Andy Greenberg

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.

No subject line sent from the encrypted email service ProtonMail.

Hello, I'm currently working inside a major crypto romance scam operation based in the Golden Triangle.

I am a computer engineer being forced to work here under a contract.

I'm still inside the compound, so I cannot risk direct exposure, but I want to help shut this down.

Well, my first thought was that I needed to figure out if this was real.

I cover this beat of crypto crime.

I'm aware of the crypto scam compound industry.

I've read the stories of people who have survived these compounds and escaped.

But what I had never heard of before was somebody on the inside offering to be a whistleblower, to leak documents to a journalist in real time.

And that was...

I don't know, as a journalist, it felt both too good to be true, but also very, very scary.

I knew that the stakes here were really high, that he was in an incredibly sensitive and risky position, if he was who he said he was.

Well, the reason it's called pig butchering is because this is a very particular form of cryptocurrency scam.