[Andy] A whistleblower trapped inside this scam compound
run by the Chinese mafia contacted me.
[Source] If they catch me, they actually kill me.
[Andy] Determined to leak his capture’s secrets
in real time, he would ultimately deliver
an unprecedented cache of evidence.
[Erin] This is a major, major deal.
Exposing the tactics and hierarchy
of a slave colony here in Northern Laos,
where trafficked workers are forced to scam millions
from American victims.
But first, you had to make it out alive.
I’m Andy Greenberg.
I investigate the strange, dark, and subversive sides
of technology for Wired.
This is Hacklab: The Whistleblower
Inside a Crypto Scam Slave Compound.
This footage was secretly filmed inside a scam compound
in Northern Laos.
The workers you see are trafficking victims
confined to the compound and forced to work
15-hour night shifts synced to US daytime hours.
Their job is to target Western victims with text messages
that lure them into fake crypto investments,
sometimes stealing hundreds of thousands
or even millions of dollars.
The color of the flags on their desks marks whether
a team of scammers is meeting their quotas.
It’s part of a cruel system of incentives and coercion
that drives the most lucrative form of cybercrime
in the world.
The video was shot by a source
who first contacted me last June.
It all started with an email, no subject line,
sent from an address on the encrypted email service
Proton Mail.
Hello, it began.
I’m currently working inside a major crypto romance
scam operation based in the Golden Triangle.
The unnamed source said he was a computer engineer
trapped in the compound, forced to work as a scammer.
I’ve collected internal evidence of how the scam works
step by step, he said.
I want to help shut this down.
I knew only a little bit about the Golden Triangle,
a lawless stretch of Laos bordering Myanmar and Thailand
dominated by Chinese syndicates that traffic in everything
from drugs to human organs.
But after 15 years of covering crypto crime as a reporter,
I’d learned that crypto romance scams,
known as pig butchering, drain tens of billions of dollars
a year from victims.
Behind this scam epidemic are hundreds of thousands
of trafficked workers from the poorest regions
of Asia and Africa, forced by the Chinese mob
to carry out these scams inside dystopian slave compounds.
What I didn’t know, what no one had ever seen before,
was what this industry looked like from the inside,
from the perspective of a whistleblower
sharing internal information in real time.
I gave the source my number
on the encrypted messaging app Signal.
That night after my kids were asleep, my phone lit up.
The source began sending documents, flow charts, scripts,
internal guides that revealed step-by-step
how the scams worked: fake Facebook profiles,
AI-generated deepfakes and hired models,
carefully scripted affection,
luring victims into fake trading platforms.
[phone ringing]
And then my phone rang.
Hello.
[Source] How are you?
[Andy] Good. Good.
Thank you for being willing to talk.
What is your name or what can I call you?
[Source] You can call me Red Bull, okay?
[Andy] Oh, Red Bull, Red Bull?
[Red Bull] Yeah, yes.
Later he told me he’d been looking at an empty can
of the energy drink as we spoke.
Okay, okay.
He said he contacted US and Indian authorities,
Interpol, several news outlets.
I was the only one who responded.
[Red Bull] Not simple thing here.
Like, big scam, very, very big scam.
[Andy] Wow.
[Red Bull] So you are the person
I share my everything with you, okay?
And you help me to expose this, right?
I was thrown off.
My mind was reeling.
I started a new call, this time with video enabled.
I needed to see who I was talking to.
Hey, hey.
So he showed me.
Thank you for picking up the phone.
Good to see you.
Red Bull told me his backstory.
He was in his early twenties from India
with a diploma in computer engineering.
He’d been recruited with a fake job offer:
IT manager, good salary, overseas opportunity.
But when he arrived in Laos,
his passport was taken by his bosses.
Like, can you walk around a bit?
Like turn your camera around
and show me out the window.
[Red Bull] This is the room, this is the building here.
[Andy] Now he found himself trapped within a cluster
of ugly concrete buildings known as the Boshang compound
in Northern Laos.
Like most pig butchering scammers,
he’d pretend to be a wealthy woman online.
His job was to build trust, manufacture intimacy,
slowly guide victims towards fake crypto
investment platforms run by his bosses.
[Red Bull] So please keep it secret, okay?
Don’t tell anyone. Okay.
[Red Bull] Right now, my mission is, brother, expose this.
[Andy] No, thank you for trusting me.
[Red Bull] Remember me in your prayers.
I, I, I have a lot of trust on you.
Don’t take any unnecessary risks, please.
[Red Bull] Okay, okay, no problem.
Thank you very much.
The next morning, after a few hours sleep,
I reached out to Erin West, a former prosecutor
who now runs an anti-scam group called Operation Shamrock.
[Erin] How was he able to make this call?
He had to ask for permission from his boss
to like go to a hotel, but he did.
And then he showed me the front of this hotel
and it was too blurry, but it was a Chinese sign.
It’s all Chinese organized crime,
and they move into locations
and they literally take over,
like everything is in Chinese.
All the food around there is Chinese.
He had showed me a fake Chinese ID
that they created for him.
West had talked to survivors of scam compounds, she told me.
She’d never heard of an actual whistleblower
within a compound leaking information to a journalist.
[Erin] This is a major, major deal.
He seems to be saying that
like a lot of the victims are,
maybe even all of them are Indian American.
[Erin] They do that.
They do Malaysians on Malaysians,
they do Japanese on Japanese,
and here’s someone on the inside
who’s willing to share this information
and tell us everything about how this whole thing runs.
[intriguing music]
From that point on,
Red Bull and I fell into a routine.
Every morning, New York time, late night in Laos,
he would walk outside his dorm
and call me on Signal
before heading to the cafeteria for dinner.
The start of a work shift
that would last until the afternoon of the next day.
Sometimes Red Bull would tell me to record my screen.
Then he would walk into the building
and secretly film his surroundings
while pretending to talk to his uncle.
I got a tour through the bright lights
of the Boshang offices lobby and stairwells,
the line of depressed-looking South Asian
and African men lining up for food in its canteen.
As they filed into the office,
team leaders took employees’ personal phones
and put them in a box when they began their shifts,
and they were strictly prohibited
from taking work devices out of the office.
But otherwise,
the surveillance of staffers seemed surprisingly loose.
The compound ran on a system
of indentured servitude and debts,
not shackles and chains.
On the surface, it didn’t look like
the modern slavery I read about elsewhere.
Instead, the whole operation felt more like a scene
from Sorry to Bother You,
a grotesque parody of a corporate sales floor.
Bosses would post motivational messages
to an office-wide WhatsApp group.
They wrote things like,
Every day brings a new opportunity,
a chance to connect, to inspire,
and to make a difference.
Talk to that next customer
like you’re bringing them something valuable
because you are.
There were promises of commissions and getting rich,
but in reality,
the system kept workers trapped in debt.
Red Bull, or Macho, the pseudonym in the compound,
earned about $500 a month,
then lost almost all of it to daily fines,
usually for missing quotas.
Red Bull told me he had never successfully scammed anyone.
That meant he was fined so much
that he was virtually broke
and forced to subsist almost entirely
on the food in the office cafeteria,
mostly rice and vegetables
that he said tasted of strange chemicals.
Even that food, he said, was denied
to anyone who so much as arrived late to their shift.
Underneath the pretense of a voluntary sales force
was a brutal system.
The bosses held the workers’ passports
so no one could go home
until they paid off their debt.
Red Bull had heard of colleagues
who were beaten or electrocuted,
even one sold into prostitution.
[Red Bull] If like, if the people know about me,
I am talking with you,
they definitely kill me without any reason.
Well, I will not publish anything then
until you are free, right?
[Red Bull] I don’t want to go home without stop this.
Understand?
I just want to make sure
that we can do this investigation
slowly and carefully together.
[Red Bull] Okay, okay, bye, okay.
Red Bull secretly installed Signal on his work computer,
changing the name and icon
to look like a shortcut to its hard drive,
and sent me messages during his shift
with disappearing texts set to erase themselves
after five minutes.
Soon, I was receiving a steady stream
of pictures, screenshots, and videos:
a spreadsheet and photos of a whiteboard
on which his team’s work was tracked
with scam totals in the thousands of dollars
next to many of the group’s nicknames.
I learned that the term recharge
meant scamming the same victim again.
He sent me a photo
of a Chinese ceremonial drum on a stand.
When someone pulled off a big scam,
six figures, sometimes even more,
[drum reverberating]
the scammer was allowed to strike it to celebrate.
[gentle music]
Later, Wired analyzed Red Bull’s leaked data.
We had all these screenshots, right?
Of all of these text conversations
that Red Bull’s team was having.
Each post has a profile picture next to it,
and what we’re able to do is use machine learning
to identify each individual post in that image
and extract both the message and who was sending it.
And in fact, they posted a special message
every time they successfully scammed someone
and included the amount of the scam
and who had pulled it off.
And so we were able to find those specific posts
and then take the numbers
that they had announced in each individual post
and add them together.
[Andy] And what is the result?
These few dozen workers pulled in
over $2.2 million over the course of three months.
My colleagues and I also studied
the dozens of internal scam scripts that Red Bull sent:
blueprints of how their fraud worked in chilling detail,
how to create fake profiles,
how to open conversations,
stall video calls until deepfake models
who worked in a specific room
of the building were ready.
The scripts have line-by-line dialogues
so the scammers know how to go through
an interaction like to a really granular degree.
And there are lists of topics for making conversation,
documents, like a hundred chat topics.
What’s your favorite group photo
that you’ve taken with friends?
or Have you recently bought
something nice for yourself?
But then it gets into
these much more emotionally evocative questions.
What was your dream when you were little?
or What was the last time I cried for?
Some scripts covered the use of cryptocurrency
and how to coach victims to distrust their own banks
when they issued fraud warnings.
Your bank might say
that there’s something wrong with this,
but like don’t listen to them.
That’s just because they don’t want you
moving your money out of their financial institution
and into cryptocurrency or into this other thing.
It’s this sort of inoculation
and preparing them in advance.
Can you believe my bank said
this might be a financial scam
or crypto scam or something?
It’s like a really wild psychological trick.
Well, a scammer wouldn’t talk about scamming.
That would be nuts.
I mean, a lot of these documents are fully in Chinese,
and so Zeyi, you were helping us out
as a native Chinese speaker
by analyzing a lot of ’em,
including this website.
That was really interesting.
That is kind of massive collection
online of scam stuff.
Yeah, so this is like a public website
that anyone can open and look into it.
It’s designed in a way
that if you are a scammer,
you’re trying to answer a question
that just came up,
you can literally search a topic,
refer to this guide,
and talk in a very convincing way
that if you are a straight male persona
talking to a woman
or you’re a straight woman talking to a man,
or even when you’re a gay man
talking to another gay man,
this is what you should say
to look more real, right?
And they also break it down into topics.
It’s like, okay, what do you talk about
your dinner last night
or your 401k or your mortgage?
And the other funny thing about this website is
that it also has this section
for music playlists for people to listen to.
This is Spotify for scammers,
among other things?
That’s a very accurate description.
It’s like a playlist of like
hundreds of hours of electronic music
that you can play
when you’re busy scamming other people.
I mean, these are 15-hour night shifts,
so you can imagine
that they’re like trying to get people
to kind of tune out the rest of the world.
[energetic music]
The bosses micromanage the fiction.
One message coached workers to explain
when their persona was traveling and why.
Another warned not to mention what car you drive
unless you can produce a convincing photo of it.
What’s really wild is
that every single one of the workers
is required to post their schedule for the day
to their bosses,
and not their actual real life schedule,
but the schedule of their persona,
like their morning yoga and meditation
and setting positive intentions,
and then lunchtime with family
and dentist visits and gym time.
The irony, of course, is that in reality,
these poor guys are spending 15 hours
in a fluorescent-lit office,
hunched over a keyboard,
spamming out messages,
and then going home to a dorm room
with five other guys on bunks
and a toilet in the corner of the room.
Red Bull sent me screenshots too
of internal chats in the tragic responses
from the lonely victims,
begging, confused, crying messages, said,
Always had a dream of having a girlfriend,
then wife like you.
You stop talking to me.
I will continue praying for your mom.
Please help me withdraw my money, okay?
Question mark, question mark, question mark, crying emojis.
One victim appeared to have recorded himself
sobbing in his car after losing everything.
The video was shared around the office for laughs.
So in total, how many scammers are there
in the whole Boshang compound?
[Red Bull] In whole Golden Triangle,
500 plus offices, 50, 60 buildings, okay?
In my office there is 100 employees.
Okay?
[Red Bull] And each team have one Chinese boss
and one Indian professional person.
Red Bull was part of Team Elite,
one of about a dozen teams with names
like Team Invincible, Team Money,
Team Excellent, and so on.
He explained that his supervisor
was an Indian man with a short beard
and aviator glasses
who went by the name Amani.
Amani’s supervisor was nicknamed Wuhan or 50K,
a short Chinese man with tight pants
and a tattoo on his chest.
Other bosses went by the names Libo, Wanezai, Yanzu,
and 50K’s boss was called Dahai, or Sea.
The boss above all of them was known as Alang,
but Red Bull never saw him in person.
[Red Bull] He’s very big and very powerful person.
He also doing here organs, you know, organ supply.
Really? Human organs?
Sometimes when Red Bull and I
would speak or text, he’d call me Uncle.
[Red Bull] Don’t worry, Uncle, I will be back.
A cover story in case anyone ever overheard
or seized his phone.
For a while, we even tried a different cover story
of me pretending to be a secret girlfriend back home,
heart emojis and Miss yous,
until it became too embarrassing to keep up
and we scrapped it.
It also reminded me a bit too much
of the fraud romances his team was carrying out.
One night he sent me a kind of gentle parting message.
[Reader] Good night. Rest easy.
You have done enough for today.
Let your mind rest and let tomorrow come
with fresh clarity and quiet strength.
I’ll admit it was actually a bit touching.
I wasn’t getting much sleep at the time.
Then the next day he told me
that this line had been copied directly from Chat GPT.
Red Bull explained how the compound used that AI tool
and others like DeepSeek to keep conversations flowing
endlessly to sound caring, romantic, persuasive.
All of the scammers on his team
were trained to use these LLMs to clean up their language,
find just the right sentiment,
and never run out of inviting turns of phrase.
It had clearly worked on me.
It’s funny how easy it is to be taken in
by a bit of sympathetic text
sent by a new acquaintance on the other side of the world.
[intriguing music]
As time passed and the collection
of materials Red Bull sent to me mounted,
I was also getting the sense
that the walls were closing in on him.
One day, Red Bull told me
his team leader, Amani, asked him with menacing calm
why he was spending so much time outside,
referring, it seemed, to the walks
when Red Bull would talk to me on Signal,
and generating so few new clients.
Maybe Amani suggested a beating or some electric shocks
would increase his productivity.
Then Red Bull also told me
new surveillance cameras had been installed:
one behind his desk, one in front.
I told him all of this meant
he should immediately stop messaging me from the office.
My editors went further.
They insisted that for Red Bull’s safety,
I should stop working with him at all until he was free.
When I broke that news to Red Bull
that our reporting process was finished,
he told me to my surprise
that he wanted to leave the compound immediately.
His escape plan was to forge a document
claiming that he was under police investigation in India.
He hoped his bosses would let him leave temporarily
to deal with this situation.
I’m very worried about like
that they’re going to know that it’s fake
and they’re going to punish you.
[Red Bull] Let’s see, just try.
And I have a hope this work.
[intriguing music]
One afternoon, two weeks into my communications
with Red Bull,
I received one of the worst emails
I’ve ever opened in my life.
[Reader] The people catch me
and now they get my phone everything.
They beat me and now maybe they kill me.
I am trapped.
I have no way to get out.
They have my personal phone and my ID card.
If there is anything you can do, please help me.
From Red Bull’s messages, it seemed like
his bosses hadn’t detected he was talking to me,
but were punishing him for trying to escape.
Soon after, he messaged again:
his captors had locked him in a room, he wrote,
and demanded 20,000 yuan, about $2,800, for his release.
I felt sick.
Journalistic ethics forbid paying sources.
Plus, paying a ransom would reward
these human traffickers,
and yet this was a man begging for his life.
At the same time, a dark thought had crept into my mind
that I almost didn’t want to acknowledge.
What if Red Bull was scamming me?
It was clear that he definitely was a real person
inside a scam compound.
But what if this had been the scam all along?
Hook a journalist, make him feel responsible,
then demand payment to save his life.
I frantically consulted experts for advice.
What we’ve seen happen is people are victimized
and have their money stolen from them from scammers,
and then the scammer flips the script and says,
Hey, I’m actually the victim here just like you.
I just need some money to get out.
Would you pay my ransom?
And you can imagine that that would be very effective
on people who have already been brought in
by emotional ties to this person.
It’s another way of scamming.
My editors were firm.
Wired would not pay Red Bull or his captors.
They worried, as did I, that he might be deceiving me.
And still, I had to operate under the assumption
that Red Bull’s nightmare was real.
For several excruciating days,
I didn’t dare reach out to him.
If his captors found out he was communicating
with a reporter, they’d kill him.
But then Red Bull messaged me on Signal to say
that he’d been given his phone back
so they could find someone to pay his ransom.
I risked a call.
[Red Bull] Hello, good morning.
So how are things?
[Red Bull] Things are, things are not,
things are not going good because you know…
I have also fever, you know?
He’d been repeatedly beaten, slapped in the face,
kicked, and forced to confess
to forging the police documents.
His bosses even mixed a mysterious powder
into his water to make him compliant.
It had made him unnaturally talkative and confident,
but then gave him a rash on his skin.
He was denied food and water for days.
[Red Bull] I also sent the message to the Indian Embassy.
No response.
Nobody is going to help me.
I don’t know why.
You know, when the luck is bad, nobody help.
Not long after that call,
Red Bull sent me a kind of confession
written as if he thought he might die in his concrete room.
[Reader] I said I never scammed anyone.
That was not fully true.
The truth is, the Chinese bosses forced me
to bring two people into the scam.
I did not do it by choice.
I feel guilty about it every day.
That is why I want to tell the full truth now.
One victim lost $504, the other about $11,000.
He gave me their names.
I located one and reached out, but got no response.
By the compound’s own rules,
Red Bull should have earned a commission for those scams,
but they never paid him.
Later, I looked back at the picture
of the office whiteboard Red Bull had shared early on.
On it, I could see quite clearly the Chinese name
the compound had given him, Macho,
next to the sum of $504.
I had until then entirely missed this.
Just days later, something else unexpected happened.
Red Bull told me the compound was packing up.
The office computers were boxed,
the staff moved to a new building,
and everyone was ordered to keep working
from their dorm rooms.
He had heard rumors that a police raid was imminent.
During all of this, Red Bull was separated
from his coworkers, forced to sleep on the floor,
fed only sporadically,
often only leftovers or rotten food.
He lost weight.
He was sick with a fever.
For trying to escape,
he was treated more or less like a dog.
Unbelievably, that’s when Red Bull
took the biggest risk of all.
[suspenseful music]
Because of the move to evade a raid,
security measures in the compound had been relaxed
and his coworkers had brought
their work phones into the dormitory.
Red Bull saw an opportunity.
While one of his coworkers was sleeping,
he secretly added his own phone
as a linked device on a WhatsApp
of the coworker’s work phone.
Then, by scrolling through that WhatsApp chat
and recording his own screen,
Red Bull captured nearly three months
of the compound’s hour-by-hour internal chats,
thousands of conversations
between workers and their supervisors,
documenting its scams, quotas, punishments,
manipulations in daily operation
at an unprecedented level of detail.
Nearly 10 gigabytes of evidence.
Here at Wired, we would turn those screen recordings
into 4,200 pages of screenshots.
I have never seen anything
like the materials that you showed me.
What struck you about this workplace?
Well, it’s a slave colony
masquerading as a legitimate business.
It’s run as though this is a car dealership,
and so it’s really creepy to be reading texts
that are a leader sending out suggestions
and inspiration about how to hit these goals,
when in fact the goals are theft of money.
People are disappearing.
People are being beaten
if they don’t make their sales goals.
Just days after he made those screen recordings,
still trapped in the compound after his escape attempt,
Red Bull sent me something else:
videos of dozens of men lined up outside a compound
by Laotian Police.
The raids had begun.
They turned out to be part of a trend
of high-profile fake police crackdowns in the region
where workers are briefly rounded up,
then quickly released and sent back to work.
Red Bull’s bosses had been tipped off
and escaped those raids,
but the move had left them in cramped conditions
with their work disrupted.
As their operation hid from the cops,
Red Bull begged the bosses to let him go.
He argued that he was of no use to them.
He had no money,
and clearly there was no one in the world
willing to pay his ransom.
He was deadweight taking up space
when they were already crowded
into their temporary building.
Shockingly, his bosses agreed.
Rather than kill him, they told him he could leave.
They gave him back his passport,
but told him to get into a car
without most of his belongings, not even his shoes.
He left the Golden Triangle wearing only flip flops.
To scrounge enough money to get home,
he borrowed from his brother
and from a scam compound recruiter
who he promised to go work for,
essentially scamming a scammer.
After weeks of buses, trains, and cheap flights,
Red Bull made it back to India.
Red Bull had rescued himself,
and despite the fact that I had never paid him anything,
not even his ransom when he was held captive,
he continued to send me materials
he’d smuggled out of the compound.
Now, there could finally be no doubt:
Red Bull was real.
A few months later,
I flew to India to meet him in person.
[upbeat music]
All right, here he comes.
He was thinner than I expected.
Quiet.
He had the same shy smile
I remembered from our first video call.
You look great.
Yeah.
It’s really good to see you.
His real name, he told me, was Mohammad Muzahir.
We spent a few days together
and I learned that the brave young man
I’d been communicating with for months
was now broke, traumatized,
sleeping as little as three hours a night,
haunted by the people he had left behind
and by the two victims
he admitted he’d scammed under coercion.
So now that we are publishing this stuff,
is this a happy ending to your story?
Is this in fact what you wanted?
Actually, if I tell you truth,
this is not a happy ending of my story.
This is just a journey I start.
Because I left lot of peoples there,
a lot of my colleagues out there working under pressures.
Lot of womens working under the pressure of Chinese boss.
14 hours, 16 hours, sometimes without food.
So honestly, I’m not happy with the ending of the story
because this memory is still there.
I’m still thinking about the peoples
who are victim of the scam.
When Muzahir isn’t working
or applying to jobs in universities,
he scrolls obsessively through reports of scam operations.
The operation that trapped him, he’s learned,
has already relocated to Cambodia,
a country that’s become, by some measures,
an even safer base for scammers to operate from.
By messaging his former coworkers,
Muzahir says he’s determined
that the compound is now based in the town of Chrey Thum,
a growing hotspot for scam operations.
One of his old bosses too confirmed to Muzahir
in text messages that the compound
is still recruiting new workers,
victims trapped in a system of modern slavery
masquerading as a job.
We’re talking about buildings the size of hotels
that are filled with human trafficked victims
forced to do this work.
The only winner here are the Chinese organized
crime syndicates that are running the whole operation.
They are the leadership.
They are the ones who are building these compounds,
who are bringing in the human trafficked victims,
who are laundering the money out,
and it’s leaving population decimated on both sides.
How did this whole experience change
your ideas about human nature?
Like your, what you think of human beings?
I have no words to express,
but I just want to tell you,
I see the brutal and the dark face of the humanity.
[Andy] Muzahir still believes
that telling his story matters.
He chose to risk his life
and to reveal his real name and face
in part to inspire others to come forward.
When someone read about me,
then lot of Red Bulls stand up and speak.
Many victims of these scam slave colonies
never make it home
and never before has one spoken out
from inside like Muzahir and survived.
Even then, his whistleblowing
hasn’t shut down the operation
that enslaved him as he intended.
I can only hope that what he shared
and the sprawling humanitarian crisis it reveals
will help persuade the world
that it’s finally time to stop looking away.
Read Wired’s full story on Red Bull
and our analysis of his leaked materials on wired.com.
[bright digital music]