Earlier this fall, Zari Podkool noticed an ad on telegram.

It was posted by someone calling himself Mr Big in a Chinese language telegram channel where people go to strike money laundering deals

Cesari is a reporter for ProPublica based in Hong Kong and lately he's been covering

cyber fraud he says Mr Bigg seemed like he needed help fast and this appeared like

and this appeared like quite a desperate plea to help ponder a large amount of money in the form of gold, precious stones, and basically just get all that stuff across the border into China because

apparently as he put it in his ad a crackdown was making it difficult for him to do that.

So this was an example of the kinds of ads you see in these forms and it was quite alarming because

we know that there's a lot of cyber fraud originating from Southeast Asia right now and there's

a lot of money laundering going on.

So this was kind of a hint at the scale of it

and the desperation of some of these groups

to try to get money laundered through the system.

The ad itself sounds like the plot of a thriller, but Cesari says the request was very real.

The idea was this. Mr. Bigg had laundered his dirty money, likely through a shady casino,

and he had physical assets that he needed smuggled back into China.

If you carry gold, jade, bricks and stones out of the country and bring them back home,

you will get 10% profit on the items.

For example, if you carry something worth 2 million back home,

you'll get 200,000.

So that's just kind of the rough example.

And then he included some geographic directions,

which made it clear that they would be talking about smuggling items from Myanmar into southern Yunnan province in China.

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