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

I had barely had time to skim these detailed descriptions—this was not how I’d planned to spend a Saturday evening with my wife—when my phone rang, just after midnight.

I picked up the Signal call. A polite Indian-accented voice said, “Hello.”

“What do I call you?” I asked.

“You can call me any name, brother, no matter,” the voice said with a shy laugh.

I insisted that I’d need a name for him, even if he just wanted to make one up on the spot.

“You can call me Red Bull,” he said. Months later, he would tell me that he’d been looking at an empty can of the energy drink as we spoke.

Red Bull explained that he’d tried reaching out to US and Indian law enforcement agencies and Interpol, as well as the tip lines for a few news outlets, but no one had responded other than me. He asked me to tell him more about myself—and then cut me off as soon as I’d said two sentences about my work covering crypto crime.

“So you are the person I share everything with,” he said hurriedly. “And you will help me to expose this, right?”

Thrown off, I told him he’d have to first tell me who he was.

For the next few minutes, Red Bull warily answered my questions. He didn’t tell me his real name but said he was from India—that most of the compound’s forced laborers were from India, Pakistan, or Ethiopia.

He was in his early twenties and had a diploma in computer engineering, he said. Like most of his coworkers, Red Bull had been tricked by a fake job offer—in his case, to work as an IT manager for an office in Laos. Then his passport had been taken from him by his Chinese bosses. He was forced to sleep in a dormitory room with five other men and work 15 hours at a time on a nocturnal schedule designed to sync with the daytime of the Indian Americans they targeted for scamming. (That system—matching scammers with victims of their own ethnicity to build rapport and avoid language issues—is common, I’d later learn.)

Red Bull’s situation was not precisely the brutal modern slavery I had read about elsewhere. It was more like a grotesque parody of a corporate sales floor. In theory, the staffers were incentivized with commissions designed to create the illusion that they could get rich from hard work. In reality, they were kept in perpetual debt and servitude. Red Bull told me he was paid a base salary of 3,500 Chinese yuan a month, close to $500, but the money was almost entirely taken from him by daily fines for various infractions, most often not meeting his quota of initial conversations with victims. The result was that he had virtually no income and subsisted off the food in the cafeteria, mostly rice and vegetables that he said tasted of strange chemicals.

He was bound into this system by a one-year contract, and believed when that time was over—in about six more months—he’d be allowed to leave. So far, he told me, he hadn’t successfully scammed anyone, only skated by with the minimum number of plausible attempts. That meant he was still essentially captive unless he escaped, served out his time, or paid off his contract with thousands of dollars he didn’t have.

Red Bull told me he’d heard of people who were beaten and electrocuted for breaking rules, a female staffer who he believes was sold into sexual slavery, and other coworkers who mysteriously disappeared. “If they knew I was talking to you or doing something wrong to them, they would directly kill me,” he said. “But I promised myself that whether I stay alive or not, I will stop this scam.”

Then Red Bull launched into the immediate purpose of his call: There was a scam in progress he knew about, targeting an Indian American man who had already been scammed at least once, but remained in the thrall of one of Red Bull’s colleagues. The man’s crypto wallet service appeared to have frozen his account on the suspicion that he was being defrauded. So for the next payment, a courier was being sent to pick up a six-figure sum in cash.