Last June, Wired reporter Andy Greenberg was sitting on the roof of his Brooklyn apartment building, watching his children goof around in a kitty pool.

There was like a rainbow after a rainstorm, and it was a beautiful day, and I probably should not have been ignoring my kids and scrolling

through my phone but it's unfortunately that's the 21st century and that's how my mind operates.

And he looked down to find a mysterious email.

I got an email with no subject line from an email address on the encrypted email service

proton mail from this person who said he was a computer engineer trapped in a crypto scam

compound in the Golden Triangle.

The Golden Triangle stretches across northern Thailand, Laos, and Myanmar.

It's notorious for compounds where hundreds of trafficked workers are forced to scam people on the other side of the world.

If you've gotten one of those,

Hi, how are you? Random texts.

It might be coming from there.

Andy wasn't sure the email he got was genuine, but he was going to find out.

He moved the conversation to signal, and the person he was texting asked to go by the code name Red Bull.

Andy found out later that was because an empty can of Red Bull was sitting on his desk.

He was determined to be like the Edward Snowden of this scam compound and leak everything

and just dig up and give me absolutely all of their internal materials.

You know, he was so kind of selfless and so driven to do this that I was like kind of taken aback

at first. And I didn't even really know what to think of, of his motives and taking this kind

of incredibly brave and dangerous step of trying to be a whistleblower inside a human trafficking

crypto scam compound.

To test that Red Bull was telling the truth,

...