Tech Elites in the Epstein Files; Musk’s Mega Merger; Crypto Scam Compound

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0:00

Hey Brian, how's it going?

2:11

Leah, it's great. We missed you last week.

2:13

I missed you guys. But hopefully you've had a lot of time without me to catch up on. All cultural things happen in the United States of America right now. The Melania documentary. Have you seen it?

2:15

No, I have not seen it. Had a hard time getting a ticket?

2:25

No, that's not true.

2:29

That's not true. So, no Melania, I'm excited for the Olympics coming up.

2:31

Yeah, that's gonna actually be way better. I think it's ice skating for me or bust.

2:36

I'm gonna try to convince you and Zoe to let me do a whole episode on the biathlon.

2:40

I'm in. No can wait. The biathlon? No, I'm not in.

2:44

Y' all get in.

2:48

Leah, get in.

2:49

All the more reason. All the more reason to do the epis.

2:50

I want to do an episode on the Olympics, period. Like, that's actually very interesting to me. Again, my section will be ice skating. I'm really sad to tell everyone that Zoe 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 Zoe too much. But should we get started? Should we get into this?

2:53

Yeah. In the meantime, welcome to Wired's uncanny valley. I'm Brian Barrett, Executive Editor.

3:20

And I'm Leah Feiger, Senior Politics Editor. Brian, let's start off with the gift that keeps on giving, for better or for worse. The Epstein files.

3:27

Oh, what a way to phrase that.

3:40

Is that not how we should talk about this?

3:44

I mean, I don't know.

3:46

This week, just to catch everyone up, there was a document dump of over 3 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. Yeah, 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.

3:48

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, sure, 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.

4:20

I mean, you found 2,500 files alone associated with Bill Gates.

4:50

Yes.

4:54

What?

4:54

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 things stand out to me here. Leah. 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 released, 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 2,000 Epstein files.

4:54

I mean, he received political advice from Epstein. Epstein said that he wished he'd helped Peter Thiel with the Gawker suit.

5:55

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.

6:02

It's an incredible, incredible list. We have Another article on Wired.com, everyone should go check that, 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. There's this Peter Thiel, co founder of Palantir, and I straight into Vice President J.D. vance's office for all that we've been told. And it's a really. This is someone who decided that it was clearly okay, and not just okay, 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.

6:20

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 to sex crimes involving a minor in 2008.

7:13

You're absolutely right.

7:24

And the vast majorities of these conversations take place after that.

7:25

Wild.

7:29

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.

7:30

We gotta talk about Elon Musk. I mean, his.

7:38

We have to.

7:40

Yeah.

7:41

In terms of out of context and never visiting the island. Well, on November 25, 2012, Elon Musk wrote to Jeffrey Epstein, what? Day, night will be the wildest party on your island.

7:42

He's, like, begging to attend. There's no other way to go. There's no other way to interpret this. And also specifically that language. The wildest party. Like, what is. You know, not even just like, oh, like, when is the wildest party? There's so many different parts of this. That gag reflects absolutely.

7:54

So the fact that the calendars didn't line up, sure. That gives you some plausible deniability. But if they had, you would have been right there. It is really disappointing. I do want to say, not to defend anybody, but a lot of the names in there are kind of circumstantial in a way. And I think the bigger point is that Jeffrey Epstein really wanted to be close to these people. Right. Like, 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. Right. Just because Epstein was reading articles about him or at the same place that he was.

8:10

I don't know about him.

8:49

Yeah, absolutely.

8:50

Yeah. It's just this web, but it fills out this web and it's.

8:50

I mean, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, Eric Schmidt, these are the tech titans.

8:53

Yeah. Up until as recently as 2019, I think some of these people were actively in touch.

8:59

Wow.

9:05

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 gotta talk about that.

9:06

Yeah. And I know that you love this combines your two favorite things.

9:19

Oh, yes, absolutely.

9:22

AI and Elon Musk. But it might. Leah, could I also interest you in a potential third favorite thing?

9:24

Oh, hit me.

9:28

Brian.

9:29

Can I interest you in data centers in space?

9:30

So, I mean, that's what he's promising, right? I'm actually very interested in data centers.

9:33

Oh, good.

9:38

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.

9:38

Yeah.

9:47

But I'm 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.

9:47

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.

9:54

It's his rocket company.

10:05

Yeah, it's his rocket company. They basically have privatized NASA, partly because NASA gave up anyway. No, the US space future really depends on SpaceX in so many ways.

10:06

If Jeff Bezos is listening, listening to this podcast, he's having just a true.

10:17

Sorry.

10:22

Blue Origin. Yeah. Oh, gosh. Terrible day. Blue origin also there. So you've got, 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.

10:22

Non consensually, and is also X, formerly known as Twitter.

10:38

Yes. And now they're all going to be the same thing.

10:41

Former Twitter employees. Did they make a lot of money from this? Like, 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.

10:44

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. The Earth cannot. 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.

10:54

Oh, gosh.

11:26

So we need to put SpaceX in service of XAI to make sure that we can get enough. 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.

11:27

I mean, I'm getting this from your tone of voice and we haven't had this legally approved or anything, but can we. Can we just call bullshit? I mean, 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 Ascenti and Son as, 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.

11:43

Yeah, I mean 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 think 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 Y 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 dollars in government contracts.

12:13

I don't know, I think that, 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.

13:11

And I'm curious too where SpaceX wants to IPO this. Tesla stock is doing pretty well. But I think increasingly Elon Musk is betting it all on sci fi, right? It's true. Tesla is no longer a car company. Tesla, he has made it very clear Tesla's 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 robo taxis 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 ten to never.

13:33

I'm really waiting for the next commercial. Do you know where your child is? It's 10pm oh no, don't worry. They're with their humanoid robot in their driverless taxi.

14:21

Yeah, they're playing frisbee with Optimus.

14:29

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.

14:34

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 sort of workaday complaints that any group of people would have.

14:53

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. Cause they're the ones with the gun. Yeah, reading this was wild. Cause I'm with you. Cause on one hand you're going, okay, 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 like 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 like 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?

15:10

What jumped out to me, the ones that really had that sort of woe is me tenor. But also the ones that sort of 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.

16:18

Oh, yeah, lots of pushback.

16:55

Yeah, lots of pushback. Lots of people who are still very committed to the mission still think it's.

16:56

Pretty righteous, 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. But how they were about to go about it. You know, 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. Like, this is wildly chaotic.

16:59

Extremely. And Leah, did you see anything in there to Tori and her reporting about the protests you mentioned in Minnesota or the deaths of Renee Nicole Goode and Alex Preddy? Did they engage with that at all?

18:03

Yeah, so they did. And a lot of the posts, I mean, 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 Preddy 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, 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, you know, noting these deaths. But also even, like, randomly little, like 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. Like it's just such a wild one because it's someone going like what is this chaos machine that I am now part of? Whether or not we agree with any part of the sentiment.

18:15

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, right. 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 is kind of 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 U.S. cities.

19:22

Right. And honestly, a bird's eye view. 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 gonna just have to keep.

20:04

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.

20:41

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22:46

I was, you know, having a normal Saturday on the roof with my kids. They were like playing in a kiddie pool.

23:12

Last summer, my colleague Andy Greenberg was enjoying an idyllic late afternoon in New York.

23:19

There had just been like a rainstorm and there was a rainbow. It was a very beautiful evening and I, you know, in typical terrible 21st century parenting style, was ignoring my kids and looking at my phone and scrolling through messages.

23:24

In the middle of mindlessly scrolling between.

23:36

Apps, I've got this email. I found this email from someone with a pseudonym who was messaging me from the encrypted email service ProtonMail.

23:38

The email is from an unnamed source who claimed to be a computer engineer in Laos.

23:47

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.

23:51

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 tens 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.

24:03

They shared really detailed documents right off the bat, like an actual, like, written report, A summary of everything they'd experienced and everything about the way that the scam compound worked, including this very, very detailed flowchart that included some elements that I had never heard of before.

24:34

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.

24:51

The idea of pig butchering is that these are crypto romance investment scams.

25:09

The operation starts with the scammer using social media profiles to convincingly take the identity of, say, a wealthy woman.

25:15

A wealthy woman getting in touch, usually with a lonely, very often older man, and enticing them with, like, you know, some sort of intimate relationship.

25:22

Trust is built through these video calls and constant back and forth messages.

25:33

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.

25:38

Eventually, the scammer gives some financial advice.

25:50

To their mark, and, you know, this wealthy woman says, you know, by the way, like, 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, like, I would be kind of 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.

25:52

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 new 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 scammer's ethnicity with that of 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.

26:26

A human trafficking operation that essentially enslaves people, tricks them into coming to this kind of compound, turns them into forced laborers, traps them, there's. 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.

27:02

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.

27:34

The Golden Triangle. I've always heard about it as this kind of, like, 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 kind of 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 often Chinese organized criminal syndicates. This very small area, just like half the size of Washington, D.C. 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.

27:42

And now it seemed the engineer who contacted Andy was willing to be a whistleblower for one of these compounds.

28:23

This was somebody who had been trapped like this and wanted to expose everything he could about the operation.

28:28

Andy's trying to figure out if this guy is legit when he calls him out of the blue.

28:35

Hello, Hello. Hello.

28:39

Fine.

28:43

How are you? Good, good. Thank you for being willing to talk. I picked up the phone, and I'm talking to this young, very polite man with an Indian accent. What is your name or what can I call. You can call me any from any name, brother. No matter. Oh, but you tell me just so we. Just so I know, like, how to talk to you and what. What name to call you. You can make one up if you like. Of course you can.

28:44

You can call me Red Bull.

29:14

Okay? Oh, Red Bull. Red Bull. Yeah. Yes. Okay. Okay. And I later found out that he was looking at an empty can of, like, the 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, like, kind of almost, you know, I was a little put off. I was wary of this person. And I quickly kind of 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. 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. And that it looked like a kind of poor tropical area where everything was in Chinese. And, like, that certainly sounded like the Golden Triangle to me. So, you know, 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.

29:15

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. It's a little bit of a different setup in terms of what's keeping them there. Is that fair to say?

30:34

You know, I was also surprised. Like, 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, you know, they're held almost like in the jungle, in remote places. And 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, you know, 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.

30:53

A closed circuit where, as the source, Red Bull, described to Andy, they had a strict work schedule and punitive measures.

31:39

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, like lights out in the dormitory. So, you know, 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. Like he had been scammed into absolute poverty, had no money. So it was a kind of Orwellian thing where the bosses would, you know, give people these inspirational speeches as if they were like part of some corporate salesforce, 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.

31:46

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.

32:49

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, you know, question this guy. And he thought that that would be like a big win against this scam operation.

33:09

That's when Andy decided to reach out to Aaron West, A former California prosecutor who now runs an anti scam organization.

33:24

Erin thought, you know, there was no time to do a sting. She also said that any courier is super far down 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, you know, 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 that I could produce with Red Bull as a source would be more important than anything. He could give law enforcement that 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 Arrest.

33:31

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.

34:36

Absolutely not.

34:46

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.

34:47

Yeah, Red Bull was just remarkably risk tolerant. Like, 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 screen recording software on his work PC so that I could see what he was doing all day long. And, you know, I consulted with you about all these things, and then many, you know, 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.

34:59

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.

35:56

And then we would talk with disappearing messages set to, like, a very low time period, so that the messages there was not much of a log if we were ever caught.

36:04

Andy and Red Bull also took up aliases.

36:13

He would pretend that he was talking to his uncle. He would call me uncle from time to time, just in case, like, somebody spotted what he was doing.

36:15

Some of those aliases were a little more embarrassing than others.

36:24

Eventually, we kind of upgraded our cover story to, like, me pretending to be his secret girlfriend. And we used a lot of, like, heart emojis, but that was a little too cringey, and we just couldn't keep it up.

36:27

But the golden rule that stuck was how Andy and Red Bull would say hi to each other.

36:38

We created a protocol where, you know, when we started the conversation, the first person would say Red. The second person would say Bull. To make sure that that his computer had not been seized.

36:42

As their communication got into a rhythm, Red Bull filled in a very detailed map of the inner workings of the scam compound operation.

36:52

He sent me, you know, photos of, like, 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 like big, big Chinese ceremonial drum that was played for scams of $100,000 or more. And then like 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, you know, 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, you know, 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.

36:59

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.

37:53

I told Red Bull, like, let's stop, we gotta 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'll 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. Escape.

38:14

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.

38:46

This episode was produced by Adriana Tapia and Tyler Hill. It was edited by Kate Osborne. Amar Lal at Macrosound mixed this episode. Matt Giles and Daniel Roman fact checked this episode. Mark Lada was our SF studio engineer. Pran Bandy was our NY studio engineer. Kate Osborne is our executive producer and Katie Drummond is Wired's global editorial director. I'm CNN tech reporter Claire Duffy.

39:01

Claire Duffy was one of the Claire Duffy.

39:33

I cover artificial intelligence and other new technologies for a l living and even I sometimes get overwhelmed trying to keep up with it all.

39:34

So I'm starting a new show where.

39:43

Together we can explore how to experiment with these new tools without getting played by them. It's called Terms of Service.

39:45

This technology is so crazy powerful.

39:52

Follow CNN'S Terms of Service wherever you get your podcasts.

39:55

Museums are more than places we visit on a field trip across the country. Museums protect our shared history, care for wildlife and collections, strengthen local economies, support job training, and spark curiosity in people of all ages. Right now, you can help make sure museums stay strong for future generations. Museum Advocacy Day is a national moment when people contact Congress to ask for continued support for museums and the federal agencies that fund them. Learn how to take action at aam museum-us.org and tell your representatives that museums matter to education, to communities, to the economy, and to our democracy.

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From PRX.

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