Hey, this is Brian. We're taking a break from our roundtable this week, but we didn't want to leave you empty-handed. So we're sharing one of our favorite stories that we featured on the show, an investigation into a whistleblower trapped in a scam compound in Laos. I sat down with Wired's Andy Greenberg earlier this year to learn about it, and trust me when I tell you that the twists and turns of this story will make your head spin.

We hope you enjoy it.

I was, you know, having a normal Saturday on the roof with my kids.

They were like playing in a kiddie pool.

Last summer, my colleague Andy Greenberg was enjoying an idyllic late afternoon in New York.

There had just been like a rainstorm. There was a rainbow. It was a very beautiful evening. And I, you know, in typical terrible 21st century parenting style was ignoring my kids and

looking at my phone and scrolling through messages.

In the middle of mindlessly scrolling between apps.

I've got this email, I found this email from someone with a pseudonym who was messaging me from the

encrypted email service proton mail.

The email is from an unnamed source who claimed to be a computer engineer in Laos.

A computer engineer trapped in a compound in the region of Laos who wanted to be a source, who wanted to be a whistleblower

inside this crypto scam compound.

As a cybersecurity reporter, crypto scams are Andy's bread and butter.

That's what he's constantly tracking down, trends in hacking and cybercrime.

But crypto scam compounds are a beast of their own.

These are places where scam operations happen at an industrial scale.

And crypto scams have become the most profitable form of cybercrime in the world, pulling

in tens of billions of dollars each year.

Andy didn't know if this anonymous source was legit, but he followed up and told the source

to message him through Signal.

Later that evening, Andy received a flurry of messages.

...