South Asian Network of Cyber Scammers

On a recent NPR’s Fresh Air episode, host Terry Gross interviews Andy Greenberg, a senior writer at Wired, about a cybercrime operation in Laos where the people running the scams are themselves being held against their will.

Gross’s experiences are quite relatable. Her own show has been impersonated, and authors have received emails in her name inviting them to appear on Fresh Air. These emails then request a fee of $250 or $350 to cover production costs. Gross is candid about this, stating that the show would never ask a guest to pay for their appearance.

How AI supercharged an old scam

Greenberg, an author himself, gets similar emails.

One arrived the day before, from someone claiming to be an editor at Penguin Random House and praising his last book. His last book was published by Penguin Random House.
As an experiment, he asked ChatGPT to write an email from Terry Gross inviting him on the show and requesting a $250 fee. It did so without hesitation, then wrote a follow-up pressing him to pay.
Researcher Gary Warner of DarkTower traced numbers behind these author scams to Nigeria’s +234 country code. Greenberg links them to the long-running groups sometimes called the Yahoo Boys. The scam is decades old. What is new is flawless, personalized English produced instantly for thousands of targets.

Pig butchering

The term comes from the scammers. The victim is the pig, fattened before slaughter.

The fattening is a romance scam running weeks, months, sometimes over a year, until the victim is emotionally dependent. Only then does the investment opportunity appear.
Greenberg calls it the most profitable cybercrime in history, taking tens of billions a year.
Gross reveals that she automatically deletes the unsolicited “were you the one I saw on the street today” texts. Greenberg’s response serves as the central theme of the interview: a lonely, elderly man with retirement savings might not be the same person she saw on the street.
Victims convert their money into Tether, witness their fake balances doubling, only to discover that they must send more to withdraw. Consequently, many end up not only broke but also in debt.

Inside the compound

Last summer, Greenberg received an unsolicited ProtonMail message from a computer engineer who had been trapped in the Golden Triangle region of Laos. The engineer offered to leak everything he had access to and requested to be called Red Bull.

He had been promised an IT manager job, flew to Thailand, crossed into Laos, and had his passport taken. This was debt bondage rather than shackles. He owed his captors for transport and board, repayable only through scam commissions.
Greenberg paints a stark picture of modern slavery, likening it to a corporate sales floor. Workers faced fines for not meeting quotas and arriving late, while their bosses delivered daily messages about transforming customers’ lives.
Everyone was trained to use ChatGPT and DeepSeek to generate conversations and refine their phrasing. Video calls were discouraged, but when necessary, a model within the compound would conduct them. During these calls, deepfake software would alter her face to match the photo that had already been sent. Greenberg acknowledges the software’s imperfections, but by that point, the victim is already inclined to believe.
Red Bull’s group of approximately 30 individuals earned around $2.2 million in just three months. Laos alone is home to numerous such compounds, while Cambodia and Myanmar also have many more.

Getting out

Wired abruptly ended his reporting when Red Bull discovered a new surveillance camera installed above his desk. Consequently, he had to leave the premises immediately.

He forged a letter from Indian police claiming he was under investigation at home. Greenberg tried to talk him out of it. The forgery was spotted at once, and his bosses beat, starved and interrogated him. They never learned he was talking to a journalist. Greenberg is certain he would have been killed if they had.
His escape came by accident. The compound relocated after a tip about a police raid, and in the disruption he argued that he was dead weight. They let him go.
He later revealed his real name, Mohammad Muzahir, and appeared on camera. Greenberg visited him in India and asserts that the decision was his own, made so that others could stand up to these organizations.

What is Next?

Greenberg believes that AI currently aids human scammers, and autonomous scamming is the next logical step. He references an Anthropic case study that details 20 dating apps developed by a Chinese organization and populated with AI personas engaged in romance scams. Additionally, he cites research indicating that AI surpasses human capabilities in the relationship-building phase, demonstrating greater responsiveness and attentiveness compared to human interaction.

Gross concludes her interview by expressing her feelings. Greenberg offers no comfort either. He explains that he has come to accept the fear of cyberwar alongside the other catastrophic events looming over American society. What makes it real, he says, is imagining the cascading consequences of an attack that we are simply not equipped to handle.

Acknowledgement: This summary was generated using AI writing tools as part of my AI exploration process. For more information, check out the original articles listed below.