Sam Sanders

Today, inside the dark world of foreign scam compounds.

One evening last June, journalist Andy Greenberg was on the roof of his apartment building playing with his kids when he got an email.

Andy was immediately intrigued by what he read.

The message claimed the sender had documents and other evidence that revealed how this scam operation really worked.

And there was one more line that really caught Andy's attention.

Andy is a senior writer at Wired, and that email was the start of a months-long reporting journey for Andy and his source.

That source went by the pseudonym Red Bull.

Together, Red Bull and Andy would uncover the hidden world of so-called pig butchering scams, where scammers build relationships with victims online before persuading them to invest in fake cryptocurrency platforms.

But the scammers are often victims themselves, held in compounds across Southeast Asia, forced to carry out the fraud.

This is a story about the inner workings of a covert criminal operation.

But it's also the story of a journalist and the source, the ethics of such a relationship, and what happens when that source tries to escape the world in which he is trapped.

Let's just dig in.

Tell us that first email you got from Red Bull.

When you read that email, what's your first thought?

And this scam, it's widely known as pig butchering.

How would you define pig butchering?

These are the things that we see in the news where it's, you know, some...

That unassuming auntie or uncle falls in love with someone via text, and before you know it, they have wired their retirement savings away.

Those scandals, those scams.

Wait, in history?