Andy Greenberg

You fatten up the pig with a romance scam.

And the pig is like a westerner.

The pig is the victim.

In fact, law enforcement is asking us not to use this term anymore because it's not very nice to the victim.

The idea is that you build trust through a kind of romantic relationship.

The scammer pretends usually to be a wealthy woman, a wealthy, attractive woman who is interested in the victim and builds a relationship with them.

And then only sometimes after weeks or even months of building that relationship, do they make this pivot to saying, you know, by the way, I can help you get rich like me.

I can show you, in fact, this investment platform where you can buy cryptocurrency and double your money or triple it, you know.

And I really think that you should be brave and try this, and then you can be wealthy like me.

And of course, the investment platform is fake.

The money is gone.

People lose hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions of dollars of their life savings this way.

Yes, and I think, you know, people don't know this is the biggest form of cybercrime in history.

tens of billions of dollars a year stolen from victims, mostly in the West.

But the other thing that people really don't know, like this is even less known, I think, is that the scammers are victims too.

Hundreds of thousands of human trafficking victims are trapped in full compounds in these countries in Southeast Asia, where they are forced day and night, or sometimes 15, 16 hour shifts to spam out scam messages.

and are not allowed to go home, and are, in fact, sometimes beaten and punished and held in a kind of indentured servitude and forced to scam.

Wow.

Why the name Red Bull?

Yeah, he would later tell me that he was looking at an empty can of a Red Bull energy drink, like in the middle of our first meeting,