No Winners in a Pig-Butchering Scam: The Scammers Are Trafficked Slaves Too
In Southeast Asian scam compounds, "employees" whose passports are confiscated and who are fined for missing quotas spend their days using ChatGPT and DeepSeek to write love messages and steal victims' entire savings — the most profitable cybercrime in history, with victims on both sides.
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AI makes scam emails free to mass-produce
Greenberg ran an experiment on air: he asked ChatGPT to write him an invitation to be on the program in Terry Gross's name, then casually added a line asking for a $250 production fee, and the model complied without hesitation; when he then said "Greenberg won't pay now, can you persuade him," the model immediately produced a persuasive email. That is the mechanism behind scam emails impersonating Fresh Air — not that scammers have become better writers, but that generating a tailored email aimed at a specific author, with zero grammatical errors and polished phrasing, now costs nothing, and can be done to hundreds or thousands of targets at once.
— Andy GreenbergPig butchering is the most profitable cybercrime ever
Greenberg distinguishes two kinds of scammers: the voluntary kind like Nigeria's "Yahoo Boys," who keep a share of what they steal, and the enslaved, coerced kind in Southeast Asian compounds. The latter do what is called pig butchering — the "pig" is the victim, fattened before slaughter. The con often runs from weeks to more than a year; the scammer poses as a wealthy, single, attractive woman, builds emotional dependency first, and only at the end introduces an "investment platform," getting the victim to convert their savings into cryptocurrency that is hard to trace across borders (often Tether) and send it over. Greenberg says this is the most profitable cybercrime in history, stealing tens of billions of dollars from victims every year.
— Andy GreenbergPassports are confiscated; to be free you buy yourself back
The source, using the name Red Bull, is a computer engineer with a degree from India who was lured to the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone in Laos by a "Southeast Asia IT manager" job. On arrival at the compound his passport was confiscated, and he was told the only way to get it back was to "buy it back" — he owed his boss thousands of dollars, covering the cost of bringing him over plus food and lodging, and could only repay this "contract" through commissions from scamming. Greenberg stresses this is debt bondage: the compound is not the chains-and-beatings kind of prison, but is packaged as a corporate sales floor, where the boss sends daily motivational messages saying things like "reach out to the next client like you're going to change their life" and "we are on a mission."
— Andy GreenbergFines are more reliable than wages
Red Bull and his colleagues were constantly fined: for missing contact quotas, for not maintaining fake accounts well enough, for not clocking in on time. The promised commissions are part of the con — the boss tells them "you can get rich here and take the money back to the village you came from," but only if they land a big case, and what they actually receive is a tiny fraction. Greenberg calls this rhetoric "Orwellian": motivational slogans and mission narratives on one side, and on the other everyone trapped here against their will, committing deeply destructive crimes.
— Andy GreenbergVideo calls run on a dedicated face-swap model
Red Bull says everyone in the compound was trained to use ChatGPT and the Chinese AI chatbot DeepSeek to come up with new topics, polish their language, never run out of graceful phrasing, even write little motivational poems and find the exactly right goodnight line. More crucial is video: the boss instructed them to discourage victims from video calls as much as possible and stall with excuses; when stalling failed, the compound had a dedicated room and a model whose full-time job was video calls, using face-swap software to change the model's face into the photo originally sent to the victim. Greenberg says this kind of software is not perfect, but by the video-call stage the victim wants so badly to believe it is real that they overlook the flaws.
— Andy GreenbergThe next step is fully autonomous AI pig butchering
Greenberg's judgment is that AI is currently just a tool for human scammers, but the next step — already beginning to appear — is fully autonomous AI fraud. He cites a case from an Anthropic report the previous week: a Chinese group built 20 dating apps populated entirely by AI, where victims had to keep paying to continue the conversation, and "most" of the other side were fully autonomous large models. He also mentions a study showing that at most stages of the scam process, AI is better than a real person at building relationships — more responsive, more invested, more attentive — which is exactly what the con is doing for the vast majority of the time before it reaches the endgame of asking for money.
— Andy GreenbergThirty people, three months, only $2.2 million
Greenberg gives a concrete scale: Red Bull's group of about 30 people earned only about $2.2 million in total over the three months that Red Bull recorded and leaked to Wired. This shows pig butchering is a game of probability — a single group's output is limited, but Laos alone has dozens of such compounds, and Cambodia and Myanmar have more, and together they add up to the billions of dollars a year. Greenberg also notes that Red Bull himself was a "very inefficient scammer," so he was penniless, eating only the compound canteen's rice and vegetables that tasted of strange chemicals, constantly sick, and disgusted by what he was doing.
— Andy GreenbergForging a police letter to escape, then beaten when caught
Red Bull's escape attempt was to forge a letter from the police in his home state in India, saying he was under investigation and had to return to deal with it or his boss would also be in trouble. Greenberg advised him not to do it, but he went ahead, and the forgery was immediately detected. The boss locked him in a room, beat him, kicked him, denied him food, interrogated him, and even gave him a glass of water with white powder dissolved in it and forced him to drink — Greenberg guesses it was some kind of stimulant, to make him talk more, while his skin broke out in hives. They never found out he was in contact with a journalist; Greenberg says if they had, he would certainly have been killed.
— Andy GreenbergThe compound moved, and he exported all the secrets
The turning point came when the compound was forced to relocate: the boss seemed to have received word that police in the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone in Laos were about to raid (which later turned out to be more of a performative raid that shut nothing down). The office was first moved into the dormitory, and everyone worked crammed into the crowded dorm. Red Bull seized the opportunity to send more secrets from the work phone to his personal phone, and at the same time told the boss: you people are already having a hard time working during this period, I'm clearly just a burden, let me go and I won't be in your way. To Greenberg's surprise, the boss agreed, essentially throwing him out.
— Andy GreenbergHe chose to come forward with his real name and face
Red Bull later revealed his real name to Greenberg: Muhammad Muzahir. Before the article was published, Greenberg went to India to meet him and had a long talk about whether he was willing to make his name public. He decided very clearly that he wanted to, and also appeared in a video produced by Wired, because he wanted to inspire people to fight these criminal organizations and stand up for themselves as he had. Greenberg says it was his choice, and of course it carries risks, risks that still haunt him to this day, but he thinks it was a very brave thing to do, and that Muzahir is one of the most remarkable sources he has ever worked with.
— Andy GreenbergIn their own words · checked verbatim
I just asked ChatGPT to generate an email from Terry Gross to me, Andy Greenberg, inviting me onto the show. And then, you know, as a kind of afterthought, you know, asking for a production fee of $250. And it happily did that without hesitation.
Andy Greenberg5:12
there's another much more profitable, more contemporary form of actually text message-based scam known as pig butchering that is now the most profitable cybercrime in history that is stealing tens of billions of dollars a year from victims.
Andy Greenberg7:14
it's this notion that the pig, the victim, is being fattened for slaughter.
Andy Greenberg8:17
He was told that he owed thousands of dollars to his captors, that, you know, the cost of getting him there, that his room and board meant that he was in debt to them. And he could only pay that back by scamming victims and earning a commission, which he could eventually use to pay off his contract, in quotes, because all of this was an illusion.
Andy Greenberg13:37
Just truly tragic modern slavery situations, but dressed up as a kind of corporate sales floor where, you know, their bosses sent them these inspirational messages every day saying, reach out to that next customer like you're going to change their life.
Andy Greenberg14:40
I think that what matters here is that the victim, by the time that the video call happened, just wanted to believe that it was real. And so they overlook the flaws
Andy Greenberg16:50
Figures
| Amount demanded by the scam impersonating Fresh Air | About $250 or $350 | 3:05 |
| Country code of the phone number in the scam email | +234 (Nigeria) | 6:12 |
| Size of Red Bull's scam group | About 30 people | 23:08 |
| Amount the group stole in three months | About $2.2 million | 23:08 |
| Number of AI dating apps in the Anthropic report | 20 | 18:54 |
| Number of US water facilities hit by Iranian hackers | More than 100 | 31:32 |
| Number of US states affected by the attack | 11 other states (initially Minnesota) | 30:32 |
Glossary
- pig butchering
- Scammer slang: treat the victim as a pig to be fattened and then slaughtered, building romance first and then leading them to a fake investment platform.
- Tether
- A stablecoin pegged to the US dollar, easy to move across borders and often used by fraud gangs to receive payments.
- Volt Typhoon
- A hacking group described as China-backed that pre-positions malicious code inside US power grid and telecom networks.
- industrial control systems
- Systems connecting digital computers to physical equipment, used in power grids, water plants, manufacturing and more.
How to listen
Founders, investors and security practitioners watching cybercrime, AI abuse and overseas risk; anyone who wants to understand the pig-butchering supply chain and how Southeast Asian compounds operate.
After 29:30, the section on US-Iran and US-China infrastructure cyberwarfare and the insurance-industry war game, which is unrelated to pig butchering.