Original Title: He Exposed the Secrets of a Southeast Asian Scam Compound. Then He Had to Escape with His Life
Original Author: Andy Greenberg, Wired Magazine
Translated by Luffy, Foresight News
Editor's Note: Deep within the dense jungles of the Golden Triangle, the steel and concrete structures of scam factories have become a human hell for countless people. Here, transnational cryptocurrency "pig butchering" scams are born. Red Bull, a computer engineer from the India-Pakistan border, fell into a trap while seeking overseas employment. After realizing the darkness of the situation, he chose to become a whistleblower. He risked his life to gather evidence within the tiger's den and joined forces with Andy Greenberg, a journalist from The Intercept, to expose the veil of this black industry. After Red Bull escaped from the den of evil, Andy Greenberg wrote a lengthy article detailing his story with Red Bull. The following is a Chinese translation of the original article:
A Distress Call from the Golden Triangle
It was a beautiful night in June in New York when I received the first email from this informant, who asked me to call him Red Bull. At that time, he was trapped in a human hell 8,000 miles away.
After a summer shower, a rainbow arched over the streets of Brooklyn, while my two children splashed and played in the rooftop children's pool of our apartment building. As the sun set, I, like a typical 21st-century parent, was absorbed in one app after another on my smartphone.
The email had no subject, and the sender's address was from the encrypted email service Proton Mail. I opened the email.
"The message began, 'Hello, I am currently working inside a large cryptocurrency pig-butchering scam group in the Golden Triangle region,' it wrote. 'I am a computer engineer who was forced to sign a contract to work here.'"
"I have already gathered the core evidence of this scam operation, with every step documented," the email continued. "I'm still inside the compound, so I can't risk exposing my real identity. But I want to help take this den down."
I only vaguely knew that the Golden Triangle was a lawless jungle region in Southeast Asia. But as a journalist who has reported on cryptocurrency crimes for 15 years, I am well aware of this type of cryptocurrency fraud—now widely known as "pig butchering"—where scammers lure victims into surrendering their life savings by offering romantic relationships and high-return investments. This has become the most profitable form of cybercrime globally, with annual case values reaching hundreds of billions of dollars.
Today, this complex and tangled fraud industry operates within scam parks across Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos, sustained by hundreds of thousands of victims forced into labor. These victims are trafficked from the poorest regions of Asia and Africa, compelled to work for criminal organizations. The result is a self-reinforcing, ever-expanding global financial funnel that pushes people on both sides into desperate situations: on one side are the victims of fraud who lose everything, and on the other are the enslaved laborers trapped in these parks.
I have read countless grim reports about scam camps: workers being beaten, tortured with electric batons, left starving, and even killed by their controllers. Most of these stories come from a small number of survivors who either managed to escape or were rescued by law enforcement. However, I had never encountered someone still inside a scam camp who voluntarily came forward as a whistleblower—an actual insider.
I still couldn't be sure whether this self-proclaimed informant actually existed. Nevertheless, I replied to the email, asking him to switch from email to the encrypted messaging app Signal and to enable the "disappearing messages" feature to better conceal his location.
The informant replied immediately, telling me to wait for two hours before contacting him again.
Red Bull Trapped in the Park Area
That night, after the children had fallen asleep, my phone began receiving continuous message notifications from Signal. First, he sent me carefully organized documents: a flowchart, followed by a written guide that detailed the complete scam operation within this fraud园区 (industrial park) in northern Laos. (Later I learned that the term "Golden Triangle," once used by Americans to refer to a massive opium and heroin-producing region, now mainly refers to a special economic zone in Laos bordering Myanmar and Thailand, which is city-sized in scale and largely controlled by Chinese commercial forces.) These two documents meticulously recorded every working step within the园区: creating fake Facebook and Instagram accounts; hiring models and using AI deepfake tools to create realistic fake romantic partners; luring victims to "invest" on the fake trading platforms they recommended. The materials even mentioned that an office had a small gong on display, which was struck to celebrate every successful scam.
I hadn't had the chance to carefully go through these detailed contents. I had planned to spend a nice Saturday night with my wife, but just after midnight, my phone rang.
I answered the voice call from Signal, and a polite voice with an Indian accent came through: "Hello."
"What should I call you?" I asked.
"Bro, you can call me whatever you like, it doesn't matter." The voice replied with a shy smile.
I insisted on having a name, even if it was something he made up on the spot.
"You can call me Red Bull," he said. Months later, he told me that when we spoke, he was looking at an empty can of Red Bull energy drink.
Red Bull said that before, he had contacted law enforcement agencies in the U.S. and India, as well as Interpol, and had also left messages on the tip lines of several media outlets, but only I responded. He asked me to tell him more about myself, but as soon as I mentioned my work reporting on cryptocurrency crimes, he interrupted me.
"You're the one person I can entrust everything to," he said urgently. "You'll help me expose all of this, right?"
I was caught a bit off guard and told him that he first needed to introduce himself.
For the next few minutes, Red Bull answered my questions cautiously. He didn't reveal his real name, only saying that he was from India. Most of the forced laborers in the park, he said, came from India, Pakistan, or Ethiopia.
He said he was in his early 20s and held a diploma in computer engineering. Like most of his colleagues, Red Bull had also been lured by a fraudulent job posting. The job offer he received was for an IT manager position at an office in Laos. Upon arrival, his passport was taken away. He was forced to live in a dormitory with five other men and work under a night shift system, working 15 consecutive hours. This working schedule coincided with the daytime hours of their targets—Indian-American victims. (I later learned that this model of matching scammers with victims of the same ethnic background is quite common, as it helps build trust and avoids language barriers.)
Red Bull's situation is not as brutal as the extreme forms of modern slavery I had previously witnessed; instead, it resembles a farcical parody of a corporate sales department. In theory, the company uses commissions to motivate employees, creating the illusion that "hard work leads to sudden wealth." In reality, however, employees are perpetually in debt and effectively enslaved through indirect means. Red Bull told me that his base monthly salary is 3,500 RMB, approximately 500 USD, but almost all of this is deducted through various illegal fines. The most common reason for these fines is failing to meet initial communication targets with potential victims. In the end, he has virtually no actual income and survives only by relying on the meager food provided in the company cafeteria, which mostly consists of rice and vegetables. He said the food has a strange chemical taste.
He was bound by a one-year contract, and originally thought that once it expired, he would be allowed to leave. He told me that so far, he had never successfully scammed anyone, managing only to barely meet the minimum required number of fake communications. This meant that unless he ran away, endured the contract period, or paid thousands of dollars to buy his way out—money he didn't have at all—he would remain a prisoner here forever.
Red Bull said he had heard that some people were beaten and electrocuted for breaking the rules, and that a female employee, whom he believed had been sold into sexual slavery, as well as some colleagues who had mysteriously disappeared. "If they find out I'm contacting you and that I'm going against them, they will kill me directly," he said. "But I made a promise to myself that no matter whether I live or die, I will stop this scam."
Gathering Evidence of Crimes in the Tiger's Lair
Subsequently, Red Bull mentioned the urgent purpose of this call: he had learned that the facility was carrying out a fraud targeting an Indian-American man, who had already been scammed at least once before. Now, one of Red Bull's colleagues was deceiving him. The victim's cryptocurrency wallet service provider apparently suspected fraud and had frozen his account. As a result, the facility planned to send a contact to collect the six-figure sum in cash that the victim had prepared to pay.
The withdrawal would take place in three or four days, and the victim lived only a few hours away from me. Red Bull explained that if I acted quickly, I could notify law enforcement, help set up an ambush, and capture the contact. In addition to this lead, he also wanted me to help him get in touch with an FBI agent to serve as his future point of contact, while he would continue cooperating with me as an informant. Our phone call lasted only ten minutes.
Red Bull, impatiently, said he would send the details to Signal and then hung up the phone. A few seconds later, he sent screenshots of internal park chat records, the conversation between the colleague and the victim, and more details of a sting operation he wanted me to arrange.
My mind was in a mess, but after a brief pause, I suddenly redialed Red Bull on Signal, out of the blue, and even turned on the video. I wanted to see exactly who I was talking to.
This is the first time Red Bull has communicated with Wired magazine, and the scene was captured from a hotel room during a Signal video call.
Red Bull picked up the video call. He was slim, good-looking, with slightly curly hair and a neatly trimmed beard. He gave me a faint smile, as if unbothered by revealing his face. I asked him to show me his surroundings. He turned the camera, revealing an empty hotel room. He explained that in order to find a place to speak with me, he had taken a room in a hotel next to the office area. Outside the window were ugly concrete buildings, a parking lot, a construction site, and a few palm trees.
At my request, he went outside and showed me the Chinese sign at the entrance of the building. I knew little about the Golden Triangle, but everything in front of me clearly indicated that this was the place.
Finally, Red Bull showed me his work ID, which had a Chinese name given to him by the park: Ma Chao. He explained that none of the employees in the office knew each other's real names.
I began to believe that what Red Bull said was true: he was indeed a whistleblower from the scam园区 in Laos. I told him that I would consider all his requests, but I hoped we could work together patiently and carefully to minimize his risks.
"I trust you, and I'll follow your arrangements," he replied at 1:33 a.m., "Wishing you a peaceful night."
At 4 a.m., I was still lying in bed wide awake, my mind repeatedly turning over how to deal with this eager new informant, who seemed determined to entrust his life to me.
After a few hours of sleep, I texted Erin West, a prosecutor in California—or, as I learned later in that phone call, a former prosecutor. By the end of 2024, she had retired early from her position as a deputy district attorney due to her deep frustration with the U.S. government's inaction in addressing the rampant issue of scamming. Now, she runs her own anti-fraud organization, Operation Shamrock, full-time.
I asked West whom I should contact within law enforcement to help arrange the sting operation proposed by Red Bull. To my surprise, West showed far more enthusiasm than I had expected regarding the story Red Bull wanted me to write. "This is a huge deal," West said. "Finally, an insider is willing to come forward and share this information, exposing the entire fraud operation."
But she quickly dismissed the idea of luring them in. She said there was simply no time to organize such an operation, and she believed that arresting a low-level contact wouldn't be considered a major victory in Red Bull's eyes. She explained that these contacts were mostly freelancers, with a lower status even than Red Bull within the fraud network, and they didn't know anything of real value.
More importantly, whether I set up a trap or personally went to warn the victims by obtaining their contact information through Red Bull, it could alert the fraud factory that there was an informant inside. This clue might eventually trace back to Red Bull, putting him in danger. To prevent a six-figure fraud or to arrest a contact at the risk of exposing Red Bull, the cost would be far too high.
My contact with Red Bull hasn't lasted even 24 hours, yet I've already made a decision: to protect him, I can only stand by and do nothing, even as this six-figure fraud is about to happen.
West also told me that, aside from the issue of luring him in, she believed handing Red Bull over to the FBI wouldn't be a good idea either. She said that if he became an informant for law enforcement, the FBI or Interpol would almost certainly instruct him to stop contacting me or any other journalist. Moreover, the outcome of the information he provided to the FBI would likely fall far short of his expectations: at most, it might result in a criminal indictment in absentia against a low-level boss. "If he thinks the FBI or Interpol will go to Laos and dismantle the operation, that's absolutely impossible. No one is coming to save him."
She believed that rather than merely opening a case against this one fraud den, a more valuable approach would be to use all the information provided by Red Bull to tell a broader story: reconstructing the most authentic current state of pig-butcher scam operations, detailing how they operate, and revealing the scale of the industry. While survivors from these camps had previously described such conditions, West knew that never before had an insider leaked real-time documents and evidence to provide such an in-depth exposure.
West told me that since the Trump administration eliminated the U.S. Agency for International Development, which previously provided funding to humanitarian organizations in the region, it has become increasingly difficult to assess the scale of human trafficking behind the fraud camps. "The rise of the Trump administration stripped us of all our informants on the ground," West said.
And all of this allows criminal organizations to continue exploiting this system of slavery, stealing the wealth of our generation, as West describes, a system that is increasingly taking control of entire regions of the world. "The core of this story is how we have allowed these criminals to take root like a festering cancer in Southeast Asia," West said, "and how this has destroyed trust between people."
I told Red Bull that, for his own safety, we couldn't arrange a sting operation. I also explained to him that if he wanted to continue working as my informant, he might need to temporarily suspend contact with law enforcement. To my surprise, he accepted this decisively. "Okay, do it your way," he said.
Soon, I established a regular communication pattern with Red Bull: we spoke every morning according to New York time, which was around 10 p.m. in Laos. At that time, he had just woken up and had half an hour before going to the cafeteria for a meal, during which he could walk outside the dormitory. After this dinner, he would start about 15 hours of work, with only two short breaks for meals in between.
In our first few conversations, he spent most of the time suggesting various increasingly risky investigative methods: he wanted to wear hidden cameras or microphones; he proposed installing remote desktop software so I could see everything on his computer screen in real time; he even volunteered to install spyware on his supervisor's computer—his supervisor was also an Indian employee, wearing pilot sunglasses and a short beard, going by the alias "Amani." He even planned to hack into Amani's supervisor's laptop, a short, stocky Chinese man nicknamed "50k," who wore tight pants and had a tattoo on his chest that Red Bull had never been able to make out. He believed that this spyware might help us gather communication intelligence between 50k and his superior, "Alang," a figure Red Bull had never actually seen in person.
For these bold ideas, I consulted my colleagues and professionals, and their answers were all the same: using hidden cameras to gather evidence requires professional training; the software Red Bull wants to install on office computers would leave traceable footprints; in other words, these approaches would very likely lead to his discovery—and possibly his death.
In the end, we settled on a much simpler approach: during work hours, he would log into Signal on his office computer to send me messages and materials, while setting Signal's self-destruct timer to 5 minutes in order to conceal his tracks. Sometimes, to cover his tracks and avoid being discovered, he would start calling me "Uncle," pretending he was merely having a conversation with a relative.
We also created a set of codes: one party would first send "Red," and the other would reply with "Bull." Through this exchange, they could confirm that the account had not been taken over by someone else. Red Bull also came up with a method to change the name and icon of the Signal app on the computer, making it look like a desktop shortcut for the hard drive.
He started sending me a continuous stream of photos, screenshots, and videos: an Excel spreadsheet, and a photo of a whiteboard that tracked the progress of his team's work, with the nicknames of many members accompanied by the amounts of money they had defrauded, in the thousands of dollars; in the office stood a Chinese-style gift drum, which was beaten to celebrate whenever someone successfully defrauded more than $100,000; page after page of chat records posted in the office's WhatsApp group, documenting the Red Bull team's fraud successes, along with desperate replies from the victims: "I've always dreamed of having a girlfriend like you, and then getting married," "Why aren't you replying to me?" "I will keep praying for your mom," "Please, can you help me get my money back?" "??????"
There is also a video showing a victim crying inside a car after being scammed out of six figures of money. The victim sent the video to the scammer, perhaps hoping to evoke a sense of guilt, but instead, the video was passed around the office and became a source of amusement for everyone.
Each employee in the team is required to report their daily work progress, including how many "initial communications" they initiated and how many "in-depth communications" they conducted—conversations that could potentially lead to fraud. Their group chats are filled with coded language, such as using "developing new customers" to refer to luring new victims, and "reinvestment" to describe victims who fall for the scam again. Each team has a performance target, usually around $1 million per month. Meeting the target allows employees to enjoy weekend days off, snack in the office, and even attend parties at nearby clubs. (According to Red Bull, the bosses hold their activities in private rooms with drawn curtains at these parties.) Failing to meet the target results in scolding, fines, and mandatory work seven days a week.
A whiteboard in an office, recording the results of fraud, with pseudonyms of employees and team names marked nearby. Provided by Red Bull
Each employee was also required to post a mandatory daily schedule, but it wasn't a night shift spent sitting in a fluorescent-lit office sending messages to Facebook and Instagram. Instead, it was the schedule of the wealthy single woman they were pretending to be: 7:00 a.m. "Yoga and meditation," 9:30 a.m. "Self-care and planning a vacation," 2:30 p.m. "Dentist appointment," and 6:00 p.m. "Dinner and chatting with mom."
Sometimes during voice calls, Red Bull would ask me to turn on the video and record the screen. Then he would walk into the cafeteria, pretend to be on a call with "Uncle," and secretly film the surroundings. I felt as if I were following him on a tour of the building: the brightly lit lobby, the stairwell, and rows of South Asian and African men standing expressionlessly in line for their meals. One time, he even captured footage of the inside of the office, a large room painted in beige, where I could see rows of desks, each with red, yellow, and green flags stuck on them, representing the fraud performance of different teams.
A few days later, Red Bull and I upgraded our cover story, and I became his secret girlfriend, so that if he were discovered using Signal, there would be a more plausible explanation. Our conversations were filled with heart emojis, we called each other "dear," and ended with "missing you." Eventually, our chat records became almost identical to the fake love scams his team staged every day. But not long after, we both felt the pretense was too awkward and gave it up.
Another time, just as I was about to go to sleep, Red Bull sent me a particularly heartfelt goodbye message: "Good night! Rest well—you've already done enough today. Let your mind go blank, and greet tomorrow with fresh ideas and steady strength."
Although the wording sounds a bit stiff, I have to admit that this particularly thoughtful message touched me. In fact, these past few days since we started communicating, I've been under tremendous pressure and have barely slept at all.
In a phone call the next morning, Red Bull explained to me the role that AI chat tools like ChatGPT and DeepSeek play in scams within the park: the park trains its employees to use these tools to refine their scripts and manipulate emotions, always having an endless supply of sweet and flattering words.
He told me without hesitation that the goodnight message from the previous night was directly copied from ChatGPT. "Everyone here does it this way; they taught us like this," he said.
I couldn't help but find it amusing—originally, just a few warm words from a stranger on the other side of the world were enough to easily touch someone's heart.
From a Village Boy in India to an Anti-Fraud Whistleblower
Every day, during the brief few minutes that Red Bull walked from the dormitory to the office, aside from discussing his safety and evidence-gathering strategies, I also asked him how he had ended up in this scam园区 (fraud industrial park), and why he was so determined to expose everything. In these hurried snippets of conversation, or in the longer text messages he sent me afterward, he recounted the story of his 23 years.
Red Bull told me that he was born in a mountain village in the disputed Jammu and Kashmir region along the India-Pakistan border, where there are eight children in his family, and they practice Islam. His father was a teacher and sometimes worked as a construction worker, and together with his mother, they kept dairy cows and sold ghee to make a living.
In the early 21st century, when Red Bull was still a child, his family often left their village to seek refuge in northern Kashmir to escape the intermittent conflicts between the Indian army and Pakistan-backed guerrillas. In this region, Muslim men were sometimes conscripted to fight or transport supplies for the Pakistan-backed armed groups, and were later labeled as terrorists and killed by the Indian army.
After the conflict subsided, Red Bull's parents sent him to Rajouri, a town four hours away by car, to live with his grandparents, hoping that this exceptionally intelligent and curious child could receive a better education. He told me that his grandparents were very strict with him. In addition to his studies, he had to chop firewood and carry water. The school was six miles from home, and he had to walk there. His shoes wore out, and his feet developed blisters. When going to school, he had to use a rope tied to his pants as a belt.
Nevertheless, he said, he always maintained a stubborn optimism. "I kept telling myself: even if things don't work out today, everything will get better tomorrow," he wrote in a text message.
At the age of 15, his grandparents sent him to live with two teachers, who made him work as a servant in exchange for his tuition. He would get up before dawn every morning, clean the house before breakfast, do the dishes, and then go to school.
He remembered one day in that house, how he was fascinated by the family's eldest son playing the latest FIFA game on the computer. It was the first time Red Bull had ever seen a computer. But just as he was engrossed, he was scolded and sent back to work. From that moment on, he became obsessed with computers. "I felt ashamed and disrespected, because I didn't even have the right to touch the computer," Red Bull wrote. "I told myself that one day, I would be the master of this machine."
After suffering an especially humiliating scolding, Red Bull decided to run away. The next morning, while the family was still asleep, he left and made his way to the city, where he took on various odd jobs: cleaning houses, doing construction work, and harvesting rice. For a while, he even went door-to-door selling Ayurvedic medicines. In the evenings, he studied on his own in a small rented room. In 2021, he was admitted to the Department of Computer Science at the Government Institute of Technology in Srinagar, the largest city in the region.
During his college years, the winters in Kashmir were especially harsh. He slept in a room without proper bedding and often went hungry. A friend taught him how to create Facebook pages for businesses or, like real estate developers flipping properties, to buy and sell Facebook pages. Experimenting on the school's computers, he quickly earned about $200. With that money, he bought a used Dell laptop—his most treasured possession, which changed his life forever.
After three years of studying and working part-time while also sending money back home, he finally earned a diploma in computer engineering. He said it was the first time someone from their village had achieved such a high level of technical education. It was also during this period that he developed a strong, almost angry determination: to rely on himself and carve out his own path in life.
"My parents always advised me to be patient and strong. Their words gave me some inner strength, but this battle in life can only be fought by me alone," he wrote. "No one can truly understand me, but I have never stopped fighting against fate."
A "Job Hunting" Journey to Hell
Not long after graduation, Red Bull was already earning a decent income by creating Facebook pages and websites, with monthly earnings reaching as high as $1,000. However, he had bigger ambitions—he dreamed of working in the fields of artificial intelligence or biomedical engineering, or becoming a white-hat hacker in the cybersecurity industry. (The TV show Mr. Robot has always been his favorite.) He wanted to study abroad, but couldn't afford the costs and was also denied student loans.
With no other options, he decided to work for one or two years first and save up some money. A friend from university told him that there were people in Laos who could help find good jobs. Red Bull began contacting this intermediary, who used the alias Ajaz. Ajaz claimed he knew a contact who could help Red Bull secure a position as an IT manager at an office in Laos, with a monthly salary of about $1,700. For Red Bull, this tempting salary meant he might only need to work for a year before returning to school.
Ajaz arranged for Red Bull to fly to Bangkok and then called a recruitment agent at the airport. Red Bull boarded the plane without even knowing what industry his employer belonged to, aware only that his job would involve assisting with computer management. He remembered how the excitement of his first trip abroad filled his heart; during the night flight across the Indian Ocean, his mind was full of hopes and dreams for the future.
The next morning in Bangkok, he called the broker, who was an East African man. The broker roughly instructed him to take a 12-hour bus ride to Chiang Mai and then a taxi to the border of Laos. Once Red Bull arrived at the border, he was told to take a selfie outside the immigration office and send it to the broker. Minutes after Red Bull did so, an immigration officer came out, waved the selfie clearly received from the broker, and asked for 500 baht (about $15). Red Bull paid the money, the officer stamped his passport, and then told him to walk to the Mekong River and board a waiting boat. This ferry crossed the Mekong River in a section south of the tri-border area of Thailand, Laos, and Myanmar. This was the Golden Triangle.
After the boat entered Lao territory, a young Chinese man on the opposite bank showed the same selfie to Red Bull. Without saying a word, Red Bull took back his passport, handed it to an immigration officer, and offered some Chinese yuan. Soon, the passport was returned with the visa stamp properly applied.
The Chinese man put his passport into his pocket and left Red Bull waiting for that East African agent. Then, he left with Red Bull's passport.
An hour later, the agent arrived, driving a white van, and took him to a hotel in northern Laos, where he would spend the night. Lying on the bed in the empty hotel room, his mind was filled with thoughts of the first formal job interview the next day, full of anxiety and anticipation. At that moment, he was still completely unaware.
The next morning, he was taken to an office located in a gray concrete building that stood among the lush mountains of northern Laos, surrounded by other dull structures. Red Bull sat nervously at the desk, where a Chinese man and a translator administered typing and English tests, both of which he passed with ease. They told him he had been accepted, and then began asking about his familiarity with social networks such as Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
Red Bull enthusiastically answered all the questions. Finally, they asked if he understood what kind of job he was about to start. "Will I be an IT manager?" he asked. They replied that it wasn't the case, and this time, they used no code: what he was to do was to be a "fraudster."
It was only at this moment that Red Bull finally realized his situation and fell into extreme panic. His Chinese boss told him he had to start working immediately. In an attempt to buy time, Red Bull desperately pleaded, hoping to first return to the hotel for a night's rest before beginning work. The boss agreed.
That night, in the hotel room, Red Bull desperately searched online for information about the scam dens in the Golden Triangle. Only then did he fully realize how deep the trap he had fallen into was: it was too late, he saw thousands of Indians just like him, deceived and imprisoned in the same way, stripped of their passports, with no chance of escape. In that moment of horrifying realization, his parents called in for a video chat, asking if he had landed the job as an IT manager. He suppressed his shame and regret, told them he had, forced a smile, and accepted their blessings.
Colorful flags in each team's work area indicate whether their fraud performance has met targets. Provided by Red Bull
Standing in the office is a traditional Chinese ceremonial drum, which is beaten whenever an employee successfully defrauds more than $100,000. Provided by Red Bull.
In the following days, with almost no pre-job training, he was quickly drawn into the operations of the fraud organization. Later, he learned that the compound was called the Boshang Fraud Park. He was trained to create fake accounts, given scam scripts, and then began working under a night shift schedule. Each night, he manually sent hundreds of messages to flirt and lure new victims. After his shift, he returned to the top bunk of a dormitory shared with five others. The dormitory was smaller than the hotel room he had stayed in on his first night, and the toilet was located in the corner.
But he said that from the very beginning, he was determined to fight fate once again. He found that he understood computers better than most of his colleagues, and even better than his boss. It seemed that his superiors only knew how to use social media, AI tools, and cryptocurrencies. Within just a few days, he began to imagine using his technical skills to secretly gather information from the campus and then somehow expose it.
Red Bull gradually realized that there was actually little preventing him from leaking secrets from the campus. During work hours, team leaders would collect employees' personal phones and put them in a box, and strictly prohibited employees from taking work equipment out of the office. However, beyond these measures, the campus's monitoring of employees and their personal phones was surprisingly lax.
In Red Bull's view, the bosses apparently primarily rely on fear and despair to control these trafficked victims, while most of the colleagues seem to have lost all hope of resistance. "They tell themselves that merely surviving is the only goal, suppressing all human feelings," Red Bull wrote, "including empathy, guilt, and even memories of their former selves."
And the reason he was able to maintain hope was partly because he felt that he was different from others. "Most people lack such skills and tools, and they don't even have the inner strength to resist from within," he wrote. "But I can maneuver within this system, I can observe, I can gather evidence, names, scripts, patterns, and connections."
Yet sometimes, I still can't understand what gave Red Bull the courage to contact me and risk his life, rather than simply enduring the rest of his contract. "Perhaps it was for justice, or maybe out of conscience," he replied. "If there is a God, I hope He can see what I've done. And if there isn't, at least I know that in a place trying to turn people into devils, I held on to my humanity."
Full of dangers, exposed risks and a desperate escape plan.
Over time, the materials Red Bull sent me kept increasing, and I gradually sensed that danger was approaching him step by step. One day, Red Bull told me that his team leader, Amani, questioned him in a calm yet threatening tone about why he spent so much time outside without developing many new "clients." Amani even implied that perhaps a beating or a few electric shocks might help improve his work efficiency.
Around the same time, Red Bull said that new surveillance cameras had been installed in the office, even on the ceiling in front of and behind his desk. I told him to stop contacting me in the office immediately, as the risks were now too great. My editors came to an even more decisive conclusion: I had to completely stop my interviews with Red Bull until he was free.
At that time, Red Bull had already sent me 25 Chinese-English scam scripts and guides. These documents analyzed the entire scam process in an unprecedented level of detail: lists of conversation tactics for approaching victims; instructions on how to respond when a target requests a video call, and how to delay time until deepfake video models are ready; and techniques for complaining about cautious financial institutions, in order to prevent victims from being alarmed by warnings from their banks.
Perhaps the materials he provided me were already sufficient. I followed the editor's advice and told Red Bull it was time to stop. "Okay, then it's settled," he said, as straightforward as always.
A video secretly recorded via Signal call shows the interior of the cafeteria at the Boshang fraud campus. Red Bull said the food tasted oddly chemical. Employees who violate rules, even if it's just being late to work or not being in their dormitory during roll call, are banned from entering the cafeteria.
I told him that now, he should do his best to safely get through the remaining six months of his contract. Once he was free, we could get in touch again. But once again, Red Bull had thought several steps ahead. He told me that if the interview was to end here, he would leave right away.
He told me about a long-considered escape plan he had devised: forging a letter from the Indian police stating that he was under investigation in Jammu and Kashmir. He would tell his supervisor that if he didn't return, not only would he and his family get into trouble, but eventually the entire campus would be affected. He would plead with his boss to let him go home for two weeks to deal with the matter, promising to return after it was resolved. He said that perhaps his boss would believe the story and let him go.
I felt the plan was fundamentally unworkable, and I told him honestly: I warned him that the park administrators might discover the documents were forged and then punish him. But after I had dissuaded him from one risky plan after another, he seemed particularly determined about this one. I told him to wait a while, saying I would try to help him contact someone in the region who was more familiar with strategies for escaping the fraud园区. For example, I knew an activist from Southeast Asia, who asked to be referred to only as "W," and who had experience helping political refugees escape from that area.
The moment he stepped into the office lobby, Red Bull suddenly switched to cover mode. "It's okay, uncle, don't worry," he said as he passed by the security guard. "Everything will be fine, right?" Then, he hung up the phone.
In daily conversations, Red Bull also mentioned another possible path to freedom: if he could come up with about $3,400, he could buy his way out and go home. He just needed to find a way to get that money.
In an instant, countless thoughts flashed through my mind. First, I felt a flicker of hope for Red Bull and wanted to help him pay off the ransom. But almost immediately, I realized that Wired magazine would never pay money to a source in this way, let alone pay a ransom to a human trafficking criminal organization. The idea violated journalistic ethics. Paying sources is generally considered a corrupt practice that creates conflicts of interest, and it would also set an unforgivable precedent. I explained this to Red Bull, and he quickly replied that he "completely understood" and had never asked me or Wired to pay the money.
Even so, just the proposal of a ransom planted a dark thought in my mind that I couldn't shake off: what if Red Bull was deceiving me? Initially, after seeing enough evidence that proved he was who he claimed to be—a real victim trapped in a scam village in Laos—I had put aside my initial doubts. Now, after nearly two weeks of knowing each other, this unsettling possibility kept haunting me: what if he was actually an insider from the scam village, and everything from the very beginning had been a complete fraud? Just thinking about it made me feel as if I had betrayed all the trust he had given me.
I decided to set this doubt aside, partly thinking that he might have ulterior motives, but more willing to believe that his original intention was sincere.
At the same time, a few days later, he brought up the idea of forged documents again. I once more advised him to wait for someone like W to help and not to take the risk of carrying out the plan. But I could sense that his determination was growing stronger each day. "I have no other choice," he said, "I'll just take it one step at a time."
The plan was uncovered, leading to capture, ransom, and repentance in a desperate situation.
A few days later, on a Saturday afternoon, I unexpectedly received an email from the Proton Mail address Red Bull had initially used to contact me. He hadn't used this account since we switched to Signal. Like the first email, this one also had no subject line.
I opened the email, and fear instantly gripped me, leaving my mind blank.
"They have caught me, and now they have taken everything from my phone," the email read. "They beat me, and now they might kill me."
Red Bull has carried out his plan to forge Indian police documents, and now, it seems the worst-case scenario is unfolding.
I suppressed my panic and quickly brainstormed various options in my mind. I sent text messages to my editor and W, hoping they might have some ideas or ways to help. Fifteen minutes after sending my first email, I received another email from Red Bull, which was somewhat clearer than the previous one: "I'm trapped with no way out. They've taken my private phone and ID," it read. "If you have any way to help, please do."
At the same time, W replied to me on Signal. We had a phone call and hastily discussed what we could do to improve Red Bull's chances of survival. I didn't know how Red Bull had sent the email, but W warned me that replying to it would be dangerous. His boss already knew that he had lied to them in order to escape. However, for now, they didn't yet know that he had been in contact with a journalist, leaking secrets from the facility.
If they discovered him, there was no doubt they would kill him. "The methods would be extremely brutal," said W. "He would have absolutely no chance of leaving this place alive." He advised me to wait for Red Bull to provide further information about his situation and how to communicate safely before taking any action.
After an agonizing 24 hours, I finally received another email from Red Bull. It was a long, rambling message, written in a state of emotional turmoil.
"Those people beat me up last night, and I'm still hungry—I haven't eaten anything. They stopped my card, took my private phone and everything I had. Today, they will decide what to do with me. The Indian team leader and everyone else sat in front of me, asked if I knew who they were, then beat me again, and then took me back to the office. Today, I must admit that everything I did was fake and confess my mistake. I can't escape from here. I have no money and can't even leave the building. I'm contacting you using the office computer. If you have any way to help, please email me, and I will check. Tell W to contact me by email. They have been torturing me, and after taking me back to the office, I can only use the office computer. Wishing you a good night."
I hadn't even had a chance to reply to the email when I received a Signal message: "Red."
"Bull." I replied.
He quickly sent a message, this time speaking very briefly: he was locked in a room, and the other party demanded that someone pay 20,000 RMB, approximately 2,800 USD, in order to release him.
In this life-or-death crisis, I couldn't help but think that this might be the ultimate outcome of the scam I had previously suspected: attracting a journalist's attention, drawing him into the trap, making him responsible for the safety of an informant, and then demanding a ransom from him to save the person.
In any case, my editors have made it clear to me that neither Wired magazine nor I personally could pay a ransom to Red Bull or whoever is controlling him. In fact, they are more suspicious than ever that he might be deceiving me. Yet I still feel that the more likely truth is that this nightmare is all real.
Red Bull seems to have gotten his phone back, and it's likely the other side did so in order to have him find someone to pay the ransom. However, I think calling him is too risky. I sent him a text message, suggesting that he try to contact W to see if someone could help him escape. W has a lot of experience in dealing with such situations, and if Red Bull is being monitored, it's better to be discovered communicating with an activist than with a journalist.
I also told Red Bull that although I was deeply pained by everything he was enduring, I couldn't pay a ransom for him, just as I couldn't pay his purchase price in the beginning.
"Okay," wrote Red Bull, "I understand." He asked me to tell W to contact him, and I agreed.
I watched as he set Signal's disappearing messages to delete after only 5 seconds, which was enough to show how concerned he was about being closely monitored.
He sent a thumbs-up emoji, and then the message disappeared.
In the following days, I contacted everyone I thought might be able to help Red Bull, even those who might be willing to pay a ransom: Erin West, W, and the director of the nonprofit organization W was affiliated with. But they all refused one by one—either out of concern that it might encourage human trafficking in the scam village, or because they doubted that Red Bull's story itself was a fraud, or both.
Although West initially showed great enthusiasm when Red Bull first came forward, she now said it sounded like a human trafficking scam she had heard of elsewhere, in which fake victims demand fake ransoms. West and Red Bull had several voice calls via Signal, but she became flustered by his extremely panicked state and found his urgent request for a ransom (with a promise to repay it later) highly suspicious. "It sounds like a 'give me one bitcoin and I'll give you two back' scam," West later told me.
But I still feel that I have a responsibility to believe everything Red Bull says, assuming it's all true, and within the bounds of journalistic ethics, do my best to help him get out.
On the third day of his kidnapping for ransom, a slight turn of fortune seemed to emerge. I could clearly sense that the surveillance on him had become less intense, perhaps because the kidnappers were gradually losing patience with him. I decided to take a risk and make a phone call. "The situation isn't good," he said in his usual, understated tone, his voice soft and close to the phone's microphone. He said he had a fever and had been beaten several times—slapped, kicked, and forced to admit to forging documents from the Indian police. On one occasion, the boss had put a white powder into a glass of water and forced him to drink it. He said that after drinking it, he became unusually talkative and confident, but soon afterward, red rashes appeared on his skin. He mentioned that sometimes he was taken back to a room to sleep, but it had already been several days since he had last eaten, and he had been deprived of water for long periods.
He wrote letters to Indian embassies and consulates across Southeast Asia, but none of the institutions responded. "No one is going to come help me, and I don't know why," he said. A few minutes into the call, his voice finally broke down, and muffled sobs could be heard—this was the first time I had heard him express self-pity.
But then he took a deep breath and quickly calmed down. "I feel like crying," he said, "but let's first see what happens."
On the fourth day after his first failed escape attempt and the demand for a ransom, Red Bull sent me a text message saying the situation at the facility had changed. Everything was unusually quiet, and no one was calling him to the office. After asking several colleagues, he learned that there were rumors the Lao police were planning to raid the facility. Their Chinese boss had received inside information and had already started to act low-key.
The next day, rumors of a raid within the compound continued to circulate, but Red Bull received a message of renewed hope from the Indian Embassy in Laos: "Please provide copies of your passports and work permits," the message read. "The embassy will take necessary actions to initiate a rescue."
Redemption seemed just within reach. However, in the following days, there was no further movement. The embassy stopped responding to Red Bull's messages. One night, after several attempts, I finally managed to get through to an Indian embassy official. He appeared to know nothing about the person we were talking about, then repeated the government's vague promises that a rescue would be carried out, before hanging up the phone.
As days passed, the Indian government provided no clear response, the police raid never came, and no one was willing to pay his ransom. Red Bull seemed gradually succumbing to a sense of fatalism. One day, after I woke up, I received a series of messages from him, sounding like confessions. It was as if he feared dying in his confined prison and wanted to atone for his sins.
"I want to honestly tell you something. When I first contacted you, I said I had never deceived anyone, but that wasn't entirely true," he wrote. "The truth is, my Chinese boss forced me to bring two people into the scam. I didn't do it voluntarily, and I've felt guilty about it every day. That's why I now want to tell you the whole truth."
Later, he revealed more details about the two victims to me. He had defrauded $504 from one person and about $11,000 from the other. He told me both of their names. I tried to contact them, but I couldn't find one of them, and the other never responded. According to the fraud operation's incentive structure, Red Bull should have earned a commission from the $11,000 fraud amount. However, he said that apart from a meager base salary, he had never received any additional rewards.
Later, I dug up a photo of the office whiteboard that Red Bull had sent me earlier. On it, clearly written, was the Chinese name "Ma Chao," the nickname given to him by the campus, with the amount of $504 noted beside it. I had completely overlooked this at the time, but in fact, he had never really tried to hide it.
"I entrust you with my most genuine story," Red Bull wrote at the end of the confession, "this is the whole truth."
After ten days of confusion, Red Bull told me that he and his colleagues were asked to pack up their belongings. All the computers in the office were boxed up and moved to the dormitory. All employees were required to relocate to a new building just a few hundred feet away and were told to continue working from the temporary dormitory instead of returning to the office. According to rumors, a police raid was finally on its way.
Red Bull said that during this time, he was treated worse than a pig or dog and was isolated by other staff members. He had no bedding and sometimes had to sleep on the floor. He was only given food when someone remembered to do so, and it was often spoiled leftovers. He had lost a lot of weight, his whole body ached, and he had a fever, feeling as if he had the flu.
But even so, Red Bull has not given up and is still trying to gather more evidence.
During the office shutdown, work devices were allowed to be brought into the dormitory. The lax security in the campus caught Red Bull's attention, as he saw an opportunity. One day, while a roommate was asleep, he found the person's work phone.
Previously, he had seen this roommate enter the password from behind, and now he quickly unlocked the phone. Then, Red Bull used WhatsApp's "Linked Devices" feature to connect his personal phone with this work phone, gaining access to internal communications within the scam operation. Using this access, he recorded the screen meticulously, carefully reviewing months of internal conversations within the operation and all the screenshots of chats between his colleagues and the victims.
The next day, in another dormitory, he found his work phone. Since his failed escape attempt, he had not touched this phone again. He used the WhatsApp linking method once more, allowing his personal phone to access messages from the work device. Then, he recorded a video of himself browsing through the chat history. These videos fully documented the daily operations of the facility over the past three months. Red Bull sent me clips from these videos, but the complete version was nearly 10GB in size, far exceeding the data capacity his phone could handle for sending.
Surviving the worst, returning home.
A week later, after he and his colleagues had moved to the new building, Red Bull sent me a series of dramatically different and more dramatic short videos: one showed dozens of South Asian men standing outside a high-rise building, lined up by Lao police in khaki and black uniforms; another showed a group of people in similar predicaments sitting in rows in a lobby. Red Bull told me that the police raid had finally arrived, clearing out scam operations that had failed to evacuate the old office area in advance, as his boss had done. Now, these videos are circulating among employees who managed to escape the crackdown.
While other scam dens in the industrial park were struggling to adjust to their new temporary office environments, Red Bull had clearly been enduring weeks of torment in hell. He had pleaded desperately with his boss, begging to be released, saying that he was of no further use to them. He had no money, and apparently, no one was willing to pay a ransom for him. In the already cramped temporary building, he had become a burden, occupying space without any value.
To everyone's amazement, the boss actually agreed. Instead of killing him, they told him he could leave.
In order to raise money for the trip home, Red Bull borrowed a few hundred dollars from his older brother. Then, he wrote a letter to an Indian acquaintance at another nearby scam operation, explaining that he wanted to go home to visit his family but would return soon. He proposed that if his acquaintance could send him money for an airplane ticket, upon his return he would share the recruitment referral fees with him. Soon after, his account received another few hundred dollars. Red Bull had tricked a scammer and found a way home.
In late July, Amani, the leader of Red Bull, stopped him outside the dormitory, returned his passport to him, and told him that he could leave. Red Bull said that most of his belongings, including his shoes, were still in the dormitory, and now he was only wearing a pair of flip-flops.
Amani, however, said he didn't care. The 50K himself was sitting inside an Audi, waiting to deliver Red Bull to the Golden Triangle region's border. From there, he would be on his own. He wore flip-flops, climbed into the back seat of the car, and left.
Later, after Red Bull had finally managed to escape, he remained deeply resentful about this final humiliation, as if it were more unbearable than all the slaps, kicks, druggings, and starvation he had endured. "I never thought they would do this to me," he wrote in a text message, accompanied by a crying emoji. "They wouldn't even let me wear my own shoes."
In the days after being sent to the border, Red Bull traveled by bus, train, and eventually bought an extremely cheap airline ticket requiring no fewer than five layovers, finally making it back to India. On the way back to his village, he started sending me WhatsApp screen recordings he had secretly taken from the facility and stored on his phone.
These documents eventually became the most valuable and unique materials he provided to me. A team of journalists from *Wired* magazine later compiled these materials into a 4,200-page PDF of screenshots and shared it with researchers specializing in fraud camps. We found that the document detailed the daily life inside the fraud camp, listed every successful scam over the past few months, and clearly illustrated the scale and hierarchical structure of the operation. At the same time, the documents revealed the mundane daily lives of the forced laborers who carried out these scams: their routines, the fines and punishments they endured, and the Orwellian rhetoric used by their bosses to manipulate, deceive, and control them.
In the end, no one provided Red Bull with the escape assistance he needed—not the human rights organizations I tried to contact, not the Indian government that had promised a rescue but took no action, and not even Wired magazine. Red Bull saved himself. And even in a desperate situation with no outside support, he still managed to gather these materials and hand them over to me. This is the most significant piece of evidence to date.
Red Bull has returned to his home country, India.
Red Bull's hands are not entirely clean. He admitted to me that, under coercion, he had deceived two innocent people. However, despite my doubts and those of others I tried to connect with him, his original intention as a whistleblower ultimately proved to be pure.
Now, there is no doubt: Red Bull is real.
On a quiet back street in a city in India, I was waiting alone, surrounded by dozens of Rhesus macaques, some lazily lying around, others grooming each other, and some leaping and darting across the balconies and power lines of the neighborhood. Then the monkeys scattered, disappearing into the trees and rooftops. A white SUV turned the corner, drove down the street, and pulled up in front of me.
The car door opened, and Red Bull stepped out with the same shy smile I had seen when he first answered my Signal video call. He looked thinner and slighter than I had imagined, but much more energetic than he appeared on the phone screen. He was wearing a flannel button-down shirt and had just had a haircut. As he approached me, his smile became brighter and more relaxed. I reached out and we shook hands.
Now that he has finally regained his freedom, Red Bull has allowed me to reveal his real name: Mohammad Muzahir.
Mohammad Muzahir, also known as Red Bull, sitting in the car after his first meeting with a Wired magazine journalist in India.
"I'm really happy to see you," Muzahir said as I helped him check into the hotel and we sat together in the SUV heading to my place. "I've been looking forward to this day, to being face to face with you and sharing everything. I'm so excited I can't even put it into words."
From escaping Muzahir to this meeting, these past three months have not been easy for him. He's almost penniless and can no longer focus on making websites and Facebook pages as he used to. He doesn't even have a laptop. To survive, he has worked as a waiter and done construction work. Besides working odd jobs and applying for jobs and universities abroad (which have so far been unsuccessful), Muzahir spends his time obsessively researching information about various scam dens using his cracked, damaged phone, its screen full of garbled lines.
During his research, Muzahir discovered that most of the men captured during that raid were later sent back to the Golden Triangle. He believed that the police operation was merely a show, causing little to no real impact on the local scam operations. He also learned that the Boshang scam camp, which had enslaved him, had already moved to Cambodia, taking many of his former colleagues with it.
Muzahir has always felt guilty toward his colleagues who were left behind in the park, and he has also been tormented by the fact that he deceived two people. Photo by Saumya Khandelwal
We sat down in an empty lounge in the basement of the hotel where I was staying. Muzahir told me that he only slept three or four hours each night. He said what kept him awake and anxious was the scam center from which he had escaped, and the dozens of similar sites still operating in lawless areas of Southeast Asia, even expanding to other parts of the world. He couldn't help but think about the colleagues he had left behind. He also felt deeply guilty for having defrauded two people, even though he kept telling himself it was a necessary price to pay before becoming a whistleblower. He dreamed of earning enough money to somehow make it up to those two people. "To be honest, the ending of this story isn't a happy one," he said.
After experiencing countless betrayals and having once worked at a den where betrayal on a large scale was part of the business model, Muzahir's biggest problem now is that he can no longer trust anyone. Even when I tried to introduce him to some human rights NGOs and survivor groups, he strongly resisted. "These people are just wasting time and giving false hope," he once wrote in a text message. "I will never trust anyone so easily again."
For some reason, I became an exception to his near-universal distrust. But now that we've finally met, I feel I must confess to Muzahir: there were times when I, too, distrusted him. Even during moments when he needed help the most, I foolishly worried that he might be deceiving me.
To my relief, he just smiled. "You did the right thing," said Muzahir. He pointed out that if I had paid his ransom or even a bribe back then, he would have left the facility earlier and would not have had the opportunity to record and share the complete WhatsApp chat logs of the scam operation.
Muzahir is now urgently hoping that Wired magazine will publish our full analysis report on these materials. I pointed out to him that after the report is released, the Chinese mafia might retaliate against him in India. Even if he leaves India as planned and goes elsewhere, he might still not escape danger. We could conceal his identity, but his team is very small. Even if we don't publish a detailed account of his experiences, his former bosses would likely immediately know who the leaker is.
Muzahir responded that he was willing to take the risk, including revealing his true identity, in order to make his story public. Despite going through all of this, Muzahir still holds onto his idealism. He hopes that his experience will not only serve as a warning, but also inspire more people like himself.
At that moment when he explained his decision, I saw more clearly than ever before the force that had driven him to take all these risks. He was not only speaking to me, but also to all those who might choose to resist or become whistleblowers within the growing fraud园区 industry, to the global power structures that enable this industry, to the survivors, and to the hundreds of thousands trapped in this system of modern slavery, whose voices have been silenced.
"If someone sees my story, perhaps more Red Bulls will come forward," said Muzahir with his usual shy smile. "When there are countless Red Bulls speaking out in this world, everything will become better."
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