperate circumstance in their life.

Speaker 3 Like they have a terminal illness or they've just lost a loved one or it's the pandemic and they're unemployed and they've had to move in with their parents.

Speaker 3 And a lot of people, if you're at least middle-aged, have access to some amount of money. You could max out your credit card, even if you're broke.

Speaker 4 Yeah, there's weirdly something exciting about knowing that this door that you're dancing in front of, some people have walked through to complete ruin.

Speaker 4 Like you're talking to someone who is trying to push you into a process where they will take all of your money and all the money you have access to.

Speaker 4 And that's like a dangerous thing, but they're also doing it in such a clumsy way that you can like have fun with it, I guess.

Speaker 3 Yeah,

Speaker 3 although once you know what's really going on on the other end of the text messages, it becomes not fun at all. And I started to wonder if Vicky might be punished for her failure to scam me.

Speaker 3 And I just, I realized that it was time to come clean.

Speaker 2 After the break, Zeke and PJ start digging into how much trouble Vicky might actually be in and discover a whole web of human trafficking and scam compounds on the other end of the text bubble.

Speaker 2 More from the search engine podcast when we come back.

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Speaker 2 So, for Zeke, what started out as a fun side reporting project of getting scammed starts to feel a little icky.

Speaker 2 Like, what if pretending he's going to hand over all this money and then not doing it ends up getting the person on the other end of the text bubble in big trouble?

Speaker 2 So, he goes searching for someone who knows what might be happening over there, and he finds this group of volunteers who call themselves the Global Anti-Scam Organization.

Speaker 2 He ends up talking to a guy known as Ice Toad, and he handed off Ice Toad's contact information to search engine host PJ Vote.

Speaker 1 I actually talked to Ice Toad. He told me that like many people who end up in this world, he arrived because he got scammed himself.
The trick he fell for. It used to be called a romance scam.

Speaker 1 At some point, those romance scams evolved into what we now know to be pig butchering scams.

Speaker 7 Otherwise known as Shaozhao Pen in Chinese.

Speaker 1 Ice Toad finds the global anti-scam organization, which was started by a woman from Singapore who had also been scammed.

Speaker 1 But while the organization began in an effort to protect people being scammed, its members had started to learn about the scammers themselves.

Speaker 7 Because we realized that these scammers were actually, in a lot of instances, they weren't choosing to scam other people.

Speaker 7 They had been human trafficked into a place and then basically locked in a compound and forced to scam people.

Speaker 1 How did you begin to understand that?

Speaker 7 We got a few of them to admit the fact that

Speaker 7 they couldn't escape and they would tell you what was actually going on in hopes that you would ring up law enforcement or whoever and get them freed.

Speaker 1 When Zeke finally found Ice Toad, what he'd originally wanted was just help from a crypto tracing expert who might be able to follow the $100 he'd sent Vicky Ho further and more forensically than he could on his own.

Speaker 3 Ice Toad is explaining to me how he can trace the crypto wallets. And he's like, I've personally seen hundreds of millions of dollars of Tether move because of these scams.
Oh, wow.

Speaker 3 And I'm, I'm kind of thinking there might be some way to locate Vicky. Maybe not Vicki herself, but like Ice Toad is like, you know, who you should really talk to is this Vietnamese hacker.

Speaker 1 The Vietnamese hacker helped Zeke crack into the fake crypto trading app that Vicki Ho had given him.

Speaker 1 Although whoever was behind the app quickly shut down the whole operation when they realized that an intrusion was happening.

Speaker 1 But from that hacker and from other people Zeke spoke to, he was able to to get a sense of what a day in the life was like for someone in one of these scam compounds.

Speaker 3 What I've learned is that there's like a hierarchy within the compound.

Speaker 3 And the lowest level workers who've been trafficked, they got 10 phones, each has like a different fake identity, and they're trolling the world, sending spam messages, sending messages on LinkedIn, on Instagram, on Tinder, whatever.

Speaker 3 And they've got like some sort of quota for how many calls they need to initiate. Yeah.
Once you've got somebody hooked, hooked, that person gets passed off to like a manager.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 4 almost like the moment you write back, you get pushed up to someone who is more of like the closer.

Speaker 3 Yeah. And it was actually Vicki one

Speaker 3 hit me on text message. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Once we chatted a bit, they moved me to WhatsApp. Oh, interesting.
And that's probably when a more skillful Vicky took over. Right.
Right.

Speaker 3 And then the person who sent me those voice memos saying that they were Vicky,

Speaker 3 presumably that's like some poor female victim whose job is like recording all the voice memos. I see.
And then if you consistently don't meet your quota, they would sell you to another compound.

Speaker 3 The only way to leave is if you pay a ransom of like anywhere from like five to thirty grand.

Speaker 3 And I just, I realized that it was time to come clean. So I told her, I'm an investigative reporter, and I'm only talking to you because I wanted to figure out how this works.

Speaker 3 And I also said, I've heard bad things about the working conditions for people like you.

Speaker 3 And she wrote back and said, oh, oh, it's not what you think. Her WhatsApp picture disappeared and I never heard from her again.

Speaker 1 Zeke had learned that many of these scam messages originated in Cambodia and more specifically from a single city, actually a single neighborhood there, a place called Chinatown in a beach town called Sihanookville Sihanookville is a string of high-rises along the water it looks a little bit like a less glitzy Miami I found a blog from like a kind of confused tourist who went on like a very detailed drive around Chinatown hello everybody and welcome back today we're in Sanookville

Speaker 1 There's actually a ton of video blogs in this strange genre.

Speaker 3 European tourists careening around Sihanookville with with a camera on unaware of what it is they're really filming we are in sahanockville it seems like a very interesting place we are in sahukaville in recent years there was a huge casino development boom fueled by chinese money it's now got like a hundred casinos another casino is that another casino yeah it is casino number seven but sihanookville fell on hard times like the skyline is completely unfinished there's literally like thousands of unfinished buildings around Sienookville because this development boom just like stopped.

Speaker 10 Casinos and half-built buildings. It doesn't make any sense.

Speaker 3 And the casinos, the ones that were built, had no customers coming in.

Speaker 3 So a lot of these casinos turned to scamming.

Speaker 4 And sorry, this vacation blogger, what did they report seeing?

Speaker 3 On the ground floor, a lot of the buildings have... restaurants, barbershops, bodegas, all with signage in Chinese because like the intended customer is not Cambodian.
But the stores are divided by

Speaker 3 metal bars in the middle because the workers might be going to the restaurant from inside the courtyard and they don't want them going out to the street to escape.

Speaker 4 Oh, so it's like a prison city almost.

Speaker 3 Yeah. And there's a police station right at the entrance.
to

Speaker 3 Chinatown. And the reports are like the police don't do anything.

Speaker 3 A lot of the local news, they're interviewing the people who like stand on the street and sell cigarettes or the guy who runs the bodega or whatever, people who aren't involved but who just live in the neighborhood.

Speaker 3 And that one of these people said, if an ambulance doesn't come every week, it's a wonder.

Speaker 1 Zeke's implication here is that the ambulances kept coming to the compounds because the people inside were being beaten badly enough, often enough, that they frequently needed to be taken to the hospital.

Speaker 1 Zeke starts talking to local reporters in Cambodia who've been investigating these compounds. Danielle Keaton Olson and Mec Dura.
They both worked for a paper there called Voice of Democracy.

Speaker 3 They've been writing these exposés about Sihanoukville. And

Speaker 3 in Chinatown, there were just like 40 or 50 buildings where, according to what they were saying, thousands of people were trapped there and forced to run these scams.

Speaker 8 My name is Mec Dara. I'm from Cambodia, and I have been

Speaker 8 a reporter for more than 10 years.

Speaker 1 I talked to DeRa over the world's glitchiest internet connection. He was connecting from an internet cafe in Phnom Penh, the city where he began his career as a reporter.

Speaker 8 I start writing about crime and then I start to move into the human right, environment, politics.

Speaker 1 The way DeRa first started to crack the scam compound story was when a Chinese friend brought him a group of people who had just gotten out of one of the compounds.

Speaker 8 He brought me

Speaker 8 two or three or four people who have been like released from the compound. And I start to interview him, I start to learn what they do.

Speaker 1 As details emerged, he kept adjusting his picture of what life was like in there. More cruel.
More brutal.

Speaker 1 He started hanging around outside the compounds, looking at how their exteriors were set up.

Speaker 8 With barbed wire, with guard, we are the street guard.

Speaker 1 He saw high security. Barbed wire, guards, people only allowed to enter or leave with a card.
One of the questions I had about all this was just, why not just pay people to do this?

Speaker 1 Why hold them prisoner at all? What I learned is that these compounds seem to be an evolution.

Speaker 1 In the beginning, some people likely were coming in voluntarily for jobs where they'd be paid to scam Americans and Chinese people. Here's Zeke.

Speaker 3 Some of them might sort of know they're getting into scamming, but they don't realize that

Speaker 3 they will

Speaker 3 be stuck there or that they'll be abused.

Speaker 4 And is it sort of like that similarly, like on the American side of it, the reason people fall for these scams is they're desperate and, you know, something has happened in their lives that has thrown wrench into the gears.

Speaker 4 It sounds like for the people who end up being compelled to run these scams, it's similar. It's like their life hits a rough patch and they try something risky that they might not have tried.

Speaker 3 Right. I mean, if someone told you, do you want to go work in customer service in Cambodia? Like, we'll give you $200 a month.
That would hold no appeal for you. Right.

Speaker 3 But yes, like there are a class of people who can't find any jobs, who are desperate for work. And when they see an ad on Facebook or something like that, they're like, I'll give it a try.

Speaker 1 So Zeke says this may have started as a business without human trafficking. And some of these compounds may include willing workers,

Speaker 1 but the margins are thin here. It takes a lot of messages to find a sucker.

Speaker 1 And DeRa told me that he talked to a boss from one of the compounds who described the financial pressure he feels he's under.

Speaker 8 One scammer, local scammer, he told me like, we need to scam this money to get at least 1 million. If we don't get, we will go bankrupt.

Speaker 1 The boss was worried about going bankrupt. So the overbosses push the bosses under them and the bosses push the people beneath, which in this environment often means physical torture.

Speaker 7 People being tortured, people being cut out hand, finger, leg, electric shop.

Speaker 3 Just floor after floor of people who were forced to send scam messages around the clock.

Speaker 3 And if they didn't meet quotas, they'd be beaten or tortured, like shocked with electric batons, or even killed.

Speaker 3 Like I've heard from people that if they didn't meet their quota, they had to line up and beat each other. And they'd be like, if you don't beat each other hard enough, like we will beat you.

Speaker 3 Just like the worst, the worst stories.

Speaker 1 Zeke wanted to go to see these compounds in person for himself. He did not expect to get inside, but he wanted to see how close he could get.
So he takes a bus from Vietnam to Cambodia.

Speaker 1 He meets up with the reporter Mec Dara and they head to the neighborhood where all of these scam compounds are.

Speaker 3 Chinatown is outside the city center. It's like maybe a 15-minute drive from town.
And there's a big avenue that runs through the middle of it.

Speaker 3 And on the right is this like blue glass X-shaped unfinished casino.

Speaker 3 And on the left is

Speaker 3 two different groups of office towers. The first group, maybe a dozen buildings, could have held thousands of people.

Speaker 3 These ones, as we get there, they're clearly empty and the gates are open and we're able to walk into the courtyard. But if you keep going, you get to a second group of buildings

Speaker 3 that surround a hotel called the KB Hotel. People call Kaibo because it's next to this KB or Kaibo Hotel.
Okay. And it's another like 12 buildings that could have held a few thousand people.

Speaker 1 This was the place that Zeke had heard so many rumors about. The place that the text message from Vicky Ho had drawn him to.
A boomtown gone bust, half built that had turned into this.

Speaker 1 A string of nondescript buildings modified to become more like prisons.

Speaker 3 This whole area is weird because it's clearly built to be like a fancy casino, but all of the office towers towers that held the trafficked workers were super run down and dirty and totally out of place.

Speaker 3 But at the center of it, there's this KB hotel, which has this gold facade. It's like a pretty fancy looking hotel.
Weirdly, though, like it actually appeared to be open to the public.

Speaker 4 The hotel?

Speaker 3 Yes. And a small adjoining casino.

Speaker 4 So did you try to just walk in?

Speaker 3 Yes. I decided, yeah, I wanted to see what was going on in this hotel.
But I'm out of my depth. I don't speak Chinese.
It's hard for me to know what anything means. I had gone in by myself.

Speaker 3 I didn't bring a translator or anything. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Zeke is a fantastic investigative reporter in print.

Speaker 11 He was not there in the field as an audio reporter, but he did record one 12-second clip inside the hotel, which he sent me.

Speaker 3 I like this music.

Speaker 3 This is Chinese music.

Speaker 1 I like this music, Zeke observes. This is Chinese music, the staff member helpfully points out.

Speaker 3 We saw no one anywhere. Like, the hotel is fully staffed, but like, there are no.

Speaker 4 But also completely empty.

Speaker 3 Yeah, yeah, yeah. He showed me lots of different nice rooms, each of which had views of like

Speaker 3 the place where people were.

Speaker 4 People would be held against their will and beaten.

Speaker 3 Then in the lobby, there's like a grand marble staircase that leads upstairs. And when I walk up there, I see a massive restaurant, like where you could host weddings.
And there

Speaker 3 is like a small buffet set out. The host seems pretty confused that I am there.

Speaker 3 And I might not be interpreting this right, but it seemed like they were so not used to having like a customer there that they didn't even really have

Speaker 3 any habit of like collecting payment. So he was just like, go ahead, eat at the buffet.
And so there's only a few people in there. Everybody seems really at home.

Speaker 3 Like there is a fridge with beer and you just go take it.

Speaker 4 So is your suspicion, like obviously it's, it's hard to prove, but the hotel was almost just like the base of operations for the people profiting from the compound?

Speaker 3 Yes. Like the workers are not allowed to leave.
So my thinking was that these are like hires up who work at these compounds or connected to them somehow. And this is like their cafeteria.

Speaker 3 But again, again, I really have no idea what's going on. Yeah.
So, one of the hostesses spoke English and so, like, came over to see if I needed anything.

Speaker 3 And I was like, what's with this place? Why is it so empty? Yeah. What's with these dirty buildings next door? Yeah.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 she said,

Speaker 3 It only opened to the public a couple months ago, i.e., after the raids.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 she said that before that,

Speaker 3 only people who worked in the buildings had been allowed to come to the hotel.

Speaker 3 And I'm like, why is there all these armed guards? And she says, this is Chinatown. Don't you know?

Speaker 3 And I'm like, no, I don't know. And she's like, the people inside, they can't go outside.
Oh, wow. She just said it.
And then I made like a horrible face, I think. And she tried to reassure me.

Speaker 3 And she's like, don't worry. the staff here, we have our freedom.

Speaker 3 And I was just like, oh no. I just thought like, this is horrible.
And DeRa and our driver picked me up. Yeah.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 we're driving out of Chinatown.

Speaker 3 And right by the police station on your way out of Chinatown, I see a closed currency exchange.

Speaker 3 And the signs have been taken down, but you can still sort of see the shadows of like the letters that they had on the facade. Yeah.

Speaker 3 And it's USDT and it's advertising that they'll like trade Tether for cash. God.

Speaker 4 So for you, it's like you see all that misery. So many things have to happen to create that situation.

Speaker 4 But what you see undergirding it is Tether, like this cryptocurrency that you had originally been curious about.

Speaker 4 Like that, I mean, if it weren't Tether, it might be a different form of crypto, but that without digital very difficult to trace money you don't have a scam that's able to get that baroque and organized and stay up for that long that in a world where you know you had the same authoritarian regime and you had people wanting to make money in human misery that just the money trail of banking would mean that it was easier for even like other countries to prosecute this.

Speaker 3 Yes, but I will say in recent months, this has become like a bigger issue among governments.

Speaker 1 A study from the University of Texas estimates that between 2020 and 2024, pig butchering scammers have likely stolen more than $75 billion internationally.

Speaker 1 Even though it is in many cases Americans falling for these scams, it's not entirely clear what the American government could do about them.

Speaker 1 Zeke believes that the problem, it may actually be solved in China.

Speaker 3 Most of the victims, both of the trafficking and the financial victims, are Chinese.

Speaker 1 These days, Zeke is back in America, where he continues to chase down all manner of financial funny business. This week, it was a lender accused of making illegal loans to small businesses.

Speaker 1 Mec Dura, who covered the scam compounds in Cambodia perhaps closer than anyone else, no longer has a newspaper job. His paper was shut down last year by the Cambodian regime.

Speaker 1 Dura told us he now spends his time gardening vegetables and continuing to research criminal activity associated with the compounds. He said the one new trend in the scamming industry these days, AI.

Speaker 1 Some of these scam bosses have figured out that a chatbot can do this work just as well as a trafficked human. Honestly, one job AI could steal where I don't think anybody would complain.

Speaker 2 That was PJ Vogt, host of the Search Engine podcast, with his guest Zeke Fox, who's an investigative reporter at Bloomberg.

Speaker 2 You can hear the full episode in the search engine feed, which is available wherever pods are cast. If you're new to Planet Money, welcome.
The water is warm.

Speaker 2 Feel free to scroll back through our episode feed for dispatches from the trade war, stories on how the economy got addicted to subscriptions, and the optimal way to price an egg during an egg shortage.

Speaker 1 Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey and Jigsaw Productions. It was created by me, PJ Vote, and Truthy Pinamanini, and it's produced by Garrett Graham and Noah John.

Speaker 1 Fact-checking this week by Sean Merchant.

Speaker 1 Theme, original composition and mixing by Armin Bazarian. Our executive producers are Jenna Weiss-Berman and Leah Reese Dennis.

Speaker 2 This episode of Planet Money was produced by Emma Peasley and edited by Marianne McCune. It was engineered by Gilly Moon.
Alex Goldmark is our executive producer. I'm Alexi Horowitzkazi.
This is NPR.

Speaker 3 Thanks for listening.

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