Shabani Matani

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246 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 21 Jun

Shabani Matani’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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Up First from NPR · Caught in Cambodia’s Scam Machine: Part 1 · 21 Jun 2026 podcast

They get access to troves of phone numbers, Instagram accounts and other data.

Then there were the receptionists like Schweip.

So were you a receptionist?

So what does a receptionist do?

Schwab explained to me that as a receptionist, he was the first person that a client would be in contact with.

That's what the victims were called, by the way, clients.

His job was to be that first human touch via text message to introduce clients to basically a profitable scheme.

He would lure them bit by bit with real cash rewards.

Can you give me an example of what the script will say at this point?

And then maybe out of 10 numbers, one person would reply.

The best part?

You don't need any technical skills or prior experience.

So Shoaib was in charge of hooking clients into what's called a task scam.

And others who I interviewed in Cambodia described how this worked to me as well.

As a client, you're convinced that you've signed up for a remote marketing job and that you just have to like a few YouTube pages, Amazon products.

But to get sort of further in and to be given more things to do, you have to deposit money into an account.

So, you deposit money, you get paid out.

You deposit more, they give you more work, you get paid out more and earn commission that way.

And this commission structure was sort of deliberately complex.

Maybe it was a way to make it seem more real.

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