Inside the 'modern slavery' where cyber scammers are victims themselves

Terry Gross (0:00)

This is Fresh Air, I'm Terry Gross. Have you ever been targeted by a cyber scam? Maybe through an email or text message that sounds convincing and tries to get you to send money or your bank information. There are so many cyber scams out there now. As you'll hear, our show has been fraudulently represented in one of those. AI is making these scams easier to pull off, making fraudulent schemes even more lucrative. The romance scam is the most lucrative. That's when someone reaches out to you via text or online, who you've never been in person, and eventually you fall in love. The object of that affection professes to love you and eventually lures you into what they say is a great investment opportunity. You send the money and then more money.

Soon all your money is gone and you never hear from that person again. Some major crime organizations behind scams like this are based in Laos and Cambodia.

My guest Andy Greenberg wrote about one such organization for Wired Magazine where he's a senior writer.

That story involves human trafficking. Greenberg was contacted by a young computer engineer using the pseudonym Red Bull, who was tricked into moving from India to Laos with the promise of a good IT job. When he got to the compound where his job was supposed to be, his passport was confiscated. He was turned into an indentured servant and forced to engage victims in cyber-romance scams. Living conditions were awful, so was the work. Red Bull managed to leak over three months of internal videos from inside the crime operation, including WhatsApp group chats, revealing details of how this operation actually functioned. This investigation will be included in Greenberg's forthcoming book, The Grayscale, True Stories of Hackers, Outlaws and Vigilantes from the Online Underground. He's also the author of books about the crime lords of cryptocurrency and about Russian hackers.

Andy Greenberg, welcome back to Fresh Air.

Andy Greenberg (2:07)

Very glad to be here. Thank you, Terry.

Terry Gross (2:09)

So I want to start with a scam that has fraudulently used Fresh Air, and you've been targeted by a similar scam. We've heard from authors who have gotten invitations, allegedly from our show, in my name, in our co-host Tonya's name, or someone else on the show, one of our producers, saying, we love your work and that therefore, the writer is invited to be a guest on Fresh Air.

The reason why the authors contacted us is that something seems suspicious about the email.

In fact, if the writer contacted the person who sent the email, they would be told, you have to pay, it's typically about $250 or $350, in order to defray the costs of the interview and help support the show. So they're trying to get money from authors. So this is horrible because some people actually pay and are defrauded of money. Other people are just let down because they think they're going to be on a national show and they're not. And also it sullies our name. We would never dream of asking a guest to pay to be on our show. Other NPR shows, other podcasts have been also fraudulently represented in this scam. And tell what your similar scam is.

Andy Greenberg (3:38)

Yes, I've gotten these emails. I'm an author. So I've gotten emails from fake agents, from fake publishers. Just yesterday, I got an email from someone describing themselves as an editor at Penguin Random House, praising my last book and wanting to work with me on another project.

I don't think that this scammer realized that my last book was published with Penguin Random House. So it was kind of a giveaway, but it was very flattering. And I'm sure if I pursued that conversation, it would have led eventually to them demanding a payment before we could go any further, just as the scammers impersonating Fresh Air are asking for these fake, so-called production fees. And yes, this is incredibly common to the degree that I think like most authors I know have faced something like it.

Terry Gross (4:24)

So I know you haven't written about this, you haven't done an investigation into it. Are there any insights that you have into how this works or who's behind it?

Andy Greenberg (4:35)

Well, first, I think to talk about why this is happening, it just seems very clear, just almost intuitively, that this is because of AI, because of large language models, AI chatbots. Just as a kind of experiment, a very basic experiment, I just asked ChatGPT to generate an email from Terry Gross to me, Andy Greenberg, inviting me onto the show, and then as an afterthought, asking for a production fee of $250, and it happily did that without hesitation. As a follow-up, I said, Greenberg is now resisting paying, can you persuade him? And it happily created a follow-up email arguing that I needed to pay. And this is just so easy, and it's not even the most advanced kind of scam that AI is capable of today.