Day: January 27, 2026

It was a perfect June evening in New York when I received my first email from the source who would ask me to call him Red Bull. He was writing from hell, 8,000 miles away.

A summer shower had left a rainbow over my Brooklyn neighborhood, and my two children were playing in a kiddie pool on the roof of our apartment building. Now the sun was setting, while I—in typical 21st-century parenting fashion, forgive me—compulsively scrolled through every app on my phone.

The message had no subject line and came from an address on the encrypted email service Proton Mail: “vaultwhistle@proton.me.” I opened it.

“Hello. I’m currently working inside a major crypto romance scam operation based in the Golden Triangle,” it began. “I am a computer engineer being forced to work here under a contract.”

“I’ve collected internal evidence of how the scam works—step by step,” the message continued. “I am still inside the compound, so I cannot risk direct exposure. But I want to help shut this down.”

I knew only vaguely that the Golden Triangle was a lawless jungle region in Southeast Asia. But as a reporter who has covered cryptocurrency crime for the past decade and a half, I understood that crypto scamming—specifically the version of it that’s come to be known as “pig butchering,” in which victims are lured with promises of romance and lucrative investments, only to be tricked into handing over their life savings—has become the most profitable form of cybercrime in the world, pulling in tens of billions of dollars annually.

This sprawling scam industry is, today, staffed by hundreds of thousands of forced laborers in compounds across Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos. They’re trafficked there from the poorest regions of Asia and Africa and pressed into the service of Chinese organized crime groups. The result is a self-­perpetuating, constantly growing, globe-spanning money funnel that destroys lives on both ends—bankrupting one kind of victim, enslaving another.

I had read harrowing reports of scam compounds where laborers are beaten, tortured with electric shock batons, starved, and even murdered by their captors. Those stories have mostly come from the rare survivors who have escaped or been rescued by law enforcement. Never before, though, had I heard of someone currently working within a scam compound offering to act as a whistleblower—an actual source on the inside.