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Article: He Leaked the Secrets of a Southeast Asian Scam Compound. Then He Had to Get Out Alive

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A reporter received an encrypted email from a person calling themselves "Red Bull," who claimed to be a computer engineer forced to work inside a major cryptocurrency romance scam operation, or "pig butchering" scheme, in Southeast Asia's Golden Triangle. The source, acting as an internal whistleblower, provided detailed evidence of the scam's steps, which involve creating fake social media profiles using AI deepfakes to lure victims into fake investment platforms.

The article describes these scam compounds as a sprawling, multi-billion dollar industry staffed by hundreds of thousands of trafficked and enslaved laborers, controlled by organized crime, which destroys both the lives of defrauded victims and the forced workers. This marked a rare instance of a current insider offering to expose the operations from within the compound, leading to an encrypted call and document exchange between the source and the reporter.

The main topics covered are cryptocurrency romance scams ("pig butchering"), forced labor and human trafficking in scam compounds, and the role of an internal whistleblower providing evidence.

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https://www.wired.com/story/he-leaked-the-secrets-southeast-asian-scam-compound-then-had-to-get-out-alive/

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2026-01-27 11:00

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2026-03-04 14:33

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2026-03-04 15:03

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It was a perfect June evening in New York when I received my first email from the source who would ask me to call him Red Bull. He was writing from hell, 8,000 miles away.
A summer shower had left a rainbow over my Brooklyn neighborhood, and my two children were playing in a kiddie pool on the roof of our apartment building. Now the sun was setting, while I—in typical 21st-century parenting fashion, forgive me—compulsively scrolled through every app on my phone.
The message had no subject line and came from an address on the encrypted email service Proton Mail: “vaultwhistle@proton.me.” I opened it.
“Hello. I’m currently working inside a major crypto romance scam operation based in the Golden Triangle,” it began. “I am a computer engineer being forced to work here under a contract.”
“I’ve collected internal evidence of how the scam works—step by step,” the message continued. “I am still inside the compound, so I cannot risk direct exposure. But I want to help shut this down.”
I knew only vaguely that the Golden Triangle was a lawless jungle region in Southeast Asia. But as a reporter who has covered cryptocurrency crime for the past decade and a half, I understood that crypto scamming—specifically the version of it that’s come to be known as “pig butchering,” in which victims are lured with promises of romance and lucrative investments, only to be tricked into handing over their life savings—has become the most profitable form of cybercrime in the world, pulling in tens of billions of dollars annually.
This sprawling scam industry is, today, staffed by hundreds of thousands of forced laborers in compounds across Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos. They’re trafficked there from the poorest regions of Asia and Africa and pressed into the service of Chinese organized crime groups. The result is a self-perpetuating, constantly growing, globe-spanning money funnel that destroys lives on both ends—bankrupting one kind of victim, enslaving another.
I had read harrowing reports of scam compounds where laborers are beaten, tortured with electric shock batons, starved, and even murdered by their captors. Those stories have mostly come from the rare survivors who have escaped or been rescued by law enforcement. Never before, though, had I heard of someone currently working within a scam compound offering to act as a whistleblower—an actual source on the inside.
I had no idea, still, if this purported source was real. But I wrote back anyway, asking them to switch over from email to the encrypted messaging app Signal and turn on disappearing messages to better cover their tracks.
The source wrote back immediately and told me to expect to hear from them in two hours.
That night, after my kids were asleep, the Signal messages began to light up my phone. First, the source sent carefully prepared documents: a flowchart and then a written guide that described the scam processes of the compound in northern Laos. (I’d come to learn that the Golden Triangle—once the American nickname for a vast hotbed of opium and heroin production—now mainly refers to a city-size Laotian “special economic zone” bordering Myanmar and Thailand and largely controlled by Chinese business interests.) The two write-ups described every step in the compound’s work: creating fake Facebook and Instagram profiles; using hired models and AI deepfake tools to complete the illusion of a real romantic prospect; tricking victims into “investing” in fake trading platforms they recommended. It even detailed the small gong that would be struck in the office when someone pulled off a successful scam.
I had barely had time to skim these detailed descriptions—this was not how I’d planned to spend a Saturday evening with my wife—when my phone rang, just after midnight.
I picked up the Signal call. A polite Indian-accented voice said, “Hello.”
“What do I call you?” I asked.
“You can call me any name, brother, no matter,” the voice said with a shy laugh.
I insisted that I’d need a name for him, even if he just wanted to make one up on the spot.
“You can call me Red Bull,” he said. Months later, he would tell me that he’d been looking at an empty can of the energy drink as we spoke.
Red Bull explained that he’d tried reaching out to US and Indian law enforcement agencies and Interpol, as well as the tip lines for a few news outlets, but no one had responded other than me. He asked me to tell him more about myself—and then cut me off as soon as I’d said two sentences about my work covering crypto crime.
“So you are the person I share everything with,” he said hurriedly. “And you will help me to expose this, right?”
Thrown off, I told him he’d have to first tell me who he was.
For the next few minutes, Red Bull warily answered my questions. He didn’t tell me his real name but said he was from India—that most of the compound’s forced laborers were from India, Pakistan, or Ethiopia.
He was in his early twenties and had a diploma in computer engineering, he said. Like most of his coworkers, Red Bull had been tricked by a fake job offer—in his case, to work as an IT manager for an office in Laos. Then his passport had been taken from him by his Chinese bosses. He was forced to sleep in a dormitory room with five other men and work 15 hours at a time on a nocturnal schedule designed to sync with the daytime of the Indian Americans they targeted for scamming. (That system—matching scammers with victims of their own ethnicity to build rapport and avoid language issues—is common, I’d later learn.)
Red Bull’s situation was not precisely the brutal modern slavery I had read about elsewhere. It was more like a grotesque parody of a corporate sales floor. In theory, the staffers were incentivized with commissions designed to create the illusion that they could get rich from hard work. In reality, they were kept in perpetual debt and servitude. Red Bull told me he was paid a base salary of 3,500 Chinese yuan a month, close to $500, but the money was almost entirely taken from him by daily fines for various infractions, most often not meeting his quota of initial conversations with victims. The result was that he had virtually no income and subsisted off the food in the cafeteria, mostly rice and vegetables that he said tasted of strange chemicals.
He was bound into this system by a one-year contract, and believed when that time was over—in about six more months—he’d be allowed to leave. So far, he told me, he hadn’t successfully scammed anyone, only skated by with the minimum number of plausible attempts. That meant he was still essentially captive unless he escaped, served out his time, or paid off his contract with thousands of dollars he didn’t have.
Red Bull told me he’d heard of people who were beaten and electrocuted for breaking rules, a female staffer who he believes was sold into sexual slavery, and other coworkers who mysteriously disappeared. “If they knew I was talking to you or doing something wrong to them, they would directly kill me,” he said. “But I promised myself that whether I stay alive or not, I will stop this scam.”
Then Red Bull launched into the immediate purpose of his call: There was a scam in progress he knew about, targeting an Indian American man who had already been scammed at least once, but remained in the thrall of one of Red Bull’s colleagues. The man’s crypto wallet service appeared to have frozen his account on the suspicion that he was being defrauded. So for the next payment, a courier was being sent to pick up a six-figure sum in cash.
The pickup was set to happen in three or four days. The victim lived just a few hours away from me. If I acted quickly, Red Bull explained, I could alert law enforcement and help set up a sting operation to capture the courier. Beyond this tip, he wanted me to find him an FBI agent to be his handler going forward, while continuing to work with me as a source. We’d spoken for just over 10 minutes.
Red Bull impatiently said that he’d write me the details on Signal and hung up. Within seconds, he was sending screenshots of the compound’s internal chat logs, his colleagues’ conversations with victims, and more details on the sting operation he wanted me to arrange.
With my mind reeling, I paused for a moment. Then I called Red Bull back on Signal without warning—with video enabled. I wanted to see who I was talking to.
Red Bull picked up. He was slim and handsome, with slightly shaggy hair and a trim beard. He gave me a half smile, seemingly unconcerned about revealing his face. I asked him to show me his surroundings, and he flipped the video to display a bare hotel room—he explained that he’d risked booking a room in the hotel next to his office to have somewhere to talk to me—and the view out the window of ugly concrete buildings and parking lots, construction sites, and a few palm trees. At my request, he walked outside and showed me the Chinese-language sign on the front of the building. I didn’t know much about the Golden Triangle, but this appeared to be it.
Finally, Red Bull showed me his work ID, with a Chinese name the compound had given him: Machao. (None of the workers in the office, he explained, knew each other’s real name.)
I began to believe Red Bull was what he said: a real whistleblower in a Laos scam compound. I told him I’d consider everything he’d asked for, but that I wanted to work with him patiently and carefully to minimize his risk.
“I am with you and whatever I do, I do under your guidance,” he wrote back at 1:33 am. “Have a nice night ahead.”
At 4 am, I was still lying awake in bed, considering what to do with the eager new source who seemed determined to put his life in my hands.
After a few hours’ sleep, I texted Erin West, a California prosecutor—or, as I would learn in our phone call later that day, a former prosecutor. Toward the end of 2024, West became so fed up with the US government’s failure to do anything about the pig butchering epidemic that she’d retired early from her position as a deputy district attorney and was now focused full-time on running her own anti-scam organization, called Operation Shamrock.
I asked West for advice about who in law enforcement could help arrange the sting that Red Bull had requested. West, to my surprise, was far more excited about the story that Red Bull wanted me to write. “This is a major, major deal,” West said. “Here’s someone on the inside who’s willing to share this information and tell us everything about how this whole operation runs.”
But she quickly shot down the idea of a sting. No time to arrange it, she said. Nor did she think that arresting a lowly money mule would be the major win that Red Bull believed it to be. Most couriers of this kind, she said, were freelancers even further down the hierarchy of a scam operation than Red Bull himself and would know nothing of value.
More important, a sting—or any effort to warn the victim myself by asking Red Bull for his contact and reaching out—could also create suspicion of a leak inside the scam compound that might be traced to Red Bull and put his life in jeopardy. Preventing one case of fraud, or taking down one courier, hardly seemed worth that risk of exposure.
I had been talking to Red Bull for less than 24 hours. Already I was making the decision to stand by as a potential six-figure scam took place, as a cost of protecting him.
Beyond this question of a sting, West told me, she wasn’t sure that handing Red Bull over to the FBI was the right approach. If he were to become a law enforcement source, she said, the FBI or Interpol would almost certainly tell him to stop talking to me or any other journalist. And the result of whatever he shared with the feds would likely fall far short of his expectations: criminal charges, in absentia, for low-level bosses at best. “If he thinks that the FBI and Interpol are going to march into Laos and take this place down, that’s never going to happen. The cavalry is not coming.”
Far more valuable than building a case against this single operation, she argued, would be to use whatever Red Bull could share to tell the larger story: the high-resolution reality of pig butchering compounds, their operational details, the scale of their work. Some of this had been described before by survivors of the compounds, but never, to West’s knowledge, by an insider source leaking documents and evidence in real time.
The role of human trafficking in scam compounds’ operations has only become harder to measure, West told me, with the Trump administration’s destruction of USAID, which funded humanitarian organizations in the region. “The Trump presidency has taken away any of the eyes on the ground that we had,” West said.
All of that has enabled Chinese-origin gangs to continue stealing “a generation’s worth of our wealth” through a system of slavery that’s increasingly come to control an entire region of the world, as West described it. “The story here is how we allowed these criminals to embed themselves in Southeast Asia like a festering cancer,” West said. “And how it’s disrupting our ability to trust people.”
I told Red Bull that we couldn’t arrange a sting operation without risking his life. I also made the case that if he wanted to be a source for me, he’d likely have to wait to talk to law enforcement. He accepted all this with surprising decisiveness. “OK, done,” he said.
Red Bull and I soon settled into a routine of speaking on Signal every morning New York time, around 10 pm in Laos, as he walked around outside his dormitory in the half hour after he woke up and before he went into the cafeteria for a meal. (This “dinner” preceded his approximately 15-hour workday, which included two breaks to eat.)
He spent much of our first conversations pitching a series of increasingly high-risk evidence-gathering methods: He wanted to wear a hidden camera or microphone. He suggested setting up remote desktop software so I could see in real time everything on his screen. He offered to install spyware on the computer of his team leader, another Indian worker with aviator glasses and a short beard who went by the name “Amani.” He even proposed to hack into the laptop of Amani’s supervisor, 50k, a short Chinese man with a paunch, tight pants, and a tattoo on his chest that Red Bull could never quite make out. Maybe that spyware would help us gather intel on 50k’s communications with his own boss, “Alang,” whom Red Bull never saw in person.
For every one of these brazen ideas, I consulted with colleagues and experts who told me, one after another, how hidden-camera evidence-gathering required training, how the software Red Bull wanted to install on the office computers left behind detectable artifacts—why, in other words, all these ideas were likely to get him caught and killed.
We settled on a far simpler approach: He would use Signal on his work computer to send me messages and materials throughout his work hours, using Signal’s disappearing messages feature set to a five-minute countdown timer to cover his tracks. At times he started calling me “Uncle” to bolster the cover story that he was just speaking to a relative, in case he was caught.
We adopted a protocol in which one of us would start a conversation by saying “Red.” The other would respond “Bull.” This exchange would verify no one had taken over his account. It was Red Bull’s idea to change the name and icon of the Signal app on his computer to make it look like a desktop shortcut for its hard drive.
He began to send me 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. A photo of a Chinese ceremonial drum on a stand that stood in the office, ready to be struck to celebrate big wins of $100,000 or more. Pages and pages of chat logs, posted to the office WhatsApp group, documented the scamming wins of Red Bull’s colleagues and the tragic responses from victims: “Always had a dream of having a girlfriend then wife like you” … “U stopped talking to me” … “I will continue praying for your Mom” … “Please help me withdraw my money OK?” … “??????” … “😭” One video showed a victim crying in his car after losing a six-figure sum; the mark had sent the clip to his scammer to elicit guilt, perhaps, but it was instead being passed around the office for laughs.
Every member of the team was required to post daily updates—how many “first chats” they’d started, how many “deep chats” they’d had, the kind that might lead to successful scams. Their group chat used euphemisms like “opening a new customer,” for hooking a new mark, and “recharges,” for repeat victims. Each team had a quota, typically around a million dollars a month. If they met it, they’d be rewarded with weekends off, the freedom to have snacks in the office, even parties at a nearby club. (Their bosses, Red Bull said, would spend those parties in a private room separated by a curtain.) Miss the target, and they’d be berated, fined, and forced to work seven nights a week.
Every worker also posted a mandatory daily schedule—not of their own nocturnal life sitting at a desk in a fluorescent-lit office and sending Facebook and Instagram messages, but the schedule of the rich, single woman they were pretending to be: 7 am “peaceful yoga and meditation,” 9:30 am “self-care and vacation planning,” 2:30 pm “dentist visit,” 6 pm “dinner and talking with mother.”
Sometimes during our voice calls, Red Bull would tell me to enable video and record my screen. Then he would walk into the cafeteria and surreptitiously film his surroundings while pretending to talk to his “uncle.” I got a tour through the bright lights of the building’s lobby and stairwells, the lines of depressed-looking South Asian and African men lining up for food. Once he even showed me the inside of the office, a large, beige room where I could see clusters of desks with red, yellow, and green flags on them that connoted each team’s scamming performance.
After a few days, Red Bull and I tried upgrading our cover story, and I became a secret girlfriend he was texting with—a better explanation for his use of Signal should it be detected. We peppered our conversation with heart emojis, referred to each other as “dear,” and signed off with “miss you,” until our chat logs started to look almost like the fraud romances his team carried on daily. But we soon found the pretense too embarrassing and gave it up.
On another occasion, as I was heading to sleep, Red Bull wrote a surprisingly sensitive farewell message: “Good night! 🌙 Rest easy—you’ve done enough for today. Let your mind reset, and let tomorrow come with fresh clarity and quiet strength.”
As stilted as the language felt, I admit to being moved by the unusually thoughtful note—I had, in fact, gotten very little sleep over the several stressful days since we’d first started communicating.
Then, during our call the following morning, Red Bull began explaining to me the role that AI chat tools like ChatGPT and DeepSeek play in the compound’s work: how they’re trained to use them to clean up their language, find just the right sentiment, never run out of inviting turns of phrase.
His goodnight message the previous evening, he told me without hesitation, had been copied directly from ChatGPT. “Everyone does this here; they teach us this,” he said.
Funny, I thought, 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.
In the few minutes I had with Red Bull every day between the dormitory and the office, amid our other conversations about his safety and evidence-gathering tactics, I asked how he’d come to be trapped in the compound and why he had become so singularly motivated to expose it. In answering, in hurried snippets of conversation and then later in longer texts, he told me the 23-year story of his life.
Red Bull grew up, he told me, as one of eight children in a Muslim family in a mountainous village in Jammu and Kashmir, a disputed territory on the India–Pakistan border. His father was a schoolteacher but also sometimes worked as a construction laborer and, along with Red Bull’s mother, raised dairy cattle and sold ghee—clarified butter—to survive.
When Red Bull was a young child in the mid-2000s, the family would often leave their village for areas in northern Kashmir to escape the intermittent conflicts between the Indian Army and Pakistani-supported guerrillas. Muslim men in the region had sometimes been conscripted to fight or carry supplies for Pakistani-backed forces, then branded as terrorists and killed by India’s military.
When the conflict died down, Red Bull’s parents sent him to live with his grandparents in the city of Rajouri, a four-hour bus ride away, where they hoped their unusually bright and inquisitive child could get a better education. His grandparents were harsh guardians, he told me. They forced him to chop wood and fetch water when he wasn’t studying, and his school was a 6-mile walk away. He wore out his shoes, blistered his feet, and attended classes with a rope tied around his pants for a belt.
Even then, he says, he maintained a kind of defiant optimism. “I kept thinking: If not today then tomorrow things will get better,” he wrote to me.
When he was 15, Red Bull’s grandparents sent him to live with the family of a pair of his teachers, who made him work as a servant in exchange for paying his school fees. He would wake up early every morning to clean the house before breakfast, then wash the dishes before going to school—including the separate set they required him to use.
One day in that house, he remembers watching, entranced, as the family’s eldest son played the latest FIFA game on his PC, the first time Red Bull had ever seen a computer. He was told to get back to work. This became the beginning of his computer fixation. “I felt ashamed and disrespected because I was not even allowed to touch it,” Red Bull wrote. “I told myself that one day I would become the master of this machine.”
After a particularly humiliating scolding, Red Bull decided to run away. He left the next morning before the family was awake and traveled to the city, where he found odd jobs cleaning houses, doing construction work, cutting rice. For a time he went door-to-door selling Ayurvedic medicines. At night he would study alone in the room he rented. In 2021, he was accepted into the computer science program at Kashmir Government Polytechnic College in Srinagar, the region’s biggest city.
At the university, he slept in a room without proper bedding through the freezing Kashmiri winters, and often went hungry. A friend taught him how to make Facebook pages for businesses, or buy and sell them like a real estate developer flipping properties. Working on the school’s PCs, he soon made the equivalent of $200, enough to buy his own used Dell laptop—a prized, life-changing possession.
After three years of studying, working, and sending money home to his family, he graduated with a diploma in computer engineering—the first time, he says, that anyone from his village had ever attained that level of technical education. He’d also developed a stubborn, even angry determination to chart his own path through the world.
“My mom and dad always advised me to have patience and to stay strong, and their advice gave me some inner strength, but the fight itself I always carried alone,” he wrote. “It is very hard for anyone to truly understand me, but I never stopped fighting my circumstances.”
Not long after Red Bull graduated, he was making a livable wage creating Facebook pages and websites, earning as much as a thousand dollars a month. But he had bigger ambitions. He dreamed of working in artificial intelligence, in the biomedical field, or in cybersecurity as a whitehat hacker. (The TV show Mr. Robot had long been one of his favorites.) He wanted to study abroad but couldn’t afford it, and was rejected when he sought student loans.
He resigned himself to working for a year or two to save money. A friend from college told him of someone in Laos who seemed to be able to find people good work. Red Bull began talking to that thirdhand contact, called Ajaz, who said he knew an agent who could get him hired as an office IT manager making around $1,700 a month. For Red Bull, that alluring salary would mean he might only have to work for a single year before returning to school.
Ajaz told Red Bull to fly to Bangkok and then call the recruiting agent from the airport. He boarded the plane without even knowing what industry his employer might be in—only that he would help manage its computers. He remembers the excitement of traveling abroad for the first time, dreaming of his future throughout the red-eye flight across the Indian Ocean.
The next morning in Bangkok, he called the agent, an East African man who summarily told him to take a 12-hour bus ride to Chiang Mai, and then a taxi to the border with Laos. When Red Bull arrived there, he was to take a selfie showing that he was outside the immigration office, and text it to the agent. A few minutes after Red Bull did as instructed, an immigration official came outside, flashed the selfie he’d evidently received from the agent, and demanded 500 Thai baht—about $15. Red Bull paid, the official stamped his passport, and he was sent down to a boat waiting on the Mekong River below. The ferry crossed the river just south of the point where the three borders of Thailand, Laos, and Myanmar meet in a single nexus: the Golden Triangle.
After the boat had crossed into Laos, a young Chinese man waiting on the opposite river bank showed Red Bull the same selfie. He took Red Bull’s passport without explanation and gave it to immigration officials along with some Chinese currency. It came back with a visa.
The Chinese man pocketed the passport and told Red Bull to wait for the East African agent. Then he left, taking Red Bull’s passport with him.
An hour later, the agent arrived and drove him in a white van to a hotel in northern Laos, where he would spend the night. Lying in the bed of that bare hotel room, he remained entirely focused on the anxiety and excitement of his first real job interview, scheduled for the next day. He still suspected nothing.
The next morning, he was brought to an office, a gray tower of concrete surrounded by other drab buildings amid the lush green mountains of northern Laos. Red Bull sat nervously at a desk as a Chinese man and a translator administered a typing test and an English language test, both of which he breezed through. They told him he’d passed, and they began asking him about his familiarity with social networks like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
Red Bull eagerly answered their questions. Finally they asked him whether he understood the job he’d be starting. “As an IT manager?” he asked. No, they said, for once speaking without euphemism: He would be a “scammer.”
As the reality of his situation finally became clear, Red Bull spiraled into panic. The Chinese boss told him he’d be starting immediately. Trying to buy time, he begged to instead return to the hotel to rest for one night before beginning work. The boss agreed.
That night in the hotel room, Red Bull frantically searched the internet for information about scam operations in the Golden Triangle. Only then did he see the dimensions of the trap that had sprung around him: Too late, he read about the thousands of Indians deceived and ensnared just as he had been, with no passport or means of escape. In the midst of this sickening epiphany, his parents video-called him to ask if he’d gotten the IT manager job. Burying his shame and regret, he said he had, smiled, and accepted their congratulations.
Over the next days, with little in the way of orientation, he was pulled into the machinery of the scamming organization he’d come to know as the Boshang compound: He was trained to create fake profiles, given scam scripts, and then set to work on a nocturnal schedule, manually spamming out hundreds of introductory messages every night to lure new victims. At the end of his shifts, he would return to the top bunk of his six-man dorm room—little bigger than the hotel room he’d occupied those first nights—with a toilet in the corner.
Yet from the very beginning, he says, he was determined to again defy his circumstances. It struck him that he knew more about computers than most of his coworkers, or even his bosses, who seemed to understand only how to use social media, AI tools, and cryptocurrency. Within days, he began daydreaming of using his technical skills to quietly gather information on the compound and, somehow, expose it.
There was, Red Bull came to believe, little to prevent him from leaking the compound’s secrets. 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 and their own phones seemed surprisingly loose.
Bosses seemed to depend largely on the fear and despair of Red Bull’s fellow trafficking victims—most of whom had, it seemed to him, lost all hope of resistance. “They tell themselves survival is the only goal, and they shut down anything that feels human,” Red Bull wrote to me. “Empathy, guilt, even memories of who they were before.”
He kept his own hope alive in part with a sense that he was different. “Most people don’t have the skills, or the tools, or even the mental strength to fight from the inside,” he wrote. “I can move through the system. I can observe. I can gather evidence, names, scripts, patterns, connections.”
At times, though, I still struggled to understand what had given Red Bull the conviction to reach out to me, to risk his life rather than merely serve out his time. “Maybe it’s justice, or maybe it’s conscience,” he responded. “If there’s a God, I hope he sees what I’m doing. If there isn’t, then at least I’ll know I stayed human in a place that tries to turn people into monsters.”
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, most likely, 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.
Around the same time, Red Bull told me that new surveillance cameras had been installed in the office, including on the ceiling both behind and in front of his desk. I told him he should immediately stop communicating with me from the office—it was now far too risky. My editors came to a more severe conclusion: I should shut down my reporting with Red Bull altogether until he was free.
Red Bull had, by this point, sent me a collection of 25 scam scripts and guides in English and Chinese. The documents displayed the anatomy of scamming at a level of resolution I’d never seen before: lists of conversation starters; tutorials on what to do when a target asks for a video call and how to delay until a deepfake model is ready to speak with them; tips on how to complain about overcautious financial institutions so victims don’t get spooked by their own bank’s warnings.
Maybe what he’d given me was already enough. Following my editors’ lead, I told Red Bull that it was time to stop. “OK, done,” he said, with his usual quick pivot.
Now, I told him, he should focus on completing the remaining six months of his contract as safely as possible, and we’d talk again when he was free. But Red Bull, once again, was already several thoughts ahead. If our reporting process was finished, he told me, he wanted to leave now.
He told me about a plan he’d been concocting to get home: He’d forge an Indian police letter stating that he was under investigation back in Jammu and Kashmir. If he didn’t go back, he’d tell his supervisor, it would cause serious trouble for him, his family, and ultimately the compound. He would plead to take a two-week trip home, deal with the situation, and return. Maybe, he said, his bosses would buy this story and let him leave.
I didn’t think it would work, and I told him as much: I warned that his overseers might detect the forgery and punish him. But after all the risky schemes I had already talked Red Bull out of, he seemed more stubbornly intent on this one. I asked him to please wait, and I told him I’d try to find him someone in the region who was more familiar with scam compound escape tactics. I was in touch, for instance, with a Southeast Asian activist who asked to be identified only as “W,” who had experience helping political refugees escape from the region.
Red Bull suddenly switched into cover story mode as he entered the office lobby. “No problem uncle, you stay relaxed,” he said as he walked by the security guard. “Things will be better soon, OK?” Then he ended the call.
At another point in those daily conversations, Red Bull brought up another potential path to freedom: If only he could pay the equivalent of $3,400, he could buy out his contract and go home. He just needed to get the money somehow.
In a matter of seconds, a fleet of thoughts ran through my mind. First, a flash of hope for Red Bull and a desire to pay off his debt. Then the realization that, of course, WIRED couldn’t possibly give money to a source in this way, much less reward an organized crime group for human trafficking. The idea violated journalistic ethics—payments to sources are generally considered a corrupting conflict of interest—and would set an unforgivable precedent. I said as much to Red Bull, and he quickly responded that he understood “completely” and that he had never asked me or WIRED to pay.
Even so, the mere mention of that payment option also planted in my mind a different, darker thought that I now couldn’t shake: What if Red Bull was scamming me? I had set aside my initial skepticism of Red Bull once I’d seen enough proof that he was who he said he was: a real person trapped in a grim compound in Laos. Now, almost two weeks into our relationship, the troubling possibility nagged at me: What if he truly was a scam compound insider, but this had been the scam all along? The mere thought felt like a betrayal of all the trust he seemed to have placed in me.
I decided to compartmentalize my suspicions, keeping the possibility of an ulterior motive in my mind next to the more likely probability that his intentions were genuine.
A couple of days later, meanwhile, he mentioned his forged document idea again, and I again suggested he wait for help from someone like W and not risk the scheme. But with every day, I could tell that he was increasingly set on his plan. “I have no other options,” he said. “Let’s see what happens.”
Just a few days later, on a Saturday afternoon, I was surprised to get an email from the same Proton Mail account that Red Bull had first reached out from but hadn’t used since we’d switched to Signal. Just like that first email, it had no subject line.
I opened the message and my mind instantly went blank with dread.
“they people cath me and now they get my phone everything,” it read. “they beaten me andn ow may be they kill me”
Red Bull had tried his forged-police-document deception. Now, it seemed, the worst possible outcome had come to pass.
I suppressed panic as my mind spun through options. I texted my editors and W, in the hopes they might have some idea of how to help. Fifteen minutes after that first email came another, more coherent message from Red Bull: “I’m trapped. I have no way to get out. They have my personal phone and my ID card,” this one read. “If there’s anything you can do, please help me.”
In the meantime, W responded to me on Signal. Over the phone, we hurriedly talked through what we could possibly do to increase Red Bull’s chances of survival. I didn’t know how Red Bull was emailing me, but W cautioned that it would be dangerous to respond. His bosses knew he’d lied to them to try to escape. It still seemed they didn’t know he was talking to a journalist and leaking their secrets.
If they found out, there was little doubt they would kill him. “Brutally,” W said. “There’s no way he’d get out of this area alive.” He advised that I wait to hear more from Red Bull about his situation and how to safely communicate.
Twenty-four excruciating hours passed before I received another email from Red Bull—a long, stream-of-consciousness block of frantic text.
“Last night those people beat me I am still hungry I have not eaten anything they disconnected my card my personal phone and everything today they will decide what to do with me the Indian team leader and everyone sat in front of me and said do you know who we are and they beat me again and then made me sit back in the office today I have to accept that whatever I did was fake and I have to accept my mistake I cannot run away from here I have no money and I cannot even go outside the gate I am contacting you from the system PC if you have any way then send me an email I will check it and tell W to talk to me on my email and those people are telling me to give them 20k yuan they said if I give it they will leave me without doing anything more please tell W to reply to my email whenever they torture me and bring me back to the office I am only on the system PC have a nice evening ahead”
Before I could respond to this email, I got a Signal message: “Red.”
“Bull,” I wrote back.
He wrote quickly, this time with the short version: He’d been put in a room and told again to find someone to pay 20,000 yuan for his release, the equivalent of around $2,800.
In the midst of this life-or-death crisis, I couldn’t help but think that this might just as easily be the endgame of the scam I’d suspected in the back of my mind: Hook a journalist’s attention, lure him in, give him responsibility for a source’s safety, and now require a payment to save his life.
Regardless, my editors had made clear to me that neither WIRED nor I could pay Red Bull or his captors. They were, in fact, warier than ever that he might be scamming me. But the more likely truth, I still felt, was that this nightmare was all entirely real.
Red Bull seemed to have his phone back—likely to allow him to find someone to pay his ransom—but it felt too risky to call him. I texted him, suggesting he instead try to speak to W about who might be able to help him escape. W was far more experienced in these situations—and if Red Bull were monitored, he’d at least be caught speaking to an activist rather than a reporter.
I also told Red Bull that, as terrible as I felt that he was going through this hell, I wouldn’t be able to pay his ransom, any more than I’d been able to pay out his contract.
“Okay,” Red Bull wrote. “I understand.” He asked me to tell W to get in touch, and I told him I would.
I watched as he set Signal’s disappearing message feature to delete messages after only five seconds, a sign of how closely he feared he was being watched.
He posted a thumbs-up emoji. Then it was gone.
Over the next few days, I spoke with one person after another who I hoped might be able to help Red Bull, perhaps even by paying his ransom: Erin West, W, W’s boss at the nonprofit he worked for. One by one, each of them backed away—either from concerns about rewarding a scam compound’s human trafficking, suspicion that Red Bull’s story might itself be a scam, or some combination of the two.
West, despite her enormous enthusiasm when Red Bull first came forward, now said it sounded like a human trafficking racket she’d heard of elsewhere, in which fake victims solicit fake ransoms. W got as far as speaking to Red Bull on multiple Signal voice calls but was overwhelmed by his panicked energy and thought his desperate pleas for the ransom payment—and promises to pay W back in the future—were dubious. “It sounded like ‘Send me one bitcoin and I’ll send you two,’” W told me afterward.
But I still felt I owed it to Red Bull to take his situation at face value and—assuming it was all true—do whatever I could within the bounds of journalistic ethics to get him out.
Three days had passed since he was first held ransom. It was becoming clearer that he was no longer being closely monitored, perhaps because his captors were growing bored with him. I decided to risk a call. “Things are not going good,” he told me with typical understatement, speaking softly, close to the phone’s microphone. He told me he had a fever, that he’d been beaten several times, slapped and kicked and made to confess that he’d forged the Indian police document. On one occasion the bosses put a white powder into a cup of water and told him to drink it. He found that it made him unnaturally talkative and confident but then gave him a rash of raised red bumps on his skin. He was sometimes sent back to his dormitory to sleep, he told me, but hadn’t eaten in days and was deprived of water for long stretches.
He’d written to various Indian embassies and consulates across Southeast Asia, but none had responded. “No one is going to help me. I don’t know why,” he said a few minutes into our call, his voice finally breaking into a muffled sob, the first time I’d ever heard him express self-pity.
Then he quickly controlled himself with a single breath. “I want to cry,” he said. “But let’s see.”
Four days after he’d first been caught trying to escape and held for ransom, Red Bull texted me to say that something had changed in the compound. Everything was strangely quiet, and no one had summoned him to the office. When he asked some of his coworkers, they told him there were rumors the Laotian police were planning a raid. Their Chinese bosses had gotten a tip from someone on the inside and were laying low.
The next day, with rumors of a raid still circulating through the compound, Red Bull got a hopeful message from the Indian embassy in Laos. “Please share your passport copy, company ID,” it read. “Embassy will take necessary action to rescue you.”
Salvation seemed to be on the horizon. But then more days passed, and—nothing. The embassy stopped responding to Red Bull’s messages. Late one night, I managed to get an Indian embassy official on the phone after several tries. He seemed confused about which person we were talking about, then repeated the government’s vague assurance that it would rescue him, and hung up.
As the days went by—with no more clarity from the Indian government, no police raid, and no one willing to pay for his freedom—Red Bull seemed to be sinking into fatalism. One day I woke up to a series of messages offering up a confession, as if he feared he might die in the room where he was being held and wanted to absolve himself of sin.
“I want to say something honestly. When I first talked to you I said I never scammed anyone. That was not fully true,” he wrote. “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.”
He later told me more details of those two victims. From one, he’d taken $504. From the other, around $11,000. He gave me both of their names. I tried contacting them but couldn’t find one, and the other never responded. For the larger of those two sums, Red Bull should have received a commission based on the scam compound’s incentive structure. But he says he was never paid any reward beyond his meager base salary.
I’d later look 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, “Machao,” next to the sum of $504. I had entirely missed this, though he’d made no attempt to hide it.
“I am trusting you with my real story,” Red Bull concluded his confession. “This is the truth.”
After 10 days in limbo, Red Bull told me that he and his coworkers had been ordered to pack their things. The office computers had been boxed up and stored in the dormitory. The entire staff was moving to a new building a few hundred feet away, and the workers were told they’d have to continue their work from these temporary dorm rooms rather than the office. According to the rumors, a raid was finally coming.
Throughout this time, Red Bull was treated more or less like a dog, as he described it, a pariah set apart from the other workers: He had no bedding; sometimes he slept on the floor and was fed only when someone remembered to give him food, often spoiled leftovers. He lost weight and suffered from body aches, fever, and what felt like the flu.
Yet somehow, even then, Red Bull was still motivated to keep digging.
During this hiatus from the office, work devices were now allowed into the dormitory—a loosening of security that Red Bull realized could offer him an opportunity. One day when one of his roommates was asleep, he found the man’s work phone.
He had seen the man enter his passcode over his shoulder, and now quickly unlocked it. Red Bull then connected his own personal phone to the man’s WhatsApp using the app’s “linked device” feature, allowing him to read the scam compound’s internal messaging. He used that access to make screen recordings, meticulously scrolling through months of the compound’s internal conversations, as well as all the screenshots of chat logs with victims his colleagues had posted.
Another day, he found his own work phone left unattended in a different dorm room—he hadn’t had access to it since he was first caught trying to escape—and repeated the WhatsApp linking trick so that he could access that device’s messages, too, from his personal phone. Then he made another screen recording of scrolling through its chats. Together, the videos added up to a detailed record of three months of the compound’s day-to-day operations. Red Bull sent me samples of these recordings, but the full videos ran to nearly 10 gigabytes, far more than he could text me from his phone’s data plan.
A week later, after he and his coworkers had moved to the new building, Red Bull sent me a very different, more dramatic series of short clips: One showed dozens of South Asian men standing outside of a high-rise building, being lined up by what appeared to be Laotian police in khaki and black uniforms. Another showed a similar-looking crowd sitting in rows in a lobby. The raids, Red Bull told me, had arrived, sweeping the scam operations that hadn’t taken the precaution of vacating the old building, as his bosses had. Now these videos were circulating among workers who had only narrowly missed the crackdown.
As the rest of the compound’s operations struggled to adapt to their new makeshift workspace, Red Bull, of course, had already been stuck in purgatory for weeks. He pleaded with his bosses to be released, arguing that he was no use to them. He had no money, and clearly there was no one willing to pay his ransom. He was dead weight, 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 go.
To scrape together enough money for a return journey, Red Bull borrowed a few hundred dollars from his brother. Then he wrote to an Indian acquaintance who had a position in a scam compound nearby, telling him that he needed to go home to see his family but would soon return. If the acquaintance could send enough money to buy plane tickets, Red Bull proposed, he’d let the man take the recruitment fee when he returned. Soon he had several hundred more dollars in his account. Red Bull had scammed a scammer, and he’d found a path home.
In late July, Red Bull’s team leader, Amani, intercepted him outside the dormitory, handed him his passport, and told him it was time to leave. Red Bull explained that most of his things, including his shoes, were in his room. He was wearing only a pair of flip-flops.
Amani told him he didn’t care. 50k himself was waiting in an Audi to drive Red Bull to the border of the Golden Triangle region. From there, he’d be on his own. He got in the back of the car in his flip-flops and left.
Later, when Red Bull had finally escaped, he would marvel at this last slight, as if it were somehow worse than all the slaps, kicks, drugging, and starvation he’d endured. “I never expected this from them,” he wrote to me, punctuating his text with crying emojis. “They didn’t even allow me to wear my shoes.”
A few days after that drive to the border, near the end of a journey that involved buses, a train, and a dirt-cheap plane itinerary with no fewer than five layovers, Red Bull was finally back in India. During a stopover on the way to his home village, he began sending me the WhatsApp screen-recording videos he’d smuggled out of the compound on his phone.
These files would turn out to be the most significant and unique material he provided me. A team of reporters at WIRED would later convert them into a 4,200-page PDF of screenshots and share them with scam compound experts. The document, we’d discover, offers a detailed diary of life inside the compound, cataloging every successful scam it achieved during those months and laying out the scale and hierarchy of the operation. It also reveals the mundane minute-by-minute life of the forced laborers carrying out those scams, from their daily schedules to the fines and punishments they received to the Orwellian language their bosses used to manipulate, cajole, and discipline them—some of which is included in the text interspersed throughout this story.
Ultimately, no one had given Red Bull the help he needed to escape—not the human rights groups I tried to connect him with, not the Indian government (which never rescued him as promised), and not WIRED. Red Bull had rescued himself. Now, despite that complete lack of incentive or aid, amid the most desperate circumstances, he had obtained and given me the biggest data prize yet.
Red Bull’s hands weren’t clean. He had admitted to me that, under duress, he’d scammed two innocent people. But despite my fears and those of the others I’d tried to connect him with, his motivation to act as a whistleblower had proven to be pure.
Now there could finally be no doubt: Red Bull was real.
On a quiet backstreet of a city somewhere in India, I wait alone—surrounded by several dozen macaque monkeys lounging, grooming each other, and parkouring off the neighborhood’s balconies and electrical wires. Then the monkey troop disperses into the trees and onto rooftops, and a white SUV emerges around a corner, drives up the street, and stops in front of me.
A door opens, and out steps Red Bull, displaying the same shy smile he had on his face when he picked up my first Signal video call. He looks smaller than I imagined, very thin, but more put together than he did on my phone screen, with a button-up flannel shirt and a fresh haircut. As he walks toward me, he breaks into a bigger, less restrained grin, and I shake his hand.
Now that he’s finally free, Red Bull has given me permission to reveal his real name: Mohammad Muzahir.
“I’m feeling very, very happy to meet with you. I’ve been waiting a long time to meet with you and share everything, face-to-face,” Muzahir says after we’ve checked him into his hotel and we’re riding in the SUV to mine. “I have no words to express it right now.”
The three months between Muzahir’s escape and this in-person meeting have been far from easy. He’s virtually broke, but he can’t bring himself to focus on building websites and Facebook pages as he has done in the past, nor does he even have a laptop. Instead he has worked as a waiter and taken construction jobs to survive. When Muzahir isn’t working or applying to jobs and universities abroad—so far without success—he obsessively researches scam operations on his phone, which is cracked on both front and back, with glitching lines across its damaged screen.
In that research, Muzahir has come to believe that almost all of the men rounded up in the raids that displaced his compound were later released back into the Golden Triangle. He assumes the police action was all just for show and barely disrupted the scam operations there. He has also learned that the Boshang operation that indentured him has since relocated to Cambodia, taking many of his former coworkers with it.
Muzahir sleeps as little as three hours a night, he tells me after we sit down in an empty lounge in the basement of my hotel. He’s haunted, he says, by the fact that the scam compound he escaped, and dozens like it, are still operating and even expanding across lawless zones in Southeast Asia, and now other parts of the world. He thinks compulsively about the colleagues he left behind. He feels crushing guilt, too, about the two people he scammed, even while telling himself it was a necessary precursor to his actions as a whistleblower. He dreams of earning enough to somehow pay the two men back. “Honestly this is not a happy ending to the story,” he says.
After experiencing so many personal betrayals—and working for an operation where industrialized betrayal was, in fact, the business model—Muzahir’s more fundamental problem is that he has trouble putting faith in anyone. He’s reluctant to engage with even the human-rights NGOs and survivor groups I’ve tried to introduce him to. “These people are just wasting time and giving false hope,” he wrote to me at one point. “I’m not trusting too much in people.”
Somehow I’ve become an exception to that near-universal mistrust. But now that we’re finally meeting in person, I feel compelled to confess to Muzahir that there were times when I didn’t trust him—that even when he most needed my help, I still feared, incorrectly, that he might be scamming me.
To my relief, he just grins at this. “You did good,” Muzahir says. If I had paid off his contract or even paid his ransom, he points out, he would have left the compound before he had a chance to record and share the operation’s full WhatsApp conversations.
Muzahir is eager now for WIRED to release our full analysis of that data. I’ve pointed out to him that, when we do, the Chinese mafia could find a way to retaliate against him in India, or elsewhere if he follows through on his plan to leave the country. We could obscure his identity, but his team was small enough that it will likely still be immediately clear to his former bosses who the leaker was—even if we didn’t publish this detailed narrative of his experience.
Muzahir responds that he’s willing to accept that risk to get his story out—including his real identity. After everything he has suffered, Muzahir is still idealistic enough to hope that his experience will serve not only as a warning but as a source of inspiration to others like him.
As he explains that decision, I can see more clearly than ever before the motivation driving every risk he has taken: He’s speaking not only to me but to every potential resister or whistleblower inside the burgeoning scam compound industry and the global power structures that enable it, to its survivors, to the hundreds of thousands of other voiceless people trapped in its systems of modern slavery.
“When someone reads about me, then maybe a lot of Red Bulls will stand up and speak,” Muzahir says with his usual shy smile. “When a lot of Red Bulls speak in this world, it will help to make things better.”
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