The next morning in Bangkok, he called the agent, an East African man who summarily told him to take a 12-hour bus ride to Chiang Mai, and then a taxi to the border with Laos. When Red Bull arrived there, he was to take a selfie showing that he was outside the immigration office, and text it to the agent. A few minutes after Red Bull did as instructed, an immigration official came outside, flashed the selfie he’d evidently received from the agent, and demanded 500 Thai baht—about $15. Red Bull paid, the official stamped his passport, and he was sent down to a boat waiting on the Mekong River below. The ferry crossed the river just south of the point where the three borders of Thailand, Laos, and Myanmar meet in a single nexus: the Golden Triangle.
After the boat had crossed into Laos, a young Chinese man waiting on the opposite river bank showed Red Bull the same selfie. He took Red Bull’s passport without explanation and gave it to immigration officials along with some Chinese currency. It came back with a visa.
The Chinese man pocketed the passport and told Red Bull to wait for the East African agent. Then he left, taking Red Bull’s passport with him.
An hour later, the agent arrived and drove him in a white van to a hotel in northern Laos, where he would spend the night. Lying in the bed of that bare hotel room, he remained entirely focused on the anxiety and excitement of his first real job interview, scheduled for the next day. He still suspected nothing.
The next morning, he was brought to an office, a gray tower of concrete surrounded by other drab buildings amid the lush green mountains of northern Laos. Red Bull sat nervously at a desk as a Chinese man and a translator administered a typing test and an English language test, both of which he breezed through. They told him he’d passed, and they began asking him about his familiarity with social networks like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
Red Bull eagerly answered their questions. Finally they asked him whether he understood the job he’d be starting. “As an IT manager?” he asked. No, they said, for once speaking without euphemism: He would be a “scammer.”
As the reality of his situation finally became clear, Red Bull spiraled into panic. The Chinese boss told him he’d be starting immediately. Trying to buy time, he begged to instead return to the hotel to rest for one night before beginning work. The boss agreed.
That night in the hotel room, Red Bull frantically searched the internet for information about scam operations in the Golden Triangle. Only then did he see the dimensions of the trap that had sprung around him: Too late, he read about the thousands of Indians deceived and ensnared just as he had been, with no passport or means of escape. In the midst of this sickening epiphany, his parents video-called him to ask if he’d gotten the IT manager job. Burying his shame and regret, he said he had, smiled, and accepted their congratulations.
Over the next days, with little in the way of orientation, he was pulled into the machinery of the scamming organization he’d come to know as the Boshang compound: He was trained to create fake profiles, given scam scripts, and then set to work on a nocturnal schedule, manually spamming out hundreds of introductory messages every night to lure new victims. At the end of his shifts, he would return to the top bunk of his six-man dorm room—little bigger than the hotel room he’d occupied those first nights—with a toilet in the corner.
Yet from the very beginning, he says, he was determined to again defy his circumstances. It struck him that he knew more about computers than most of his coworkers, or even his bosses, who seemed to understand only how to use social media, AI tools, and cryptocurrency. Within days, he began daydreaming of using his technical skills to quietly gather information on the compound and, somehow, expose it.