What’s Really Happening Behind Closed Doors... | Matt Parker | DSH #1907

Do you ever think about the risks you didn't take? Buying Bitcoin early, and besting after 2008, loading up on NVIDIA? AI is changing jobs, markets are all over the place, nothing feels guaranteed, and at some point you realize no one's here to save you. We're kind of the FOMO generation, but here's one thing you don't want to miss, protecting your future. If you're new to life insurance, you're not alone. Thankfully, I found select quote. For over 40 years, they've helped more than 2 million Americans understand their options and secure over $700 billion in coverage. As a broker, their mission is simple, to find you the right insurance policy at the best price. And they work for you for free. You can even get same-day coverage up to $2 million with no medical exam required. And even if you have pre-existing conditions, they work with companies that can help. Life insurance is never cheaper than it is today. Get the right life insurance for you for less and save more than 50% at selectquote.com slash dsh. Save more than 50% on term life insurance at selectquote.com slash dsh today to get started at selectquote.com slash dsh. When undercover for the first time 2011, Brighton on lights, tourists from all around the world are there to buy people for xx. And there's stickers on each corner of an alleyway, and they have your feet, your positions, or child's placement. They're selling it all. Okay guys, Matt Parker, in studio today from Exodus Road. Thanks for your time, man. I know you're busy. Yeah, thanks for bringing me in. Yeah, you just spoke at an event, right? Yeah, I guess so worked out. Yeah, it was great. I'm sure you're off to another country soon. Yeah, a lot of travel, but enjoy what I do. Nice. For those that don't know what, I got a younger audience, so they might not know you, but Exodus Road, what is that about? Yeah, we're a global nonprofit fighting human trafficking. And we do several things. We partner with law enforcement to identify victims of human trafficking and advocate for police action. That's really the genesis of what we began to do. And it's evolved over the years, and now we have aftercare shelter where we care for victims that are coming out of human trafficking, help them find healing through counseling services, and then help them find work, which is a big component of their freedom. And then we're in school systems with awareness, talking about digital safety and how to avoid exploitative situations all around the world. So that's the main way they're being targeted now through the digital world? Yes, yeah, it's really unfortunate to see how the world has opened up to criminals through social media and digital platforms, even things like cryptocurrency being leveraged to remain anonymous while they exploit vulnerable people. Yeah, it is pretty nuts. I play Fortnite, which I'm sure you're familiar with, and like there's a mode called Delulu. I don't know if you heard it. I'm not that familiar with it. Basically, like Voice Chat is an open world. So I hear kids all the time, just like six, seven, eight-year-old kids talking on Voice Chat, and they're talking to adults. And that's normal. Crazy, right? One of the things that we did with the nonprofit this year, this will last a couple years, is we've rolled out a digital safety training called Influenced. And it addresses this exact vulnerability of young people in the online space interfacing with strangers, right, in the end, and with voice modification, an old man can sound like a young man or a young woman. And so young people are very trusting at times because they kind of think, well, they can't harm me, but they're lured into a relationship under false pretense, and eventually that could lead to something like sex distortion, which is on the rise here in the United States. Sex distortion. Yeah, sex distortion. When we talk about human trafficking, and this is Human Trafficking Awareness Month, so I appreciate you having me on to talk about this issue in particular. We have 50 million modern day slaves today. It's an overwhelming number. And that's an estimated number based on data, the data we can collect, but human trafficking in general is a difficult crime to measure because victims of human trafficking are always raising their hand, like please count me in the census. And so we have law enforcement data from arrests and interdiction that takes place, and we have these estimates and algorithms that kind of say, hey, we think there's an estimate of 50 million. Wow. But sex distortion touches human trafficking in that we have, especially in the United States, young people online, playing Fortnite, living their life, and they're engaging with people in chat rooms or forums. And what happens often is those relationships are perpetrated by someone who's trying to get money. Or nudes from children. And it starts off quite innocently. Oftentimes, the relationship will say, hey, if you send me a photo of yourself, I'll give you some diamonds or some currency that was in the game. Yeah, Z-box. And it starts off not necessarily as a nude, but just a photograph, but it progresses. And eventually, that child, the unsuspecting victim, would say, hey, please don't share that photo. And then the relationship changes and the veil comes off, and the perpetrator said, I'm going to share that image with your mom or your friends on Facebook or your school community. And a lot of these perpetrators have done a lot of homework on that child's community, and they're name dropping. Wow. And so the child is terrified, they're not equipped to handle that. And unfortunately, it's led to a lot of teen suicide here in the United States. Geez. And some of our more recent investigations have uncovered that a lot of the perpetrators aren't even within our country. They're from Nigeria or Myanmar, these are targeted attacks on the United States teenagers. Is it because in their currency, they can make a lot more basically targeting American? Well, it's an interesting development. A lot of the perpetration is actually caused by someone who's been trafficked and is under duress. Oh, wow. It's called forced criminality. So right now, one of the largest human trafficking situations in the world is coming from scamming compounds is what we call them. And there's many of them in Myanmar, there's some in Cambodia and the Philippines, there's some in Africa, parts of Africa. And what happens is a mafia group in Asia, the Chinese mafia, they will recruit young 20-something IT professionals for a job. And so it looks like labor migration. Young people are like, yeah, I get to travel for work and they arrive into Bangkok under the promise of work and then they're driven across the border into Myanmar. Wow. And they're held in a factory basically, where they're forced to scam or sex store teenagers or people here in the United States. Holy crap. So I don't know if you've gotten some of those texts, I get them once a month or every other week. If somebody pretending to know you and then most of us are like, hey, I'm sorry, you have the wrong number, that is probably a trafficked victim in a foreign country who's being forced to send you that text. And their goal is one of two things or three things, a romance scheme. So they're praying on vulnerable people who may really desire a relationship and they're trafficking intimacy. They're like, hey, have a relationship with me and they'll send you a fake photo, even fake videos to make you think it's a beautiful woman and then you enter into this relationship or they invite you into a cryptocurrency investment scheme. And it sounds and looks so real in these compounds, they have very sophisticated but fake investment platforms that look legitimate. Wow. And they are convincing typically retirees but others in the United States to empty their savings to gamble like we do here in Vegas, right? Like, hey, I'm going to make you rich and people fall for that and it's not real. And as soon as they've emptied their savings, that veil comes down. Or the third thing is sex distortion, right? What we've already kind of mentioned, convincing children to send a nude and then as soon as they do that, they demand money or more nudes. And in that regard, there's two things that are happening. They're either extorting funds out of children or generating CSAMP, child sexual abuse material that they will then sell or trade. Wow. So there's a whole market for just child nudes. Oh yeah. It's major. In fact, it's one of the crime types that the United States law enforcement are really focused on. Globally, we're focusing on that. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children is really at the center of that fight, you know, celebrate the company that I work for now. It's the Global Brain Ambassador. We have tools that expedite the investigation of CSAMP. And so in this way, you have all these layers to child exploitation taking place and human trafficking. And unfortunately, the teenagers that are victims of this type of sex distortion crime, they're committing suicide. Wow. And, you know, they don't have those skills. They typically don't have what they consider to be a safe place to say, look, I'm in trouble. I sent a nude, right? And now that's going to go to my entire community. And so at the Exodus Road, we have that digital safety training called Influence. It's for parents of teenagers. Do you ever think about the risk you didn't take buying Bitcoin early, investing after 2008, loading up on NVIDIA? AI is changing jobs, markets are all over the place, nothing feels guaranteed. And at some point, you realize no one's going to save you. We're kind of the FOMO generation. But here's one thing you don't want to miss, protecting your future. If you're new to life insurance, you're not alone. Thankfully, I found select quote, for over 40 years, they've helped more than 2 million Americans understand their options and secure over $700 billion in coverage. As a broker, their mission is simple to find you the right insurance policy at the best price. And they work for you for free. You can even get same day coverage up to $2 million with no medical exam required. And even if you have preexisting conditions, they work with companies that can help. Life insurance is never cheaper than it is today. Get the right life insurance for you for less and save more than 50% at selectquote.com slash dsh. Save more than 50% on term life insurance at selectquote.com slash dsh today to get started at selectquote.com slash dsh. Puppet Traders and four teenagers, how do you protect yourself and your friends against this type of perpetration? And then on the other side of the planet, we have perpetrators who are forced to do it, who have been trafficked. And if they don't meet their quotas through extorting money out of children or adults, then they're beaten. And we have rescued several of those victims who have been trapped in those compounds. And we've worked with Interpol and Homeland Security on those cases. It's an overwhelming problem that we're dealing with. But you might just think, oh, I just got the wrong text from someone. But it really all, I think, boils into this concept that our culture and society, we long for intimacy. We want friendships. We want to be loved. Unfortunately, a lot of our relationships, maybe fortunately or unfortunately, they're digital relationships. These days, yeah. And so we're not really looking at each other eye to eye in a bar to get to know each other. It's all digital, which creates this opportunity for deception to vulnerable people. And we're all vulnerable in that regard. We all want relationships, right? And we tend to turn online, because it's easier. I know I did when I was a kid. I turned to the internet because I had a lot of trouble making friends in real life growing up. Always felt a little different. But on the internet, you could kind of find your niche no matter how small or large. Right. There's all sorts of communities. Absolutely. Yeah. You mentioned Asia earlier. I know you spent a lot of time over there under copyright. I did. Yeah, that was kind of my Genesis story of coming face to face with the problem of human trafficking, which to be honest, I didn't know much about at the time. I was with my wife and my kids running a children's home in the north of Thailand. That's what we had moved to Thailand to do was to care for vulnerable people. And my wife and I have just always had a heart for the global poor, and we've always wanted to help. And I found myself with my family in northern Thailand, caring for 48 young girls in a children's home. And it was during that time of trying to understand what are the needs that these young women have, and why did they end up in this situation where they needed to come and live in a children's home? Some of them were orphaned, and some of them just had maybe one parent living, and there was incredible poverty that was driving some of that decision to take care of them. So I drove to their villages and interviewed the village chiefs. And it was a really cool experience for me as chickens running around, thatched roofs in the middle of the jungle, and every village leader as I would interview them and say, hey, you know, tell me about girls that end up working in large cities south of here. How does that happen? And what was happening and is explained to me, men in trucks would show up to their village and offer jobs that sounded legitimate, but only to the pretty girls. And they have this saying in the village that there are no pretty girls in the village. And these are minority groups, Lysu, La Hu, Aka, Mong, and they're mostly rice farmers, agricultural, and so if the monsoon comes through and wipes out their crop, they're facing extreme hunger and poverty, and they've got kids to care for. And so when a guy drives up in a truck and offers a great job to your daughter, you kind of feel like, oh man, this is a great opportunity. And they put them in that truck, and then they never see their daughter again in often cases, and they drive them to a large city and they force them into sex slavery. And that's called human trafficking. Human trafficking, it looks like so many different things. And what I'm describing is a pretty extreme form of it, but a lot of it mirrors this idea of labor migration. This young girl or boy's offered a job, it's a town away or country away or a long bus ride away, and they arrive at that destination for the job. And all of a sudden, the terms of employment change. The trafficker says, well, hey, now you owe me for that bus ride or the plane ticket, or some terms that were previously agreed upon change. I've even met women who have said, look, I knew I was going to come to this country and do sex work, but I was promised it would be with executives, wealthy men in nice hotels, and turns out, now that was true, I have to walk the street and go with whomever. And so they change the terms. Well, that's human trafficking. But you look at it from the outside in and from a law enforcement perspective or civilian perspective, and it looks like, oh yeah, she's on that street corner because she wants to be there. Well, not exactly. That's not exactly what's going on here. That woman I was describing, she was actually from Uganda. And she was missing a tooth when I had met her. And I had heard rumors of Ugandan women being trafficked into Bangkok, and I was deputized by the Thai Royal Police, and I'll share a bit more about that too. But in this case, I had sat down with her and she said she was from Tanzania. And I had talked with her about how long she'd been in the country and tried to understand her situation. And eventually, she says, Matt, I've been lying to you this whole time. I'm from Uganda. The reason I lied to you is that the syndicate who's controlling me will send men sometimes that look just like you to ask me the exact questions you're asking me. And I told the truth once before and they knocked my tooth out. Holy crap. And so so much of the force, fraud and coercion that goes on with these vulnerable people, it's a mental gain of violence. It's like a mental prison. It is. And a lot of times when you think about human trafficking, like, oh, people are tied to a bed and there's ropes and chains involved. And those are great images. But the truth is, you don't really need ropes and chains. You just need to threaten a victim's sister or mom if they're non-compliant or the victim next to each other. And I was undercover just a few months ago and I was asking one of the victims, hey, do you have any friends here? That's one of the questions I tend to ask these days. And she's like, no, I don't have any friends here. There's some mechanism of isolation and control that these women that look like no any willing participants maybe in the sex trade have things happening in the background most people don't know about and no one's asking about. So when I started to understand what was happening in the northern villages of Thailand, I met with the Thai royal police and I'm like, look, I just want to help. You know, how can I help? And they wanted me to do some research for them and try to understand where people are bought and sold. You know, 50 million modern day slaves is an overwhelming number. When I first started this, the estimation was 27 million. So this is getting worse, right? But the police that I worked with were like, look, help us identify, you know, where the border crossings are, where people are being traded or illegally smuggled in and where are the brothels and where are the dark alleys. And so I set about researching that for them and it all built up to a singular moment where I had received a phone call and, you know, from a nonprofit partner of mine. And they were like, Matt, there's a child being sold. You know, do you ever think about the risk you didn't take buying Bitcoin early, besting after 2008, loading up on NVIDIA AI is changing jobs and markets are all over the place. Nothing feels guaranteed. And at some point you realize no one's coming to save you. We're kind of the FOMO generation. But here's one thing you don't want to miss protecting your future. If you're new to life insurance, you're not alone. Thankfully, I found select quote for over 40 years, they've helped more than 2 million Americans understand their options and secure over $700 billion in coverage. As a broker, their mission is simple to find you the right insurance policy at the best price. And they work for you for free. You can even get same day coverage up to $2 million with no medical exam required. And even if you have preexisting conditions, they work with companies that can help life insurance is never cheaper than it is today. Get the right life insurance for you for less and save more than 50% at select quote dot com slash dsh. They've more than 50% on term life insurance at select quote dot com slash dsh today to get started at select quote dot com slash dsh. Down this red light district, we've met with her. Can you tell the police? I'm like, yeah, absolutely. And so I told the police what the tip, you know, like, Hey, there's a victim of trafficking in this area. Can we go get her? And the police looked at me and said, Matt, we don't know this person who gave you that information. And I've been working with them for about a year. That's pretty close with this unit. They said, but if you would go and verify it, we trust you, you know, this is something we would act on. And then really, the whole, my whole life changed because I went to my wife, Laura, and I'm like, Hey, babe, I, I never really anticipated going undercover to verify a child was for sale. Police are asking if I would do it. What do you think? And I knew early on, I really wanted her, if I were to do something like that, I'd want her buy-in because I've never been in a brothel before. And Mary, we have kids, you know, brothels typically aren't where Mary men should do it. Anyone should be. And she said something that was really powerful. She said, Matt, what if this were our kids? We had three kids and we still have three kids, two daughters and a son. And what if this were one of them? And we knew it, we knew just enough to know that they're, that these girls were trafficked, lost to the darkness of a back alley and that their parents had no recourse to find or free them. And if that were our kids, we would hope that someone would go on behalf of them to advocate for their freedom so they could come home to us. And so I went undercover for the first time in 2011. And when I walked in to that brothel, they're, you know, first off, if you guys could imagine with me a red like district, and I think most of us can imagine that, you know, parts of Vegas that feel like this, you know, Brighton neon lights, tourists from all around the world are there to buy people for sex. And there's traffickers on each corner of an alleyway and they have, you know, or sexual positions or child sexual abuse, they're selling it all, they're selling drugs and they approach you, they grab your arm, they're trying to kind of be pushy and, and girls are lined the alley, pulling on you, hey, handsome man, they're calling out to you, trying to get you to come into their brothel. And these brothels have a black curtain in the doorway. And behind that black curtain is a totally different world than what's in the public eye. And so as you cross through that black curtain, you'll see women on a stage with a number on their chest. And they're dancing, most of them are not good dancers, they're, they're from the village or they're from an exploitative situation. They're just on the stage with these numbers on their chest, they're in a bikini, maybe they're nude. And then the customers sit kind of around that stage and they get to choose the number of the girl they want to have sex with. Wow. So that first undercover experience, I, I pulled the trafficker close to me and I'm trying, I'm like, Hey, I'm new, explain this to me. You know, these girls have numbers. And he's like, Oh, don't worry. I know you don't speak Thai. These girls don't speak English. That's why they have numbers. You just pick the number of the girl you want to have sex with. You can take her upstairs for 45 minutes, you can do whatever you want to her, you don't have to talk to her. And it's 45 bucks. Wow. And then she'll come back down and she'll hop back on stage. And we, those of us in the nonprofit sector and who are fighting human trafficking, we talk about human trafficking turns people into commodities. And these young women were commodities. They were canned goods on a shelf. You just chose the one you wanted and you could abuse them. And I think the other thing that really struck me in those first moments is that their faces, their eyes, they felt, they clearly did not want to be there. They did not want to be on that stage. They didn't fit the bill of like a knowing and willing participant into the sex trade. And I think we convolued these things where human trafficking hides in the sex trade, right? Certainly there may be some women who are there knowing and willingly and they're by choice and they have power to leave whenever they want. But that wasn't the story of these women. And I've been in over 2000 brothels, wow, the last 14 years undercover. And I have never heard a woman that I've asked, hey, do you like working here? No one has said yes. Holy crap. And so I think there's this idea we have, I think, of legal prostitution perhaps and women's empowerment. And I'm all about women's empowerment if that's what they want. Right. I just have yet to meet somebody who's like, man, I love this job. I'm not saying that doesn't exist. I'm saying I've been in over 2000 brothels. That's a lot. And I've held thousands and thousands of hands and places where women are really disempowered. So there is this narrative that I think in the West we often have that this problem is over there somewhere. It's in Asia. But I'm telling you, it is reaching into and across our borders and impacting our children. It's impacting our moms and dads who lose the retirement to a scamming operation before a country. And then even within our own borders, we have perpetrators who are seeking out to abuse children. So it's a very challenging crime. And my experience over the last 14 years, I have seen that crime evolve faster than our legislation is able to keep up with. The speed of technology is faster than the speed of legislation. And we are just chasing this crime type and it's growing. So awareness is really key. Having the skills to protect yourself and your family and your loved ones is really key. Law enforcement are typically underfunded, understaffed, undertrained. They're doing the best they can with a small budget and personnel. And that's where Celebrite comes in with technology because it expedites the investigation process, comes up with evidence that is powerful through the judicial process. And that's why I love working with Celebrite and have deployed their capabilities all around the world to find in free victims of trafficking. That's incredible. So you can have operations all over because of Celebrite. Yes. That's powerful. Have any other girls ever blown your cover because they're so scared of escaping or whatever? No, I can't really divulge all of our tactics, but I'm able to say that even the victims themselves don't know who my investigators are. Oh, well. So the Exodus Road has over 100 staff globally. We're in six countries and we use aliases. I can say that. And as we engage with victims, we are very careful to not victimize victims. We work in partnership with police. We're empowering them. Oftentimes, police are embedded and undercover with us so that they can take the stand and testify. We'd rather not. In every successful case we do, we're giving law enforcement partners credit. And in that way, they get promoted and we get to stay safe. Respect. Right? And so we're arrested along with all the other criminals and that's really the way to go about it. And so no one really knows. And we have enough investigators at the Exodus Road. I can rotate them in and out, different nationalities. And so we really don't want to have a heavy footprint, one individual going too many times in an establishment. And we hide amongst the thousand, unfortunately, of customers who are there who look and behave just like we do. There's not many on a daily night there. Oh, yeah. The commercial red light districts thousands. Wow. I've been to the when I was young, I like walked. Do you ever think about the risk you didn't take buying Bitcoin early, and best thing after 2008, loading up on NVIDIA AI is changing jobs and markets are all over the place. Nothing feels guaranteed. And at some point, you realize no one's coming to save you. We're kind of the FOMO generation. But here's one thing you don't want to miss protecting your future. If you're new to life insurance, you're not alone. Thankfully, I found select quote for over 40 years, they've helped more than 2 million Americans understand their options and secure over $700 billion in coverage. As a broker, their mission is simple to find you the right insurance policy at the best price. And they work for you for free. You can even get same day coverage up to $2 million with no medical exam required. And even if you have preexisting conditions, they work with companies that can help life insurance is never cheaper than it is today. Get the right life insurance for you for less and save more than 50% at select quote.com slash DSH. Save more than 50% on term life insurance at select quote.com slash DSH today to get started at select quote.com slash DSH. We're the one in the Amsterdam, the red light district. I don't know if you investigated that one. But yeah, there was a lot of people there. Yeah. And it you know, there's these are commercial red light districts and I call it it's a case typology. So when we look at cases of, you know, what does human trafficking look like? It could certainly take place and look like a commercial red light district. Thankfully, those have gotten a little bit of focus. Countries and governments who are trying to clean up the reputation and not not be a sex tourist destination, but you know, have other natural tourist activities that are more family friendly. So trafficking could occur there does. But it's also on in border towns. And I was thinking of it actually on the way over here today. It's interesting what we as as society or global cultures are comfortable with, you know, red light districts or, you know, massage businesses here in the United States often have traffic victims in them. Really massage business. There's a big population of Chinese speaking masseuses who offer happy endings or sexual services in these massage places. All the illicit massage businesses or IMBs in the United States and they're very difficult to investigate because most most of those cases require Chinese language proficiency. And they're here in the country technically sometimes legally. And so you have to prove that they're doing these illicit things. And you have an uncooperative witness and that becomes really challenging. That's where digital evidence is so important. Got it. That's where celebrites capabilities are so important because they'll take the stand when no one else will data doesn't really it's unbiased. It's data. Did you call, you know, is this syndicate on this phone number attached to multiple escort ads? It is. Well, that's not an individual selling themselves. They're a part of a bigger network or, you know, an IMB, illicit massage business. You know, are these are these women allowed to to leave the establishment or are they forced to live and stay on site? So these digital witnesses is what we call them. They will testify to a narrative and story that's true and irrefutable and data cooperates. Wow. So it really makes for a powerful prosecution. Yeah. You can do that whether it's an illicit massage business or a sex distortion situation or other types of human trafficking. But apart from red light communities, it could look, you know, people are bought and sold just out of, you know, massage businesses or beer gardens, border crossings. Right now, you know, this issue with Venezuela, we're having. Yeah. For years undercover in Colombia, there's this wave of vulnerable women coming into Colombia desperate for money and trying to send work home. And they often shave their hair and sell their hair to make wigs right there on the border. Traffickers just wait there on the border for them and then they offer them jobs. And so you look at that situation, I think this is a great story. It's like, if you were to drive by a homeless person in the United States and they have a cardboard sign and it says, I will work for food, you know, if that were genuinely true, you know, we should have an amount of compassion for that individual, right? They're willing to work in exchange for money, right? You know, what we would probably consider to be honorable work, you know, mulling the lawn or painting a fence. But if that sign said, I will have sex with you for money or I will have sex with you for food, that really should hit us a little bit differently. But that is exactly what's happening. Vulnerable people are willing on behalf of their families and and their children to say yes to an exploitive situation to survive. And that is happening in at scale, 50 million, right? This is a large problem. But the majority of us in society aren't equating what's taking place as a vulnerable thing. We should not allow young women to sell their bodies. We should be able as a society to care for them in a way where they get the choice perhaps to do that. Yeah. But they don't have to do it to survive. Yeah. And in this way, it's easy to exploit them. Someone who's desperate and trying to survive who's willing to sell their hair or kidney, you know, willing to cross a border and make a journey that's treacherous to feed their families. That is oftentimes that vulnerability that leads them to take the job, that leads them to the brothel on a promise of wealth or at least enough. And then once they're there, and I think the reason the ex's road exists as a nonprofit and the reason I do what I do, is oftentimes no one's looking for them. Yeah. Because like you said, they capture them from villages and these poor areas. Yes. Yes. So they can't even make a call, some of these people, right? Yeah. And even if they could make a call and a lot of these women have phones, they're under an amount of duress. They've threatened to go get my sister if I actually call for help. And oftentimes in other parts of the world, law enforcement can be complicit. Wow. And are protecting these environments for a bribe. Wow. And so that's a whole other level of complexity. And when you think about, hey, someone's child and if it were my child and they're trapped in this environment, and somebody has to go and find them and they have to advocate for their freedom and police action by navigating the corrupt environment that allows this whole thing to exist. It's very complicated. Yeah. Because some of these rings, I'd imagine the bigger ones, they're making a lot of money so they can afford to bribe people, right? That's nothing to them. Yeah. And they do try. And again, I feel like I'm continuing to champion the concept of digital forensics, but in 2015, we participated in one of the largest human trafficking takedowns in Thailand's modern history. And it was a rumored case like the Rohingya people from Myanmar were being persecuted. There's been genocide taking place there for 60 years. And what they were doing, these people groups were trying to escape and they were paying human smugglers to load them onto ships and take them to Malaysia where they would be safe and they have family there. But these human smugglers turned human traffickers and made landfall on the Andaman coast of Thailand. And they were loading the Rohingya people who were paying to get to Malaysia, loading them on the trucks and driving them into jungle holding camps. They were secret. They marched them into the jungle and would hold them there and ransom them to the fishing industry, or ransom them to their families in Malaysia. Wow. So that was a human trafficking syndicate. And it had been happening for years and years and it was rumored that something was going on like that, but there was no evidence. Nobody really knew how or when. And this was taking place for me in 2014-13. Somebody, one of my donors who was an Army Ranger called me up and said, Matt, have you heard of Celebrate? And I know, Celebrate, what is it? And he said, well, it's a digital forensics tool. We used it to fight terrorism in Afghanistan. I think it could help you fight trafficking. I'm like, I'm in. So he donated the device to me. It's called a UFED, a universal forensics extraction device. And I looked at this thing. I'm like, what am I going to do with this? So I called Celebrate and I told him what I was hoping to accomplish and they were like, we're in. We want to help. And so they equipped me and I went to Thailand and right around that time, I was equipped with Celebrate capabilities and one of these trucks loaded full of Rohingya people encountered a road stop, a police checkpoint. And it was a canvas covered military style truck and the driver and passenger, that truck came up to the police stop and took off running. 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Get the right life insurance for you for less and save more than 50% at select quote dot com slash dsh. Save more than 50% on term life insurance at select quote dot com slash dsh today to get started at select quote dot com slash dsh. And the cops are like, what is happening? So they chased them down and tackled these guys and then they uncovered the back of that truck and there was 90 Rohingya traffic victims in the back, stuffed in the back. And one 16 year old boy had died from heat exhaustion because Thailand's hot, it's tropical. They were on the way to these jungle holding camps, but the police were like, we don't know what this is. What is happening? Of course, those driver and passenger aren't telling the truth. Well, they found six cell phones in the cab of that car. So they called me, Matt, we know you have Celebrate. Can you help us get into these phones? And that's what Celebrate does. It'll extract data off of a cell phone device and analyze that data. So really quickly, you can figure out, hey, this criminal was regularly calling these five people and he was meeting up with them at this Starbucks. And they were managing these victims through a chat group and you can get that data off of a phone and analyze that and it's powerful data. With that one police checkpoint and arrest in those phones, we uncovered the largest human trafficking syndicate in Thailand's modern history. It led to the rescue of over 400 Rohingya people that were held in these jungle holding camps. And unfortunately, if they couldn't ransom them, they executed them. So we found mass graves at these sites and we arrested 50 corrupt government officials who were involved. And we took down the kingpin of the criminal syndicate. That's insane. You got to make a bad into a movie or something. Well, I mean, for me, because I feel like my expertise is mostly human intelligence. Going undercover, working with traffickers to get access to who they're selling, work with the police. Well, this was the first time I'm like, holy cow, digital forensics, it is a critical player in child safety. And the other issue there is children, it is difficult for anyone to take the stand in court and testify of your abuses. For sure. It is very challenging for a young child to do that. And so if we can make that easier by adding to the case, digital forensics to say, look, there's a text thread between the perpetrator and the child where he's clearly asking for sex, he's clearly inciting sexual abuse, or he asked for this nude and then he sex-storted her once he had that. If the phone will tell that story, that's pretty powerful. And a step forward in child protection in my mind. So yeah, that kind of epiphany for me of if we are to be serious about making the largest impact we can to fight trafficking, we have to have advanced capabilities and support law enforcement in their efforts to fight this crime. Yeah. I mean, the world's evolving, right? Especially with AI now. Oh yeah. I'm sure they're going to start using that to kidnap kids. Yeah, already they're doing that. I think maybe seven years ago, five years ago, we saw this huge tactic by criminals to leverage crypto. Yeah. You know, right? I mean, that's the anonymity crypto offers is well suited for criminal activity, unfortunately. And AI is just that next big move for criminals to adopt. Criminals are really quick to adopt new technology into their illicit business. So yes. I mean, the videos are so good now. The voice is almost one of one in my opinion now. I think the voice is really hard to tell. Well, and here in the United States, one of the things that came out a few years ago, it's still an issue is it's not really human trafficking related, but they, sorry, they're generating child sexual abuse material that's AI built. And so, you know, a lot of legislators were like, oh, how do we prosecute this? There's no really a victim, but it's indecent and there's some indecent see laws maybe we can use. And so you have this, I mean, it's kind of the wild wild West right now. People are scrambling to figure out what is ethical and moral with AI, but certainly criminals, you know, pretending to be you, taking your identity, putting your head on someone else's body, all these complexities will have implication for years to come. Yeah. But like you said earlier, the legislation can't keep up. So it's almost like we as people as a community have to take it into our own hands, right? Yeah, that's very true. And I think that I, you know, keep mentioning it, but it really speaks to the need for digital safety training. I like it, we put it this way, you know, I'm a child of the 80s, you know, best generation. I love the 80s music. And PI, you know, all the great TV shows that my kids think are hilarious. I was a digital nomad, you know, I wasn't born with the internet. I wasn't born with cell phones, you know, those things for me happened in college and I grew up with a rotary phone and my kids have never seen one, I don't think. My kids are digital natives. They were, I mean, they weren't technically, but they were kind of born with a cell phone in their hand and the way that they have friends and communities and relationships are online. And that's just way different than my childhood. So as it comes to my responsibility as a parent to protect my kids, there's this learning gap that I have to bridge. It's my responsibility to bridge the gap. It's not my kids responsibility to tell me about the vulnerabilities of their world. It's my job as a dad to figure that out. How can I guide them through that? And so that's where this digital safety training influence.org, that's the where we offer that. It feels to us so critical. We have worked cases in the past where perpetrators have infiltrated school systems through Google chat. Wow. And are interfacing with teenagers while they're in their classrooms. What? And having them go to the bathroom to take nudes and extorting them while they're on school property. That's crazy. So as you can imagine, it's like, look, you can lock down your home with VPNs and not let your kids be online past 9 PM. I mean, there's all these tactics and some of those may be good, but at some point, they're going to leave your home. And whatever safety you've built there, they need to take with them. They have to have these skills. And we as parents, and we need to provide these skills. So that to me is kind of at the core of this. The crime is evolving so fast. We have to equip ourselves and defend ourselves in a world that is really not safe for children. It's certainly not safe. How can we protect them? We have to equip them. Yeah, because this was never taught when I was in school. But I feel like it's needed now because I think the criminals have caught on and they realize this is a massive audience they can attract for their nefarious reasons. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it's tough, man. I don't know what the right solution is because I know kids love social media these days and you telling them, you can't have that. I'm sure that's a fun conversation. I think that's exactly the point. The message really isn't you can't have social media. It's how do you remain safe while on social media? How do you understand to recognize predatory behavior? Who do you send a nude to? It's probably not a good idea to send it to anybody. If you're going to do it, certainly want to know them, that image, it's difficult for a young person, for any person, if that were to get leaked out. How do you handle that? These are skills that I never had to have in the 80s. Even in the 80s, it was a magazine behind the counter at the gas station. It wasn't accessible to me as a young person. Everything's pretty accessible now, but these children often don't have the skills to ask that question, is this legitimate? And there's a lot of peer pressure too. The childhood my children have is infinitely harder than the one that I grew up with. There should be a compassionate response to that. So the work then must be as a father and as a provider of care, how do I keep them safe? How do I teach them digital jujitsu to fend off somebody who's going to try to exploit their vulnerability? For sure. For nudes, I don't see the risk to reward personally, even if you're dating them or whatever, because I've seen people's iClouds get hacked and then the nudes get leaked. That way, I've seen people's snapshots get hacked. There was a case of a college girl a couple years ago that she was a beautiful woman and she had taken a lot of nude selfies but had them in a folder in her Instagram. It wasn't public, it was just for her. A perpetrator was going around engaging digitally with young college girls and would learn about their community, their friends, their pattern of life and sent her a fake Instagram password reset text. It looked like it was from Instagram. It wasn't, but he had done the work to make it sound like Instagram and look like Instagram. Well, she was busy, she didn't think about it, so she hit the link and it sent a password or a code to her phone and then the text said, enter this code to reset your password. Well, he got the code, changed the password, locked her out of Instagram, downloaded all of her nudes and then sold them all around the community. That's all. That type of thing, it's like she wasn't even sharing the nudes, but she inadvertently gave access to a perpetrator, access to her account that had everything and then it was out there. Once it's out there, it's very difficult to remove it. Hopefully, some legislation will advance in that regard as well to force the removal of some of these images, but it is really difficult to suffer the trauma of something like that. Yeah, so you've been just taking them as a risk these days, isn't that crazy? Unfortunately, yeah, that's true. Man, time's running. Well, Matt, it's been an honor having you, man. Thank you. You're doing amazing work. How could people support you and follow your journey? Yeah, the ExodusRoad.com. We can't do the good work we do to find and free victims of trafficking without supporters and donors. The majority of donors are individuals or households that care about this issue and want to join the fight with us. That's the first place I'd point you to. Influence.org is the second one. If you want to learn how to keep your family and loved ones safe, we're in the business of equipping you with those skills also. Nice. Thanks for your time today, man. Yeah, thank you. Good luck with everything. Check them out, guys. I'll see you next time. Peace. Thanks for watching all the way to the end, guys. It means a lot. Please click here if you want to watch the next episode. Please subscribe to the show. It helps us get more guests and helps grow the brand. Do you ever think about the risks you didn't take buying Bitcoin early, investing after 2008, loading up on NVIDIA? AI is changing jobs and markets are all over the place. Nothing feels guaranteed. And at some point, you realize no one's coming to save you. We're kind of the FOMO generation, but here's one thing you don't want to miss, protecting your future. If you're new to life insurance, you're not alone. Thankfully, I found select quote. For over 40 years, they've helped more than 2 million Americans understand their options and secure over $700 billion in coverage. As a broker, their mission is simple. To find you the right insurance policy at the best price, and they work for you for free. You can even get same day coverage up to $2 million with no medical exam required. And even if you have preexisting conditions, they work with companies that can help. Life insurance is never cheaper than it is today. Get the right life insurance for you for less and save more than 50% at selectquote.com slash dsh. Save more than 50% on term life insurance at selectquote.com slash dsh today to get started at selectquote.com slash dsh.