Andy Greenberg

phone call on Signal when I asked him to come up with a pseudonym.

He was like, you can call me anything you want.

And I was like, well, you need to give me some name to call you.

And he was like, okay, how about Red Bull?

How did he get trapped?

It was a very typical human trafficking situation where he had actually really pulled himself up by his bootstraps.

He was a young man from India or from the kind of disputed region of Jammu and Kashmir on the border with Pakistan.

And he had managed actually to get into the Kashmir Polytechnic Institute and get a degree in computer engineering there.

And then after that university program, he was lured with, it turns out, a fake job offer to be an IT manager somewhere in Southeast Asia by, you know, what appeared to be a kind of hiring agent who asked him to come to Thailand and then to cross the border into Laos.

It turned out it was the Golden Triangle region of Laos.

The Golden Triangle is this very small city-sized special economic zone inside of northern Laos.

That is, in fact, a kind of lawless zone, but a small and kind of formalized one controlled essentially by Chinese organized crime now.

And even the police are very often on the payroll of those criminals.

So it has become a hotbed of this particular criminal industry, which is scam compounds.

So his passport was taken away by this hiring agent.

And then before he knew it, he was told what his real job would be, which was not to be an IT manager in any office, but to be a scammer.

And by that point, it was too late.

He was trapped.

He had no way of leaving and had to essentially get to work.

And, you know, these 15, 16 hour night shifts timed to the time zones of his victims and then sleep through the days in this dorm room with five other men in a toilet in the corner.