Laundry Man: The Wild Ride of the Pig Butcher's Banker

Chameleon

Audiochuck | Campside Media

Documentary, Society & Culture, True Crime, Tv & Film

4.5 • 8.8K Ratings

🗓️ 28 May 2026

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A swashbuckling South African expat, Benjamin Mauerberger, rose up as a boiler-room stock hustler in Southeast Asia, then reappeared years later with a diplomatic passport and extraordinary wealth. When reporters start pulling at threads, they uncover an entirely new identity: this stock scammer seems to now be a key player in the industrial “pig butchering” scam economy. How does a small-time con artist end up orbiting political dynasties, buying yachts and private jets?… And what happens when the doors finally start to close? To learn more about Tom Wright and his team’s work on this story: Project Brazen reporting on Mauerberger Read the US Department of Justice’s announcement of their crackdown on the Prince Group"

Transcript

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0:00.0	Campside Media.
0:05.3	Hello?
0:06.2	What is this?
0:06.9	What do you want me to say?
0:08.6	Oh, it's just a...
0:10.3	Camelian.
0:11.2	Camelian Weekly.
0:12.8	Oh.
0:14.4	A couple of years ago, a source came to me with a tantalizing bit of information, which was
0:20.2	there was this South African
0:21.4	called Benjamin Malberger. But he was actually living in Cambodia with a diplomatic
0:26.9	Cambodian passport under the name Ben Smith, and he was buying private jets for rich and
0:32.2	powerful people around Southeast Asia. This is Tom Wright, a Hong Kong-based investigative reporter who worked for the
0:39.5	Wall Street Journal, before co-founding Project Brazen, a production company that focuses a lot of
0:44.8	its attention on the secret lives of the planet's most nefarious financial criminals.
0:50.1	And that was the first thread that we started pulling almost three years ago now that has led to one of the most extraordinary stories that I have ever reported on.
0:59.5	A flashy young Cambodian real estate developer named Yim Leek had started posting photos on his Instagram account, flaunting Louis Vuitton pajamas and $2 million Rishar Meal watches.
1:11.5	Some of them posted from a $30 million Gulfstream jet.
1:15.2	A jet, this source told Wright, that had been purchased for him by this mysterious South
1:20.4	African guy, Benjamin Mowerberger.
1:23.5	And Benjamin Mowberger has a history.
1:25.7	He's a boiler room operator going back 30 years.
	...

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