This week, Uncanny Valley hosts Brian Barrett and Leah Feiger dive into the key tech industry figures who show up in the final batch of the Epstein files. Then, they discuss SpaceX and xAI’s blockbuster merger, and what it says about the future of Elon Musk’s companies. Plus, we share the story of how a whistleblower revealed—and fled—the inner operations of a crypto scam compound in Laos.
Articles mentioned in this episode:
- The Tech Elites in the Epstein Files
- Elon Musk Is Rolling xAI Into SpaceX—Creating the World’s Most Valuable Private Company
- Inside the ICE Forum Where Agents Complain About Their Jobs
- He Leaked the Secrets of a Southeast Asian Scam Compound. Then He Had to Get Out Alive
You can follow Brian Barrett on Bluesky at @brbarrett and Leah Feiger on Bluesky at @leahfeiger. Write to us at [email protected].
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Transcript
Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.
Leah Feiger: Hey, Brian, how’s it going?
Brian Barrett: Leah, it’s great. We missed you last week.
Leah Feiger: I missed you guys, but hopefully you’ve had a lot of time without me to catch up on all cultural things happening in the United States of America right now. The Melania documentary. Have you seen it?
Brian Barrett: No. I have not seen it. I had a hard time getting a ticket.
Leah Feiger: Oh, no.
Brian Barrett: No. That’s not true. That’s not true. So no, Melania, I’m excited for the Olympics coming up.
Leah Feiger: Yeah. That’s going to actually be way better. I think it’s ice skating for me, or bust.
Brian Barrett: I’m going to try to convince you and Zoë to let me do a whole episode on the biathlon.
Leah Feiger: I’m in. Wait, the biathlon. No, I’m not in.
Brian Barrett: No. Get in. Leah, all the more reason to do the episode.
Leah Feiger: I want to do an episode on the Olympics period. That’s actually very interesting to me. Again, my section will be ice skating. I’m really sad to tell everyone that Zoë is not here with us this week, but she did leave a treat for WIRED.com in the form of her review of the Melania documentary, and more specifically, all of the people that went to go see it. So everyone check it out and don’t miss Zoë too much. But should we get started? Should we get into this?
Brian Barrett: Yeah. In the meantime, welcome to WIRED’s Uncanny Valley. I’m Brian Barrett, executive editor.
Leah Feiger: And I’m Leah Feiger, senior politics editor. Brian, let’s start off with the gift that keeps on giving for better, for worse, the Epstein files.
Brian Barrett: Oh, what a way to phrase that.
Leah Feiger: Is that not how we should talk about this?
Brian Barrett: I don’t know.
Leah Feiger: This week, just to catch everyone up, there was a document dump of over three million files pertaining to everything, Jeffrey Epstein, and it contains some really disturbing allegations, including torture and murder, really, really disturbing pictures and videos in the documents, so many emails, references to Trump, all sorts of things. I’m really excited to talk about this with you, honestly, because you wrote a story for WIRED all about the tech folks that got implicated in this most recent drop.
Brian Barrett: I did. I spent way too much time reading way too many of these Epstein files just to look and see what was in there about specifically the tech billionaires. If you were to try to do all the people in tech that were in there, it would take you weeks or months. Truly, it’s astonishing. But even with just billionaires, we’ve still got thousands of files referencing maybe about a 10 or so that we found and we sorted them, we broke it down by how many files each person was referenced in.
Leah Feiger: You found 2,500 files alone associated with Bill Gates.
Brian Barrett: Yes.
Leah Feiger: What?
Brian Barrett: Yes. A couple of caveats just real quick about all of these things, when we talk about all these people, those files represent some duplicates. They represent if Jeffrey Epstein was talking about somebody to someone else that’ll show up. So it’s not an exact figure. On the other hand, it’s also only when their full names are mentioned. We know that Epstein referred to Bill Gates as BG in a lot of emails. So I think a couple of things stand out to me here, Leah.
Leah Feiger: Yeah, hit me.
Brian Barrett: One. Yes, there’s a lot of Bill Gates. Gates has been on the record as saying he regrets his associate with Epstein. It’s been widely reported for years, even before the first Epstein files release, that Gates was in there. Still more interesting stuff in there about that, but it more reaffirms what we know. What I was interested in more were some things that seemed relatively new. The tech billionaire who’s in there the third most by our measurement was Peter Thiel. Peter Thiel, who I think there had been some reports that they had met maybe once or twice, but no, Peter Thiel is in over 2000 Epstein files.
Leah Feiger: He received political advice from Epstein. Epstein said that he wished he’d helped Peter Thiel with the Gawker suit.
Brian Barrett: Yeah. I think as much as anyone else in there, Thiel seemed interested in taking a meeting, having lunch. At one point they go to Signal, which is where encrypted chats happen. At one point, Peter Thiel’s assistant sent over Thiel’s dietary restrictions list, which is quite expansive.
Leah Feiger: It’s an incredible, incredible list. We have another article on WIRED.com. Everyone to go check that one out. I think the thing that gets me in so many ways, when I was looking through your story and all of the other excellent reporting on this drop, these are still people that have such an impact on our day-to-day life and day-to-day political life in the US and day-to-day tech life. Peter Thiel, cofounder of Palantir and eyes straight into Vice President Vance’s office for all that we’ve been told. This is someone who decided that it was clearly and not just OK, but beneficial to be having these associations. And again, we don’t know exactly what he knew or what all of these people knew at the time, but reading in between the lines, it’s a real … I guess what I’m saying is this isn’t an issue of just 2016, this is an issue of right now.
Brian Barrett: Well, and Leah, I’ll actually disagree with you there. We do know what they knew to a certain extent in the sense that Jeffrey Epstein pleaded guilty sex crimes involving a minor in 2008.
Leah Feiger: You’re absolutely right. You’re absolutely right.
Brian Barrett: And the vast majorities of these conversations take place after that.
Leah Feiger: Wild.
Brian Barrett: I’ll say too, a lot of the times, to your point, the defense comes up a lot. Elon Musk did this right? Where he’s like, oh, it’s taken out of context, or, oh, I never visited the island.
Leah Feiger: We got to talk about Elon Musk. His—
Brian Barrett: We have to. In terms of out of context and never visiting the island, well, on November 25th, 2012, Elon Musk wrote to Jeffrey Epstein: “What day/night will be the wildest party on your island?”
Leah Feiger: He’s begging to attend. There’s no other way to interpret this.
Brian Barrett: He really wants to go.
Leah Feiger: There’s no other way to interpret this. And also specifically that language. “The wildest party.” Not even just like, “Oh, when is … The wildest party?” There’s so many different parts of this. That gag reflex. Absolutely.
Brian Barrett: So the fact that the calendars didn’t line up, sure, that gives you some plausible deniability, but if they had, you would’ve been right there. So it is really disappointing. I do want to say, not to defend anybody, but a lot of the names in there are circumstantial in a way, and I think the bigger point is that Jeffrey Epstein really wanted to be close to these people. He happened to be at a dinner party with Jeff Bezos, no indication that they ever talked, no indication, whatever. But still, Jeff Bezos winds up in the Epstein files hundreds of times just because Epstein was reading articles about him or at the same place that he was so it is—
Leah Feiger: Talking about him. Yeah. Absolutely.
Brian Barrett: Yeah. It’s just this web. It fills out this web.
Leah Feiger: Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, Eric Schmidt, these are the tech titans.
Brian Barrett: Yeah. Up until as recently as 2019, I think some of these people were actively in touch.
Leah Feiger: Wow. So speaking of Elon, he was also in the news this week for an entirely different thing, aka rolling xAI into SpaceX, officially creating the world’s most valuable private company. We got to talk about that.
Brian Barrett: Yeah. And I know that you love … This combines your two favorite things.
Leah Feiger: Oh, yes. Absolutely.
Brian Barrett: AI and Elon Musk.
Leah Feiger: Uh-huh.
Brian Barrett: Leah, could I also interest you in a potential third favorite thing?
Leah Feiger: Oh, hit me, Brian.
Brian Barrett: Can I interest you in data centers in space?
Leah Feiger: So that’s what he’s promising, right?
Brian Barrett: Yeah.
Leah Feiger: I’m actually very interested in data centers.
Brian Barrett: Oh, good.
Leah Feiger: Molly Taft, our wonderful climate reporter on the science desk, has entirely turned me around on how important it is to engage with them. I hate them, but I am very interested in them. So he wants to build a data center in space. What does that mean? What is a terrestrial solution? Please explain all of these things.
Brian Barrett: Well, basically, yeah. So Elon Musk’s pitch for combining SpaceX and xAI. And just to back up a second, SpaceX is Elon Musk’s most mainstream non-controversial company probably.
Leah Feiger: It’s his rocket company.
Brian Barrett: Yeah. It’s his rocket company. They basically have privatized NASA, partly because NASA gave up. Anyway …
Leah Feiger: No.
Brian Barrett: The US space future really depends on SpaceX in so many ways.
Leah Feiger: If Jeff Bezos is listening to this podcast, he’s having just a true—
Brian Barrett: Sorry, Blue Origin. Yeah. Oh, gosh.
Leah Feiger: Internal.
Brian Barrett: Terrible day. Blue Origin also there. So on the one hand, you’ve got this sort of future of US space travel, and on the other side you’ve got xAI, which is Elon Musk’s AI company that keeps undressing women non-consensually.
Leah Feiger: And is also X, formerly known as Twitter.
Brian Barrett: Yes. And now they’re all going to be the same thing.
Leah Feiger: Former Twitter employees, did they make a lot of money from this? What’s happening? How are all of these companies now the same thing? None of this has relations to each other other than Elon Musk.
Brian Barrett: So he would argue differently. And so the case that he would make is that in order for AI to get where it needs to be, wherever that is, faster undressing of more women, for it to get there, there’s literally not enough energy on earth to make that happen. So what you need to do is you need to go out in space and harness the energy of the sun to power AI. And who is really good at going out into space and harnessing things? SpaceX.
Leah Feiger: Oh God.
Brian Barrett: So we need to put SpaceX in service of xAI to make sure that we can harness the power of the sun, or as Elon Musk said, scaling to make a sentient sun to understand the universe and extend the light of consciousness to the stars.
Leah Feiger: I’m getting this from your tone of voice, and we haven’t had this legally approved or anything, but can we just call bullshit? It was also suggested that Tesla could merge with xAI and SpaceX. Tesla recently invested $2 billion in xAI. At that point this is basically all of Elon Musk’s companies. You can talk about as sentient sun as much as you want, whatever that may entail. But this is just him combining all of his stuff together in one big pile and saying, I deserve as much money as possible from this. No?
Brian Barrett: Yeah. There are parts that you can call if not bullshit you can raise your eyebrow really, really high on and parts you can say, well, maybe this is Elon Musk’s unified theory of the future. I was surprised by this. I have been deeply skeptical of data centers in space. As much as I like to say it, I think it actually is where we’re going. I think that is a thing that is going to happen at some point, and SpaceX is in a really good position to do it. I do think, to your point though about all that intermingling … Look, SpaceX is a company that’s really, really important to the US government because of that NASA thing. And so suddenly tying its fortunes into this pretty controversial AI company, suddenly making its mission to be more about powering that AI than getting to Mars or wherever, that’s going to invite some regulatory concern. I think the US is going to take a closer look at this than they have taken a look at other Elon Musk projects because look, SpaceX has 20 something billion in government contracts.
Leah Feiger: I don’t know. I like to think that the US government would be taking a closer look at this. I think as we know in so much WIRED reporting and other reportings out there, the regulatory bodies that are able to look at things like this have been slashed and dismantled, and a lot of yes, men put in charge. So I’m very curious about where these regulatory conversations and reviews go.
Brian Barrett: And I’m curious too, SpaceX wants to IPO this year. Tesla stock is doing pretty well. But I think increasingly Elon Musk is betting it all on sci-fi, right? It’s true.
Leah Feiger: Yeah. You’re absolutely right.
Brian Barrett: Tesla is no longer a car company. He has made it very clear. Tesla is not a car company. Tesla is a company that sells humanoid robots, and we’re going to put them in every home. Tesla is a company that is going to have driverless robotaxis in every city. So he’s basically saying, look, all my companies right now are in service of what I think is going to happen. Could happen, may happen in he would probably say two years, but when he says two years, it usually means five to 10 to never.
Leah Feiger: I’m really waiting for the next commercial. Do you know where your child is? It’s 10:00 PM. Oh, no, don’t worry, they’re with their humanoid robot and their driverless taxi.
Brian Barrett: Yeah. They’re playing frisbee with optimists.
Leah Feiger: So before we go to break, Brian, just to change this up a little bit, so many things happening in the US this week. We’d be really remiss to not at least briefly talk about a big WIRED scoop that just came out that the politics desk at WIRED got this week all about an online forum where ICE agents log on and complain about their jobs.
Brian Barrett: Leah, this was a fascinating read from Tori Elliott who spent some time lurking in these forums, and I think what stands out, maybe not surprisingly, but it is a reminder of they have the same workaday complaints that any group of people would have.
Leah Feiger: Oh, absolutely. But it’s a little more serious when an ICE agent is telling you that they’re super tired and overworked and haven’t taken a day off in a while because they’re the ones with the gun.
Brian Barrett: Yeah.
Leah Feiger: Reading this was wild because I’m with you because on one hand you’re going, OK, yes, we’re all humans. We’re all dealing with these things, and on the other, you’re in charge of this right now you’re in charge of this massive surge. To back up a little bit, this forum of over 5,000 alleged current and former ICE and CBP officers has them venting about long work hours, limited overtime pay, incompetent leadership, poorly trained new recruits. A lot of these claims I have to add as a fun little side note, a lot of these came in after ICE actually lost their union representation a few years ago because ICE accused the union of being too far left. No comment further required. To add, just as a little backdrop here, the forum doesn’t require proof of employment, but it’s a really interesting look inside of ICE’s workforce and it has a lot of information and very specific details that really only these people would know. Some of these quotes were wild. What stood out to you?
Brian Barrett: What jumped out to me, the ones that really had that woe is me tenor, but also the ones that called the agency to task in a way that you don’t see externally, at least. There’s one quote, “led by some of the worst leadership I’ve ever witnessed from the local level all the way up to the national stage, this agency has managed to turn a righteous mission into a complete clown show.” Now, you might agree with half of that. You might agree with the whole thing. I don’t know whether it was ever necessarily righteous, but it is interesting to see how they are working through this. And to be clear, some of these people, when they make those complaints, they do get jumped on. I think there is a pretty active—
Leah Feiger: Oh yeah. Lots of pushback.
Brian Barrett: Yeah. Lots of pushback. Lots of people who are still very committed to the mission, still think it’s pretty righteous.
Leah Feiger: Honestly, the people talking about the mission and however these agents may feel about what’s happening in Minnesota, what happened in Chicago, what happened in LA, and what appears to be getting ready to happen in different parts of the United States, what was really interesting to me was not even just their focus on their mission, but how they were about to go about it. There was one user who was saying they had just finished the Virtual Deportation Officer Transition Program, which they also said had been shortened, and they’d been transitioned to practicals like firearms training. And they wrote in the chat that the new agent kit had arrived on Friday, this big box full of body armor, gear, Glock, bunch of other stuff. But then they said that the process was wildly chaotic. They still didn’t have access to GovTa, which is a system that the government uses to track workers’ time and leave. They didn’t have access to the electronic official personnel folder, which allows employees to access their own records. So basically, they’re not actually getting fully onboarded according to posters on this forum, but they’re still being handed a gun. This is wildly chaotic.
Brian Barrett: Extremely. And Leah, did you see anything in their editorial, in her reporting about the protests you mentioned in Minnesota or the deaths of Renee Nicole Good, and Alex Pretti. Did they engage with that at all?
Leah Feiger: Yeah. So they did, and a lot of the posts … The posts have been happening for over a decade now at this point, but posts definitely have been heating up this month. A couple of days before Pretti was killed, a user started a thread ready to resign, had enough stress and people were commenting on it and going back and forth, and I think that was when the quote that you mentioned came up, led by some of the worst people. And they continued on after that. We didn’t find things of people going like, oh, this is horrible. This person was killed. It doesn’t mean that it wasn’t there. These are so many posts. But a lot of people posting are very concerned about ICE’s image. They’re very concerned by how this is coming across. They’re very concerned about the chaos from the big things, noting these deaths, but also even randomly almost seemingly little stuff. This one quote I just can’t get enough of, which is I’m all for removing illegals, but snatching dudes off lawnmowers in Cali and leaving the truck and equipment just sitting there, definitely not working smarter. It’s just such a wild one because it’s someone going like, what is this chaos machine that I’m now part of? Whether or not we agree with any part of the sentiment.
Brian Barrett: What I thought really was interesting too, in telling in the forum … And maybe this doesn’t play out across all of them, but it does say how long someone has been in the forum, which is a little bit of a shorthand for how long they have been in ICE and working with this organization. And you can see how if you have been doing this for a decade and you do think that there is a right way to do this, I think clearly we’re in a world where that’s not the way it’s working anymore. So not to have sympathy for ICE, but it’s at least interesting to see who’s pushing back, how long they’ve been there when it’s veterans versus people who just got there, which again, it gets back to also it’s a workplace in some ways. It’s a work environment. It’s just one that is also a paramilitary force that is occupying us cities.
Leah Feiger: Right. And honestly, a bird’s eye view is as interesting as this article is and as juicy and telling as some of these quotes are, to my knowledge at least, there isn’t any other reporting out there like this. This snapshot in time of what ice agents are talking about and going through. They’re not really talking to that many other people about it. You have a couple of articles here or there. New York Times spoke to three ice agents about what’s going on. No. This is thousands. These are thousands of people talking about their day-to-day concerns with their jobs, with their bosses, with their coworkers, and with their mission. It’s a snapshot in time that we’re going to just have to keep looking at.
Brian Barrett: And we will. Coming up after the break, we’re going all the way to Laos in Southeast Asia to hear how a whistleblower was able to document and escape a crypto scam compound. Stay with us.
Andy Greenberg: I was having a normal Saturday on the roof with my kids. They were playing in a kiddie pool.
Brian Barrett: Last summer my colleague Andy Greenberg, was enjoying an idyllic late afternoon in New York—
Andy Greenberg:There had just been a rainstorm and there was a rainbow. It was a very beautiful evening. And I in typical terrible 21st century parenting style was ignoring my kids and looking at my phone and scrolling through messages.
Brian Barrett: —in the middle of mindlessly scrolling between apps.
Andy Greenberg: I’ve got this email. I found this email from someone with a pseudonym who is messaging me from the encrypted email service Proton Mail.
Brian Barrett: The email is from an unnamed source who claimed to be a computer engineer in Laos.
Andy Greenberg: A computer engineer trapped in a compound in the region of Laos who wanted to be a source, who wanted to be a whistleblower inside this crypto scam compound.
Brian Barrett: As a cybersecurity reporter, crypto scams are Andy’s bread and butter. That’s what he’s constantly tracking down. Trends in hacking and cybercrime. But crypto scam compounds are a beast of their own. These are places where scam operations happen at an industrial scale and crypto scams have become the most profitable form of cybercrime in the world, pulling in 10s of billions of dollars each year. Andy didn’t know if this anonymous source was legit, but he followed up and told the source to message him through Signal. Later that evening, Andy received a flurry of messages.
Andy Greenberg: They shared really detailed documents right off the bat, like an actual written report, a summary of everything they had experienced and everything about the way that this scam compound worked, including this very, very detailed flow chart that included some elements that I had never heard of before.
Brian Barrett: These documents describe step-by-step the methods that this crypto compound uses to lure victims into their scams. From creating fake Facebook and Instagram profiles to using hired models and AI deepfake tools, all of it to create the illusion of a romantic prospect, something they call pig butchering.
Andy Greenberg: The idea of pig butchering is that these are crypto romance investment scams.
Brian Barrett: The operation starts with the scammer using social media profiles to convincingly take the identity of say, a wealthy woman.
Andy Greenberg: A wealthy woman getting in touch usually with a lonely, very often older man and enticing them with some sort of intimate relationship.
Brian Barrett: Trust is built through these video calls and constant back and forth messages.
Andy Greenberg: The pig butchering part of this is that the pig is fattened up with this emotional connection, like somebody builds a real relationship with the victim until there’s a lot of trust and intimacy.
Brian Barrett: Eventually the scammer gives some financial advice to their mark.
Andy Greenberg: And this wealthy woman says, “By the way, I can help you become wealthy too. It seems like you’re having some financial problems and I can just refer you to the same crypto trading platform that I use, and you can easily double your money. It’s a very safe bet. I’ll walk you through it. In fact, I would be disappointed in you if you didn’t try it.” And that process is incredibly effective it turns out. And only after weeks or months of that fattening up romantic process is the pig butchered.
Brian Barrett: If you’re wondering how someone could fall for that, you should know that the methods these scammers use take everything into account. Through documents shared by his news source. Andy learned that they use deepfakes to interact with their victims through video calls and AI chatbots to finesse their messages. They also make sure to match the scammers ethnicity with that at their target to avoid any language or cultural barriers. But the thing is, these operations don’t just make victims out of their targets. Scam compounds lure workers, meaning the scammers behind the fake Facebook and Instagram accounts from Asian and African countries with legitimate job offers. Once they arrive at the sites, their passports are taken and they’re essentially trapped and forced to become scammers.
Andy Greenberg: A human trafficking operation that essentially enslaves people, tricks them into coming to this compound, turns them into forced laborers, traps them there and forces them to scam people for sometimes 15, 16 hour shifts. On one side, it’s taking people’s entire life savings very often, hundreds of thousands or even over a million dollars from victims in a single scam. But then on the other side, there are hundreds of thousands of enslaved people whose lives have been completely ruined as they’re trapped in these compounds.
Brian Barrett: The engineer who reached out to Andy is one of these workers trapped in Laos in a region bordering Myanmar and Thailand, where illicit operations are the norm.
Andy Greenberg: The Golden Triangle, I’ve always heard about it as this kind of vague region at the intersection of the borders of Laos and Myanmar and Thailand that has been carved out as this special economic zone that is almost in an official sense, not controlled by Laos, but instead controlled by Chinese business interests. It is essentially run by Chinese, both business people and very Chinese organized criminal syndicates. This very small area, just like half the size of Washington, DC, or something, it is now a hub for all sorts of transnational crime and crypto scam compounds may in fact be the biggest and most lucrative form of those.
Brian Barrett: And now it seemed the engineer who contacted Andy was willing to be a whistleblower for one of these compounds.
Andy Greenberg: This was somebody who had been trapped like this and wanted to expose everything he could about the operation.
Brian Barrett: Andy’s trying to figure out if this guy is legit when he calls him out of the blue.
Archival audio:
Red Bull: Hello.
Andy Greenberg: Hello.
Red Bull: I’m fine. How are you?
Andy Greenberg: Good. Good. Thank you for being willing to talk.
Andy Greenberg: I picked up the phone and I’m talking to this young, very polite man with an Indian accent.
Archival audio:
Andy Greenberg: What is your name or what can I call you?
Red Bull: You can call me from any name brother. No matter.
Andy Greenberg: Oh, but you tell me just so I know how to talk to you and what name to call you. You can make one up if you like of course.
Red Bull: You can call me Red Bull. OK.
Andy Greenberg: Oh, Red Bull. Red Bull?
Red Bull: Yeah. Yes.
Andy Greenberg: OK. OK.
Andy Greenberg: And I later found out that he was looking at an empty can of a Red Bull energy drink on the table in front of him when he said that. He was so motivated as a source, so driven that I was almost … I was a little put off. I was wary of this person, and I quickly actually hung up and then called him back on a video call because I wanted to see who I was talking to. And he picked up with no hesitation and showed me his face on the video call. Showed me around the hotel room. He had actually managed to book a hotel room. And I asked him to show me out the window to walk outside the hotel. It was nighttime my time, but it was daytime there and he showed me the front of the hotel, which I could see that it was a Chinese language sign that there were palm trees and that it looked like a poor tropical area where everything was in Chinese, and that certainly sounded like the Golden Triangle to me. So I started to get what felt like confirmation very quickly that he was who he said and that he really was in a scam compound and that he was in the Golden Triangle.
Brian Barrett: I think it’s interesting too. I think when you hear about people and about people enslaved in these compounds, you don’t really necessarily think that they have that amount of mobility, the ability to go rent out a hotel room, walk around on the street, take video, but it’s a little bit of a different setup in terms of what’s keeping them there. Is that fair to say?
Andy Greenberg: I was also surprised. I had read reports of these scam slavery compounds where people are held in shackles and beaten every day and electrocuted in some cases, and they’re held almost in the jungle in remote places. The Golden Triangle compounds are not like that. In part because the Golden Triangle itself is almost like a mega compound. The victims of these human trafficking operations, even if they walk around outside the building where they work, or even the dormitory where they live, their passport has been taken away. The police have very often been paid off by the compound mafia. They can’t really leave regardless. So they have a surprising freedom of movement because the whole place is essentially like a closed circuit.
Brian Barrett: A closed circuit where as the source Red Bull described to Andy, they had a strict work schedule and punitive measures.
Andy Greenberg: They were actually paid, in theory, a salary of like $500 a month or so in Chinese Yuan. But then that money was taken from them almost entirely through fines for every tiny violation that their bosses could think of. They had access to a cafeteria where they were fed, but that food was withheld if they so much as showed up late to work or late to lights out in the dormitory. So there was this illusion of them being there voluntarily being paid a salary. They were even in theory, paid a commission on any scams they pulled off. But Red Bull was entirely broke. He had been scammed into absolute poverty, had no money. So it was a Orwellian thing where the bosses would give people these inspirational speeches as if they were part of some corporate sales force, like part of a car dealership or something. And in fact, they were absolutely forced laborers with no choice about what they were doing and who faced really brutal consequences if they ever broke the rules or tried to escape.
Brian Barrett: It had been less than 24 hours since Red Bull had first made contact, but the details were quickly mounting up. He told Andy that they should involve law enforcement and that he was willing to work with an FBI handler. He specifically wanted to inform them about an upcoming in-person cash transaction that was happening on US soil and was related to one of the compound scams.
Andy Greenberg: They were going to do an in-person pickup of cash with a courier. So Red Bull wanted me to arrange a sting operation to catch this courier and question this guy and he thought that that would be a big win against the scam operation.
Brian Barrett: That’s when Andy decided to reach out to Erin West, a former California prosecutor who now runs an anti-scam organization.
Andy Greenberg: Erin thought there was no time to do a sting. She also said that any courier is super far down the hierarchy of a scam operation and it would not be a good idea. Also, she pointed out that that would call attention to the fact that there was a leak in the compound and could put Red Bull’s life at risk. But then I asked her, what do you think about putting him in touch with an FBI agent, somebody to be his handler? Can you recommend somebody? And to my surprise, she suggested that I not do that either. She thought that the story I could produce with Red Bull as a source would be more important than anything he could give law enforcement. That in the best case scenario in years, what he provided might lead to the arrest of somebody low down in the org chart of a scam compound or possibly just charges in absentia for somebody who could not possibly be arrested or extradited from Laos from the Golden Triangle. As she put it, the cavalry is not coming. Nobody from Interpol or the FBI is going to march into this scam compound in the Golden Triangle and start arresting people.
Brian Barrett: When Red Bull suggested that you organize a sting, which Andy, you are a incredibly gifted reporter, I believe that’s not in your skill set necessarily.
Andy Greenberg: Absolutely not.
Brian Barrett: Not. But it was, I think, an indicator of something that we ended up talking about a lot throughout this reporting process, which is that Red Bull was not just willing, but at times very eager to take big chances.
Andy Greenberg: Yeah. Red Bull was just remarkably risk-tolerant. Had so many dangerous ideas about what he wanted to do. He wanted to wear a hidden camera or hidden microphone, a button camera or some sort of watch with a recording device in it. He wanted to install spyware on his boss’s computer. He wanted to set up a screen recording software on his work PC so that I could see what he was doing all day long. And I consulted with you about all these things, and then many other experts, and everybody told me one by one, these are not good ideas. This will get Red Bull killed. And I took that very seriously. And we didn’t do any of that. I talked him out of all of those ideas. And what we ultimately settled on was a much simpler system that I still think actually turned out to be pretty effective, which was just that he installed a disguised version of Signal on his work PC.
Brian Barrett: A disguised version of Signal. Basically, Red Bull installed the app on his work computer with a different icon, making it look like it was a shortcut to his hard drive.
Andy Greenberg: And then we would talk with disappearing messages set to a very low time period so there was not much of a log if we were ever caught.
Brian Barrett: Andy and Red Bull also took up aliases.
Andy Greenberg: He would pretend that he was talking to his uncle. He would call me uncle from time to time just in case somebody spotted what he was doing.
Brian Barrett: Some of those aliases were a little more embarrassing than others.
Andy Greenberg: Eventually, we upgraded our cover story to me pretending to be his secret girlfriend, and we used a lot of heart emojis, but that was a little too cringey and we just couldn’t keep it up.
Brian Barrett: But the golden rule that stuck was how Andy and Red Bull would say hi to each other.
Andy Greenberg: We created a protocol where when we started the conversation, the first person would say, Red, that the second person would say, Bull to make sure that his computer had not been seized.
Brian Barrett: As their communication got into a rhythm, Red Bull filled in a very detailed map of the inner workings of the scam compound operation.
Andy Greenberg: He sent me photos of a whiteboard that showed a leaderboard of who had scammed the most that month. He sent me a spreadsheet that turned out to be a floor plan of the whole dormitory and all the different workers there. He sent me a picture of this big Chinese ceremonial drum that was played for scams of a hundred thousand dollars or more. And then once in a while, he would then tell me to record my screen and turn on video on those calls, and then keep pretending to talk to his uncle as he walked around and videotaped and I recorded outside the compound, into the lobby of the office, sometimes into the cafeteria and once into the actual work floor, the office itself, where I could see the whole layout of the office and even colored flags on different teams desks to connote whether they had met their scam quota of revenue that month.
Brian Barrett: As the weeks passed by, the wall started to close in on Red Bull. His team leader started asking questions about why he wasn’t generating enough new so-called clients, and then he threatened him with a beating. At this point, Andy consulted with me and the other editors at WIRED. We decided that the safest thing was to stop the reporting process with Red Bull, at least until we knew he was safe.
Andy Greenberg: I told Red Bull, let’s stop. We got to stop. You gave me enough. Thank you. Let’s just wait and we’ll speak again when you are free and you’re home, then we will talk again. But when I said this to him like that, we’re done with our reporting process, he immediately in that conversation said, well, then I need to get out of here now. I’m going to find a way to escape.
Brian Barrett: For the full story of what happened to Red Bull and the crypto scam compound he was escaping from you can head to WIRED.com. We promise it’s worth your time. Thank you for listening.
Leah Feiger: This episode was produced by Adriana Tapia and Tyler Hill. It was edited by Kate Osborn, Amar Lal at Macro Sound mixed this episode. Matt Giles and Daniel Roman fact-checked this episode. Mark Leyda was our SF studio engineer. Pran Bandi was our NY Studio engineer. Kate Osborn is our executive producer, and Katie Drummond is WIRED’s Global Editorial Director.
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