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: “[email protected].” 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.I had no idea, still, if this purported source was real. But I wrote back anyway, asking them to switch over from email to the encrypted messaging app Signal and turn on disappearing messages to better cover their tracks.The source wrote back immediately and told me to expect to hear from them in two hours.That night, after my kids were asleep, the Signal messages began to light up my phone. First, the source sent carefully prepared documents: a flowchart and then a written guide that described the scam processes of the compound in northern Laos. (I’d come to learn that the Golden Triangle—once the American nickname for a vast hotbed of opium and heroin production—now mainly refers to a city-size Laotian “special economic zone” bordering Myanmar and Thailand and largely controlled by Chinese business interests.) The two write-ups described every step in the compound’s work: creating fake Facebook and Instagram profiles; using hired models and AI deepfake tools to complete the illusion of a real romantic prospect; tricking victims into “investing” in fake trading platforms they recommended. It even detailed the small gong that would be struck in the office when someone pulled off a successful scam.I had barely had time to skim these detailed descriptions—this was not how I’d planned to spend a Saturday evening with my wife—when my phone rang, just after midnight.I picked up the Signal call. A polite Indian-accented voice said, “Hello.”“What do I call you?” I asked.“You can call me any name, brother, no matter,” the voice said with a shy laugh.I insisted that I’d need a name for him, even if he just wanted to make one up on the spot.“You can call me Red Bull,” he said. Months later, he would tell me that he’d been looking at an empty can of the energy drink as we spoke.Red Bull explained that he’d tried reaching out to US and Indian law enforcement agencies and Interpol, as well as the tip lines for a few news outlets, but no one had responded other than me. He asked me to tell him more about myself—and then cut me off as soon as I’d said two sentences about my work covering crypto crime.“So you are the person I share everything with,” he said hurriedly. “And you will help me to expose this, right?”Thrown off, I told him he’d have to first tell me who he was.For the next few minutes, Red Bull warily answered my questions. He didn’t tell me his real name but said he was from India—that most of the compound’s forced laborers were from India, Pakistan, or Ethiopia.He was in his early twenties and had a diploma in computer engineering, he said. Like most of his coworkers, Red Bull had been tricked by a fake job offer—in his case, to work as an IT manager for an office in Laos. Then his passport had been taken from him by his Chinese bosses. He was forced to sleep in a dormitory room with five other men and work 15 hours at a time on a nocturnal schedule designed to sync with the daytime of the Indian Americans they targeted for scamming. (That system—matching scammers with victims of their own ethnicity to build rapport and avoid language issues—is common, I’d later learn.)Red Bull’s situation was not precisely the brutal modern slavery I had read about elsewhere. It was more like a grotesque parody of a corporate sales floor. In theory, the staffers were incentivized with commissions designed to create the illusion that they could get rich from hard work. In reality, they were kept in perpetual debt and servitude. Red Bull told me he was paid a base salary of 3,500 Chinese yuan a month, close to $500, but the money was almost entirely taken from him by daily fines for various infractions, most often not meeting his quota of initial conversations with victims. The result was that he had virtually no income and subsisted off the food in the cafeteria, mostly rice and vegetables that he said tasted of strange chemicals.He was bound into this system by a one-year contract, and believed when that time was over—in about six more months—he’d be allowed to leave. So far, he told me, he hadn’t successfully scammed anyone, only skated by with the minimum number of plausible attempts. That meant he was still essentially captive unless he escaped, served out his time, or paid off his contract with thousands of dollars he didn’t have.A city-sized “special economic zone” just inside Laos, the Golden Triangle is controlled largely by Chinese business interests—often illegal ones. This map shows the office and dormitory where Red Bull was kept.