- 2 days ago
It began with a message in WIRED technology journalist Andy Greenberg's inbox, sent from a lawless stretch of Laos bordering Myanmar and Thailand. A computer engineer from India, trapped far from home inside an isolated compound, forced to work long hours luring western victims into fake crypto investments. This is how he exposed the never-before-seen inner workings of a modern forced labor operation—and escaped with his life.
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00:00A whistleblower trapped inside this scam compound run by the Chinese Mafia contacted me.
00:04If they catch me, they technically kill me.
00:06Determined to leak his captured secrets in real time.
00:09He would ultimately deliver an unprecedented cache of evidence.
00:12This is a major, major deal.
00:15Exposing the tactics and hierarchy of a slave colony here in northern Laos,
00:19where trafficked workers are forced to scam millions from American victims.
00:23But first, he had to make it out alive.
00:25I'm Andy Greenberg. I investigate the strange, dark, and subversive sides of technology for WIRED.
00:30This is Hack Lab, the whistleblower inside a crypto scam slave compound.
00:35This footage was secretly filmed inside a scam compound in northern Laos.
00:39The workers you see are trafficking victims, confined to the compound,
00:42and forced to work 15-hour night shifts synced to U.S. daytime hours.
00:46Their job is to target Western victims with text messages that lure them into fake crypto investments,
00:51sometimes stealing hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars.
00:55The color of the flags on their desks marks whether a team of scammers is meeting their quotas.
00:59It's part of a cruel system of incentives and coercion that drives the most lucrative form of cybercrime in the world.
01:05The video was shot by a source who first contacted me last June.
01:08It all started with an email.
01:09No subject line sent from an address on the encrypted email service ProtonMail.
01:13Hello, it began.
01:15I'm currently working inside a major crypto romance scam operation based in the Golden Triangle.
01:20The unnamed source said he was a computer engineer trapped in the compound, forced to work as a scammer.
01:24I've collected internal evidence of how the scam works step by step, he said.
01:28I want to help shut this down.
01:29I knew only a little bit about the Golden Triangle, a lawless stretch of Laos bordering Myanmar and Thailand,
01:34dominated by Chinese syndicates that traffic in everything from drugs to human organs.
01:39But after 15 years of covering crypto crime as a reporter,
01:42I'd learned that crypto romance scams, known as pig butchering, drain tens of billions of dollars a year from victims.
01:48Behind this scam epidemic are hundreds of thousands of trafficked workers from the poorest regions of Asia and Africa,
01:54forced by the Chinese mob to carry out these scams inside dystopian slave compounds.
02:00What I didn't know, what no one had ever seen before, was what this industry looked like from the inside,
02:05from the perspective of a whistleblower sharing internal information in real time.
02:10I gave the source my number on the encrypted messaging app signal.
02:15That night, after my kids were asleep, my phone lit up.
02:19The source began sending documents, flowcharts, scripts, internal guides that revealed step by step how the scams worked.
02:25Fake Facebook profiles, AI-generated deepfakes and hired models.
02:28Carefully scripted affection, luring victims into fake trading platforms.
02:32And then, my phone rang.
02:38Hello.
02:39How are you?
02:41Good, good. Thank you for being willing to talk.
02:44What is your name or what can I call you?
02:46You can call me Red Bull, okay?
02:49Oh, Red Bull? Red Bull?
02:51Yeah, yes.
02:52Later, he'd tell me he'd been looking at an empty can of the energy drink as we spoke.
02:56Okay, okay.
02:56He said he'd contacted U.S. and Indian authorities, Interpol, several news outlets.
03:02I was the only one who responded.
03:05Not simple thing, yeah.
03:06Like, big scale.
03:07Big, very, very big scale.
03:08Wow.
03:08So, you are the person I share my everything with you, okay?
03:11And you help me to expose this, right?
03:13I was thrown off.
03:14My mind was reeling.
03:16I started a new call, this time with video enabled.
03:18I needed to see who I was talking to.
03:20Hey, hey.
03:22So, he showed me.
03:23Thank you for picking up the phone.
03:26Good to see you.
03:27Red Bull told me his backstory.
03:28He was in his early 20s from India with a diploma in computer engineering.
03:32He'd been recruited with a fake job offer, IT manager, good salary, overseas opportunity.
03:37But when he arrived in Laos, his passport was taken by his bosses.
03:40Like, can you walk around a bit?
03:41Like, turn your camera around and show me out the window.
03:44This is the building here.
03:46Now, he found himself trapped within a cluster of ugly concrete buildings
03:49known as the Bochang compound in northern Laos.
03:52Like most pig-butchering scammers, he'd pretend to be a wealthy woman online.
03:56His job was to build trust, manufacture intimacy,
03:59slowly guide victims towards fake crypto investment platforms run by his bosses.
04:03So, please keep it secret, okay?
04:05Don't tell anyone.
04:06Okay, okay.
04:06So, I know my mission is, brother, expose this.
04:09No, thank you for trusting me.
04:10Remember me in your prayers and I have a lot of trust on you.
04:14Don't take any unnecessary risks, please.
04:16And thank you very much.
04:18The next morning, after a few hours sleep, I reached out to Aaron West,
04:22a former prosecutor who now runs an anti-scan group called Operation Shamrock.
04:26How was he able to make this call?
04:28He had to ask for permission from his boss to, like, go to a hotel.
04:32But he did.
04:33And then he showed me the front of this hotel.
04:35It was too blurry, but it was a Chinese sign.
04:37It's all Chinese organized crime and they move into locations
04:40and they literally take over the, like, everything is in Chinese.
04:45All the food around there is Chinese.
04:47He had to show me a fake Chinese ID that they created for him.
04:50West had talked to survivors of scam compounds, she told me.
04:53She'd never heard of an actual whistleblower within a compound
04:56leaking information to a journalist.
04:58This is a major, major deal.
05:00He seems to be saying that, like, a lot of the victims,
05:02or maybe even all of them, are Indian American.
05:05They do that. They do Malaysians on Malaysians.
05:07They do Japanese on Japanese.
05:09And here's someone on the inside who's willing to share this information
05:12and tell us everything about how this whole thing runs.
05:19From that point on, Red Bull and I fell into a routine.
05:22Every morning, New York time, late night in Laos,
05:24he would walk outside his dorm and call me on signal
05:26before heading to the cafeteria for dinner.
05:28The start of a work shift that would last until the afternoon of the next day.
05:32Sometimes Red Bull would tell me to record my screen.
05:34Then he would walk into the building and secretly film his surroundings
05:37while pretending to talk to his uncle.
05:39I got a tour through the bright lights of the Brochong office's lobby and stairwells,
05:43the lines of depressed-looking South Asian and African men
05:45lining up for food in its canteen.
05:47As they filed into the office, team leaders took employees' personal phones
05:51and put them in a box when they began their shifts,
05:53and they were strictly prohibited from taking work devices out of the office.
05:56But otherwise, the surveillance of staffers seemed surprisingly loose.
05:59The compound ran on a system of indentured servitude and debt,
06:03not shackles and chains.
06:04On the surface, it didn't look like the modern slavery I read about elsewhere.
06:08Instead, the whole operation felt more like a scene from Sorry to Bother You,
06:11a grotesque parody of a corporate sales floor.
06:13Bosses would post motivational messages to an office-wide WhatsApp group.
06:17They wrote things like,
06:18Every day brings a new opportunity,
06:20a chance to connect, to inspire, and to make a difference.
06:23Talk to that next customer like you're bringing them something valuable because you are.
06:26There were promises of commissions and getting rich,
06:29But in reality, the system kept workers trapped in debt.
06:32Red Bull, or Machao, the pseudonym in the compound,
06:35earned in yuan about $500 a month,
06:38then lost almost all of it to daily fines, usually for missing quotas.
06:42Red Bull told me he had never successfully scammed anyone.
06:46That meant he was fined so much that he was virtually broke
06:48and forced to subsist almost entirely on the food in the office cafeteria,
06:52mostly rice and vegetables that he said tasted of strange chemicals.
06:55Even that food, he said, was denied to anyone who so much has arrived late to their shift.
07:00Underneath the pretense of a voluntary sales force was a brutal system.
07:04The bosses held the workers' passports so no one could go home until they paid off their debt.
07:08Red Bull had heard of colleagues who were beaten or electrocuted,
07:11even one sold into prostitution.
07:13Even like, if the people know about me, I am talking with you,
07:17they definitely kill me without any reason.
07:19I will not publish anything then until you're free, right?
07:22I don't want to go home without stop this, I understand?
07:24I just want to make sure that we can do this investigation slowly and carefully together.
07:30Okay, okay, right, okay.
07:32Red Bull secretly installed Signal on his work computer,
07:35changing the name and icon to look like a shortcut to its hard drive,
07:38and sent me messages during his shifts with disappearing texts set to erase themselves after five minutes.
07:43Soon I was receiving a steady stream of pictures, screenshots, and videos.
07:47A spreadsheet and photos of a whiteboard on which his team's work was tracked,
07:51with scam totals in the thousands of dollars next to many of the group's nicknames.
07:55I learned that the term recharge meant scamming the same victim again.
07:58He sent me a photo of a Chinese ceremonial drum on a stand.
08:01When someone pulled off a big scam, six figures, sometimes even more,
08:05the scammer was allowed to strike it to celebrate.
08:07Later, Wired analyzed Red Bull's leaked data.
08:14We had all these screenshots, right, of all of these text conversations that Red Bull's team was having.
08:20Each post has a profile picture next to it.
08:22And what we're able to do is use machine learning to identify each individual post in that image
08:28and extract both the message and who was sending it.
08:31And in fact, they posted a special message every time they successfully scammed someone
08:35and included the amount of the scam and who had pulled it off.
08:38And so we were able to find those specific posts
08:40and then take the numbers that they had announced in each individual post and add them together.
08:45And what is the result?
08:45These few dozen workers pulled in over $2.2 million over the course of three months.
08:50My colleagues and I also studied the dozens of internal scam scripts that Red Bull sent.
08:55Blueprints of how their fraud worked in chilling detail.
08:57How to create fake profiles, how to open conversations, stall video calls
09:02until deep fake models who worked in a specific room of the building were ready.
09:05The scripts have line-by-line dialogues so the scammers know how to go through an interaction
09:12like to a really granular degree.
09:15And there are lists of topics for making conversation, documents like 100 chat topics.
09:20What's your favorite group photo that you've taken with friends?
09:23Or have you recently bought something nice for yourself?
09:27But then it gets into these much more emotionally evocative questions.
09:32What was your dream when you were little?
09:35Or what was the last time I cried for?
09:38Some scripts covered the use of cryptocurrency and how to coach victims
09:42to distrust their own banks when they issued fraud warnings.
09:45Your bank might say that there's something wrong with this, but like, don't listen to them.
09:50That's just because they don't want you moving your money out of their financial institution
09:55and into cryptocurrency or into this other thing.
09:57It's this sort of inoculation and preparing them in advance.
10:01Can you believe my bank said this might be a financial scam or crypto scam or something?
10:07It's like a really wild psychological trick.
10:10Well, a scammer wouldn't talk about scamming.
10:12That would be nuts.
10:13I mean, a lot of these documents are fully in Chinese.
10:16So, Zee, you were helping us out as a native Chinese speaker by analyzing a lot of them,
10:20including this website that was really interesting that it's had a massive collection online of scam stuff.
10:26Yeah, so this is like a public website that anyone can open and look into it.
10:30It's designed in a way that if you are a scammer, you're trying to answer a question that just came up,
10:35you can literally search the topic, refer to this guy, and talk in a very convincing way.
10:40It's like if you are a straight male persona talking to a woman or you're a straight woman talking to a man
10:45or even when you're a gay man talking to another gay man, this is what you should say to look more real, right?
10:50And they also break it down into topics like, okay, what do you talk about your dinner last night
10:55or your 401k or your mortgage?
10:57And the other funny thing about this website is that it also has this section for the music playlist
11:01for people to listen to.
11:03This is Spotify for scammers, among other things?
11:05That's a very accurate description.
11:07It's like a playlist of hundreds of hours of electronic music
11:11that you can play when you're busy scamming other people.
11:13These are 15-hour night shifts, so you can imagine that they're trying to get people
11:18to kind of tune out the rest of the world.
11:20The bosses micromanage the fiction.
11:24One message coached workers to explain when their persona was traveling and why.
11:28Another warned not to mention what car you drive unless you can produce a convincing photo of it.
11:32What's really wild is that every single one of the workers is required to post their schedule
11:38for the day to their bosses.
11:39And not their actual real-life schedule, but the schedule of their persona.
11:43Like their morning yoga and meditation and setting positive intentions.
11:47And then lunchtime with family and dentist visits and gym time.
11:51The irony, of course, is that in reality, these poor guys are spending 15 hours
11:54in a fluorescent-led office, hunched over a keyboard, spamming out messages,
11:58and then going home to a dorm room with five other guys on bunks
12:02and a toilet in the corner of the room.
12:04Red Bull sent me screenshots, too, of internal chats and the tragic responses
12:07from the lonely victims.
12:09Begging, confused, crying.
12:11Messages said,
12:12Always had a dream of having a girlfriend, then wife, like you.
12:14You stopped talking to me.
12:15I will continue praying for your mom.
12:17Please help me withdraw my money, okay?
12:19Question mark, question mark, question mark.
12:21Crying emojis.
12:22One victim appeared to have recorded himself sobbing in his car after losing everything.
12:26The video was shared around the office for laughs.
12:30So in total, how many skimmers are there in the whole Bochang compound?
12:34In the whole Golden Triangle, 500 plus offices, 50, 60 buildings, okay?
12:38In my office, there is 100 in place.
12:41Okay.
12:41And each team have one Chinese boss and one Indian professional person.
12:45Red Bull was part of Team Elite, one of about a dozen teams with names like Team Invincible,
12:49Team Money, Team Excellent, and so on.
12:51He explained that his supervisor was an Indian man with a short beard and aviator glasses who
12:55went by the name Amani.
12:57Amani's supervisor was nicknamed Wu Wan, or 50K, a short Chinese man with a paunch,
13:02tight pants, and a tattoo on his chest.
13:04Other bosses went by the names Li Buo, Wang Zai, Yanzu, and 50K's boss was called Dahai, or Si.
13:11The boss above all of them was known as Ah Lang, but Red Bull never saw him in person.
13:16He's a very big and very powerful person.
13:18He also doing here organs, you know, organs supply.
13:22Really?
13:22Human organs.
13:23Sometimes when Red Bull and I would speak or text, he called me uncle.
13:27Don't worry uncle, I will be back.
13:28A cover story in case anyone ever overheard or seized his phone.
13:32For a while, we even tried a different cover story of me pretending to be his secret girlfriend
13:35back home, heart emojis and misuse, until it became too embarrassing to keep up and we
13:40scrapped it.
13:40It also reminded me a bit too much of the fraud romances his team was carrying out.
13:44One night, he sent me a kind of gentle parting message.
13:47I'll admit, it was actually a bit touching.
13:57I wasn't getting much sleep at the time.
13:58Then the next day, he told me that this line had been copied directly from ChatGPT.
14:02Red Bull explained how the compound used that AI tool and others like DeepSeek to keep
14:05conversations flowing endlessly, to sound caring, romantic, persuasive.
14:09All of the scammers on his team were trained to use these LLMs to clean up their language,
14:13find just the right sentiment, and never run out of inviting turns of phrase.
14:17It had clearly worked on me.
14:19It's funny how easy it is to be taken in by a bit of sympathetic text,
14:22sent by a new acquaintance on the other side of the world.
14:29As time passed and the collection of materials Red Bull sent to me mounted,
14:33I was also getting the sense that the walls were closing in on him.
14:36One day, Red Bull told me, his team leader, Amani, asked him with menacing calm why he was
14:40spending so much time outside.
14:42Referring, it seemed, to the walks when Red Bull would talk to me on signal, and generating
14:45so few new clients.
14:47Maybe, Amani suggested, a beating or some electric shocks would increase his productivity.
14:51Then, Red Bull also told me new surveillance cameras had been installed, one behind his
14:55desk, one in front.
14:56I told him all of this meant he should immediately stop messaging me from the office.
15:00My editors went further.
15:02They insisted that for Red Bull's safety, I should stop working with him at all until
15:05he was free.
15:06When I broke that news to Red Bull, that our reporting process was finished, he told me, to my
15:09surprise, that he wanted to leave the compound immediately.
15:12His escape plan was to forge a document claiming that he was under police investigation in India.
15:17He hoped his bosses would let him leave temporarily to deal with the situation.
15:20I'm very worried about, like, that they're going to know that it's fake, and they're going
15:24to punish you.
15:25That's it.
15:26That's right.
15:26And I have a hope.
15:27You're so welcome.
15:28One afternoon, two weeks into my communications with Red Bull, I received one of the worst
15:37emails I've ever opened in my life.
15:40The people catch me, and now they get my phone, everything.
15:42They beat me, and now maybe they kill me.
15:45I am trapped.
15:45I have no way to get out.
15:47They have my personal phone and my ID card.
15:49If there is anything you can do, please help me.
15:52From Red Bull's messages, it seemed like his bosses hadn't detected he was talking to
15:55me, but were punishing him for trying to escape.
15:57Soon after, he messaged again.
15:59His captors had locked him in a room, he wrote, and demanded 20,000 UN, about $2,800 for his
16:04release.
16:05I felt sick.
16:06Journalistic ethics forbid paying sources, plus paying a ransom would reward these human
16:10traffickers, and yet this was a man begging for his life.
16:13At the same time, a dark thought had crept into my mind that I almost didn't want to
16:17acknowledge.
16:18What if Red Bull was scamming me?
16:22It was clear that he definitely was a real person inside a scam compound, but what if this
16:26had been the scam all along?
16:28Hook a journalist, make him feel responsible, then demand payment to save his life.
16:32I frantically consulted experts for advice.
16:34What we've seen happen is people are victimized and have their money stolen from them from scammers.
16:41And then the scammer flips the script and says, hey, I'm actually the victim here, just
16:46like you.
16:47I just need some money to get out.
16:49Would you pay my ransom?
16:50And you can imagine that that would be very effective on people who have already been
16:55brought in by emotional ties to this person.
17:00It's another way of scamming.
17:01My editors were firm.
17:03Wired would not pay Red Bull or his captors.
17:05They worried, as did I, that he might be deceiving me.
17:08And still, I had to operate under the assumption that Red Bull's nightmare was real.
17:13For several excruciating days, I didn't dare reach out to him.
17:17If his captors found out he was communicating with a reporter, they'd kill him.
17:20But then Red Bull messaged me on a signal to say that he'd been given his phone back
17:23so that he could find someone to pay his ransom.
17:25I risked a call.
17:27Hello, good morning.
17:29So how are things?
17:31Things are not going good because, you know, I have also fever, you know.
17:40He'd been repeatedly beaten, slapped in the face, kicked, and forced to confess to forging
17:44the police document.
17:45His bosses even mixed a mysterious powder into his water to make him compliant.
17:50It had made him unnaturally talkative and confident, but then gave him a rash on his
17:53skin.
17:54He was denied food and water for days.
17:56I also sent the message to the Indian embassy.
17:59No response.
18:00Nobody is going to help me.
18:02I don't know why.
18:02You know, when the luck is bad, nobody helps.
18:06Not long after that call, Red Bull sent me a kind of confession, written as if he thought
18:10he might die in his concrete room.
18:12I said I never scammed anyone.
18:15That was not fully true.
18:16The truth is the Chinese bosses forced me to bring two people into the scam.
18:20I did not do it by choice.
18:22I feel guilty about it every day.
18:24That is why I want to tell the whole truth now.
18:26One victim lost $504, the other about $11,000.
18:30He gave me their names.
18:31I located one and reached out, but got no response.
18:34By the compound's own rules, Red Bull should have earned a commission for those scams, but
18:38they never paid him.
18:39Later, I looked back at the picture of the office whiteboard Red Bull had shared early
18:43on.
18:43On it, I could see quite clearly the Chinese name the compound had given him, Ma Chao,
18:47next to the sum of $504.
18:50I had, until then, entirely missed this.
18:53Just days later, something else unexpected happened.
18:55Red Bull told me the compound was packing up.
18:58The office computers were boxed, the staff moved to a new building, and everyone was ordered
19:01to keep working from their dorm rooms.
19:03He had heard rumors that a police raid was imminent.
19:06During all of this, Red Bull was separated from his co-workers, forced to sleep on the
19:10floor, fed only sporadically, often only leftovers or rotten food.
19:13He lost weight, he was sick with a fever.
19:15For trying to escape, he was treated, more or less, like a dog.
19:19Unbelievably, that's when Red Bull took the biggest risk of all.
19:27Because of the move to evade a raid, security measures in the compound had been relaxed,
19:31and his co-workers had brought their work phones into the dormitory.
19:34Red Bull saw an opportunity.
19:36While one of his co-workers was sleeping, he secretly added his own phone as a linked
19:40device on the WhatsApp of the co-worker's work phone.
19:43Then, by scrolling through that WhatsApp chat and recording his own screen, Red Bull captured
19:48nearly three months of the compound's hour-by-hour internal chats.
19:52Thousands of conversations between workers and their supervisors, documenting its scams,
19:56quotas, punishments, manipulations, and daily operation at an unprecedented level of
20:01detail. Nearly 10 gigabytes of evidence.
20:04Here at Wired, we would turn those screen recordings into 4,200 pages of screenshots.
20:08I have never seen anything like the materials that you showed me.
20:12What struck you about this workplace?
20:14Well, it's a slave colony masquerading as a legitimate business.
20:19It's run as though this is a car dealership.
20:21And so it's really creepy to be reading texts that are a leader sending out suggestions and
20:29inspiration about how to hit these goals when, in fact, the goals are theft of money.
20:35People are disappearing.
20:37People are being beaten if they don't make their sales goals.
20:40Just days after he made those screen recordings, still trapped in the compound after his escape
20:43attempt. Red Bull sent me something else. Videos of dozens of men lined up outside a compound by
20:49Laotian police. The raids had begun. They turned out to be part of a trend of high-profile fake
20:54police crackdowns in the region where workers are briefly rounded up, then quickly released and
20:58sent back to work. Red Bull's bosses had been tipped off and escaped those raids, but the move had
21:02left them in cramped conditions with their work disrupted. As their operation hid from the cops,
21:07Red Bull begged the bosses to let him go. He argued that he was of no use to them. He had no money,
21:13to pay his ransom. He was dead weight, taking up space when they were already crowded into their
21:18temporary building. Shockingly, his bosses agreed. Rather than kill him, they told him he could
21:23leave. They gave him back his passport, but told him to get into a car without most of his belongings,
21:27not even his shoes. He left the Golden Triangle wearing only flip-flops. To scrounge enough money to
21:33get home, he borrowed from his brother and from a scam compound recruiter who he promised to go work
21:37for, essentially scamming a scammer. After weeks of buses, trains, and cheap flights, Red Bull made
21:43it back to India. Red Bull had rescued himself, and despite the fact that I had never paid him
21:49anything, not even his ransom when he was held captive, he continued to send me materials he'd
21:53smuggled out of the compound. Now there could finally be no doubt, Red Bull was real. A few
21:58months later, I flew to India to meet him in person.
22:02All right, here he comes. He was thinner than I expected, quiet. He had the same shy smile I
22:13remembered from our first video call. You look great. It's really good to see you. His real name,
22:18he told me, was Muhammad Muzahir. We spent a few days together, and I learned that the brave young man
22:23I'd been communicating with for months was now broke, traumatized, sleeping as little as three
22:27hours a night, haunted by the people he had left behind, and by the two victims he admitted
22:31he'd scammed under coercion. So now that we're publishing this stuff, is this a happy ending
22:38to your story? Is this, in fact, what you wanted?
22:40Actually, if I tell you the truth, this is not the happy ending of my story. This is just a journey
22:46I start because I left a lot of peoples there. A lot of my colleagues are there working under
22:51pressures. A lot of women working under the pressure of Chinese bosses, 14, 14 hours, 16 hours,
22:56sometimes without food. So honestly, I'm not happy with the ending of the story because the memory is
23:02still there. I'm still thinking about the peoples are victims of this scam.
23:06When Muzahir isn't working or applying to jobs in universities,
23:09he scrolls obsessively through reports of scam operations. The operation that trapped him,
23:14he's learned, has already relocated to Cambodia, a country that's become by some measures an even
23:18safer base for scammers to operate from. By messaging his former co-workers, Muzahir says
23:23he's determined that the compound is now based in the town of Shreitong, a growing hotspot for scam
23:27operations. One of his old bosses, too, confirmed to Muzahir in text messages that the compound is still
23:32recruiting new workers. Victims trapped in a system of modern slavery masquerading as a job.
23:38We're talking about buildings the size of hotels that are filled with human trafficked victims
23:46forced to do this work. The only winner here are the Chinese organized crime syndicates that are
23:51running the whole operation. They are the leadership. They are the ones who are building
23:57these compounds, who are bringing in the human trafficked victims, who are laundering the money
24:01out. And it's leaving population decimated on both sides. How did this whole experience change your ideas
24:08about human nature, like what you think of human beings? I have no word to express, but I just want
24:16to tell you, I see the brutal and the dark face of the humanity. Muzahir still believes that telling his story
24:23matters. He chose to risk his life and to reveal his real name and face, in part, to inspire others to
24:29come forward. When someone read about me, then a lot of red bulls stand up and speak. Many victims of these
24:36scam slave colonies never make it home. And never before has one spoken out from inside like Muzahir and
24:43survives. Even then, his whistleblowing hasn't shut down the operation that enslaved him as he intended. I can only hope
24:49that what he shared and the sprawling humanitarian crisis it reveals will help persuade the world that it's
24:54finally time to stop looking away. Read Wired's full story on Red Bull and our analysis of his leaked materials
25:01at Wired.com.
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