You might have seen these texts before. The scam starts innocently enough. Maybe it's a "Long time no see" or "Hello" or "How are you." For investigative reporter Zeke Faux it was – "Hi David, I'm Vicky Ho. Don't you remember me?" Many people ignore them. But Zeke responded. He wanted to get scammed. This led him on a journey halfway around the world to find out who is sending him random wrong number texts and why. After you hear this story, you'll never look at these messages the same way again.To hear the full episode check out Search Engine's website. Search Engine was created by P.J. Vogt and Sruthi Pinnamaneni. This episode was produced by Garrott Graham and Noah John. It was fact-checked by Sean Merchant. Theme, original composition, and mixing by Armin Bazarian. Search Engine's executive producers are Jenna Weiss-Berman and Leah Reis-Dennis.Find more Planet Money: Facebook / Instagram / TikTok / Our weekly Newsletter.Listen free at these links: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, the NPR app or anywhere you get podcasts.Help support Planet Money and hear our bonus episodes by subscribing to Planet Money+ in Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/planetmoney.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: What are scammy text messages?
A couple years ago, my friend PJ Vote started getting these weird text messages on his phone. You know the ones. They come from some number you've never seen before, and they ask you some out-of-context question.
Around for dinner today? Are you still in Boston? If you answer and tell them it's the wrong number, they'll try to engage you in conversation. It feels like a scam, but the actual scam part never seems to materialize.
PJ is the host of one of my favorite podcasts. It's called Search Engine. Each week, they answer a different question. Some of them are big and existential. Some are tiny and hilariously specific. And with these texts, PJ got curious about what happens when you do keep these scammy-seeming conversations going. When you do start to follow the crumbs one of these texters starts leaving you.
So he called up another journalist who'd also gotten obsessed with figuring out this mystery. Like, who was on the other side of these messages? And how were they making their money?
Okay. August 2022, you get a text message from a woman named Vicky Ho. What did Vicky Ho want?
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Chapter 2: Who is Zeke Faux and what motivates him?
So Vicky said to me, Hi, David. I'm Vicky Ho. Don't you remember me? And this is kind of weird because my name is Zeke.
Zeke Fox, author of the book Number Go Up Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall. You may remember him from our episode on the explosion in new meme coins.
I wanted to get scammed. So I was like, I want to see how this scam works. So I wanted to give her what she was looking for.
Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi. These days, it can feel impossible to go more than a week or two without some bizarre text from a stranger. But what is actually happening on the other side of that text bubble? Today on the show, we're going to hand that question off to Search Engine.
Host PJ Vogt and his guest, Zeke Fox, take us down the sinister rabbit hole Zeke found when he raised his hand to get scammed.
Zeke is an unusual person. He writes for Bloomberg Businessweek, but instead of doing what I would think he's supposed to do there, which is write about how a successful company has an IPO or something, Zeke is the guy at the fancy business publication who is only really happy when he's investigating scams.
And this particular text message he'd gotten from one Vicky Ho, he wanted to play along and experience the scam because he'd heard that these wrong number texts might be somehow connected to a cryptocurrency that he's obsessed with, a cryptocurrency called Tether.
There's this one...
leaked text message from a russian money launderer who got arrested by the fbi so he's texting a customer and he's being like you should use tether it's convenient it's quick and i'm like okay this is how the criminals are talking about tether yes but i don't know any russian money launderers but i hear that among the criminals who use tether are these pig butchering scammers and
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Chapter 3: What is a pig butchering scam?
Chapter 4: How does Zeke engage with the scammer?
And so eventually she starts telling me about something she calls short-term node trading. Okay.
Short-term node trading.
Yeah. She's sending me these price charts. And she's basically saying that she can predict fluctuations in the price of Bitcoin. And she starts in between the Golf and Ferraris. She'll be like, I see an opportunity in the Bitcoin market.
And is short-term, I'm not a financial journalist, is short-term node trading a thing in some other context? Or is it just a bunch of words that sound mathy and sciencey?
No, yeah, it's total nonsense. But it sounds kind of equally plausible as like all the other random jargon in the crypto world. Like EVM arbitrage. That's a real thing.
That's a real thing.
Short-term node trading. That's a big thing.
But they're close.
Yeah. And one morning, I get yet another text that says, Love, did you sleep well last night? And I'm like, I've got to get Vicky to scan me. What am I going to do? And so I'm like, Vicky... needs to know that I have money and that I have financial goals. She needs to know that, like, I'm ready to spend. So I sent her a picture of a goal-wing Tesla that I want.
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Chapter 5: What happens when Zeke tries to invest?
They always hit you with some fees.
And in order to buy Tether the way that Vicky suggested, I have to pay $105.86 for 93 Tethers. So I'm paying $12 in fees. Yes. I don't know why. Vicky says it doesn't matter. We're going to make so much money on the nodes.
You're going to be buying a Tesla. Okay, so just to recap, because I fear this may be getting a little bit confusing, Vicky told Zeke to spend 100 real dollars on $100 worth of the cryptocurrency Tether. And then she told him to transfer that crypto into a wallet, a crypto bank account on the internet. Vicky was saying to Zeke that this wallet belonged to a crypto trading app called ZBXS.
More likely, the money was just going directly to the entity behind Vicky Ho. Zeke, meanwhile, was dutifully following all of these instructions so that he could learn as much about the entity as possible.
I tell her I'm nervous, and she said it's okay. I was nervous when I first traded, too. You have to relax. It's not too complicated. Then she says, get ready. We have to be ready by 4.30. You have to make sure you have 500 tethers in ZBXS by then. And at this point, I might have been busy that day. Also, like my budget for losing money to Vicky Ho was more like $100.
I didn't really want to lose this 500. So I was sort of hesitating. And she starts calling me, asking me to send the 500 tethers.
Okay, Jake, what are you doing? I see you got my message. Why you not reply to me back? Why you don't pick up my phone? I'm waiting for your reply me, okay?
I don't know why I did sort of stick to the truth in my communications with her, a lot of them. So I said I had to take my daughter to the doctor. She said, well, the child's body is important.
Child's body is important.
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Chapter 6: How does Zeke uncover the truth behind the scam?
After the break, Zeke and PJ start digging into how much trouble Vicky might actually be in and discover a whole web of human trafficking and scam compounds on the other end of the text bubble. More from the Search Engine podcast when we come back. So for Zeke, what started out as a fun side reporting project of getting scammed starts to feel a little icky.
Like, what if pretending he's going to hand over all this money and then not doing it ends up getting the person on the other end of the text bubble in big trouble? So he goes searching for someone who knows what might be happening over there, and he finds this group of volunteers who call themselves the Global Anti-Scam Organization.
He ends up talking to a guy known as Ice Toad, and he handed off Ice Toad's contact information to search engine host PJ Vogt.
I actually talked to Ice Toad. He told me that, like many people who end up in this world, he arrived because he got scammed himself. The trick he fell for, it used to be called a romance scam. At some point, those romance scams evolved into what we now know to be pig butchering scams.
otherwise known as Xiaoshan Pen in Chinese.
Ice Toad finds the Global Anti-Scam Organization, which was started by a woman from Singapore who had also been scammed. But while the organization began in an effort to protect people being scammed, its members had started to learn about the scammers themselves.
Because we realized that these scammers were actually, in a lot of instances, they weren't choosing to scam other people. They had been human trafficked into a place where and then basically locked in a compound and forced to scam people.
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Chapter 7: What are the consequences of these scams?
How did you begin to understand that?
We got a few of them to admit the fact that they couldn't escape. And they would tell you what was actually going on in hopes that you would ring up law enforcement or whoever and get them freed.
When Zeke finally found Ice Toad, what he'd originally wanted was just help from a crypto tracing expert who might be able to follow the $100 he'd sent Vicky Ho further and more forensically than he could on his own.
Ice Toad is explaining to me how he can trace the crypto wallets. And he's like, I've personally seen hundreds of millions of dollars of Tether move because of these scams. Oh, wow. And I'm kind of thinking there might be some way to locate Vicky. Maybe not Vicky herself, but Ice Toad is like, you know who you should really talk to is this Vietnamese hacker. Yeah.
The Vietnamese hacker helped Zeke crack into the fake crypto trading app that Vicky Ho had given him, although whoever was behind the app quickly shut down the whole operation when they realized that an intrusion was happening. But from that hacker, and from other people Zeke spoke to, he was able to get a sense of what a day in the life was like for someone in one of these scam compounds.
What I've learned is that there's like a hierarchy within the compound. And the lowest level workers who've been trafficked, they got 10 phones, each has like a different fake identity, and they're trolling the world, sending spam messages, sending messages on LinkedIn, on Instagram, on Tinder, whatever. And they've got like some sort of quota for how many calls they need to initiate.
Yeah.
Once you've got somebody hooked, that person gets passed off to like a manager. Ah.
So... Almost like the moment you write back, you get pushed up to someone who is more of like the closer.
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