Andy Greenberg

He slept in this dorm and he would walk into this kind of bare office building where he worked.

He would show me the cafeteria where you could see lines of these very depressed looking South Asian and African men who were all human trafficking victims lining up for food before their work shift began.

And once he actually showed me the inside of his office where you could see, you know, rows of cubicles.

You could see, in fact, flags on the desk of different worker groups that were colored based on how well they had succeeded at scamming that month, whether they were meeting their quotas.

I think it is a form of modern slavery.

But what I would realize is that it doesn't take the form that you might expect.

There are, in fact, crypto scam compounds where people are held in shackles and beaten every day.

But this was modern slavery, too.

I'm stealing a line here from a scam compound expert that I showed this to.

But it was slavery pretending to be a corporation.

Red Bull eventually, he would share with me lots of the communications, the internal communications of this scam compound, the ways that the bosses talked to workers and you could see this bizarre Orwellian talk of like, let's all band together and meet our goals and we'll leave this place with our head held high and go home rich and fulfill our mission.

It's not, you shall meet your quota.

You need to do this many scams a day or you will be beaten.

It's sort of like capitalism on steroids with this illusion of actually making a profit, of winning along with the bosses.

But that is fully an illusion.

Red Bull was held in debt, essentially.

They told him that he owed a certain amount of money to the company, essentially, and that he would have to earn it back.

Why did he owe them money?

Well, I don't think that there was any legitimate reason.

There was this kind of explanation of like, well, we paid for you to start work here.