This is In Conversation from Apple News.

I'm Sam Sanders in for Shemita Basu.

Today, inside the dark world of foreign scam compounds.

One evening last June, journalist Andy Greenberg was on the roof of his apartment building,

playing with his kids when he got an email.

No subject line sent from the encrypted email service proton mail.

Andy was immediately intrigued by what he read.

Hello, I'm currently working inside a major crypto romance scam operation based in the Golden Triangle.

I am a computer engineer being forced to work here under a contract.

The message claimed the sender had documents and other evidence that revealed how this scam operation really worked.

And there was one more line that really caught Andy's attention. I'm still inside the compound, so I cannot risk direct exposure, but I want to help shut this down.

Andy is a senior writer at Wired, and that email was the start of a months-long reporting journey for Andy and his source.

That source went by the pseudonym Red Bull. Together,

Red Bull and Andy would uncover the hidden world of so-called pig-butchering scams,

where scammers build relationships with victims online before persuading them to invest in fake

cryptocurrency platforms. But the scammers are often victims themselves, held in compounds across Southeast Asia,

forced to carry out the fraud.

This is a story about the inner workings of a covert criminal operation.

But it's also the story of a journalist and the source, the ethics of such a relationship,

and what happens when that source tries to

escape the world in which he is trapped?

Let's just dig in. Tell us that first email you got from Red Bull. When you read that email,

...