Scam Inc: How a $500B Crime Industry is Impacting the World with Sue-Lin Wong
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We're all vulnerable and I hadn't thought about that previously. I thought, oh, it's only a small group of people who might fall for this. And what I've learned is actually these scammers are so sophisticated. They have so much money. Based on my reporting, this industry is maybe more lucrative than the illicit drug trade and these criminal syndicates might be making over 500 billion US dollars a year.

So that means they have access to the latest technology, whether it's voice cloning or face changing software. They can buy the latest in AI tools. And so they can stay several steps ahead of most law enforcement organizations in most places in the world and protect

reinvest in their businesses because that's how they view what they're doing. They just see this as a business line and they want to make a profit. And that's why we called the podcast Scam Inc. because I think the way to understand what we're seeing is

that this is an industry and everyone's driven by profits. And so the fact that the criminals have so much money makes it really difficult for governments or police or international organisations or banks or crypto exchanges or social media companies to tackle this huge and growing problem.

Welcome to Analyze Asia, the premier podcast dedicated to dissecting the pulse of business, technology and media in Asia. I'm Bernard Leong, and you must be frustrated by the inundation of scam emails, phone calls and messages pervading your phone every day. The problem has led to millions of dollar losses globally, and yet part of the story actually happens in Asia.

With me today, Wong Soo-Lyn, Southeast Asia correspondent from The Economist, to talk about the new podcast series Scam Inc and its implications in the region which we live in. First of all, I've completed the whole series back to back over the last weekend and a lifelong subscriber of The Economist and also a fan of your earlier series, The Prince. Soo-Lyn, welcome to the show. Well, thanks so much for having me, Bernard, and it's a delight to know you are a longtime subscriber of The Economist.

Yes. And I want to start off first to just get your origin story. How did you start your career and eventually landed to your present role with The Economist? I was born and raised in Australia. And after high school, I spent a year in China teaching English and really fell in love with the country and decided I wanted to get back there after university. So I went...

home, studied Asian Studies and Law at the Australian National University. But in my final year, applied for a bunch of jobs in Asia, including in China, and was very fortunate to get a job with Reuters on their graduate trainee program. So I spent a year training in Shanghai, and then I joined the Reuters Beijing Bureau as one of their economics correspondents and

From there, I did a whole range of jobs. I covered China-North Korea relations. I opened the Royal Asian Gen Bureau. Then I joined the Financial Times in China. And after the FT, I joined The Economist.

So from your career journey, what are the interesting lessons that you can share with my audience? Ah, life advice. Gosh. Given that you covered like with financial time, Reuters, and now with the economies, I'm sure even the experience of covering China could give you some very interesting experiences as such. I guess listen deeply, try to understand other people rather than coming with your own preconceived notions. Stay curious.

I guess I feel very unqualified to give life advice. So I'll keep it broad and vague. Cool. I just want to ask one question. It's actually regarding your earlier show, which actually that's where I got to know you. The Prince, that actually shares the chronology of President Xi Jinping, the current Chinese leader. Given the series that you've built three years ago, and how was the response to the series? And what are your reflections to the series? And any thoughts on continuing that story, given that now he has secured his third term?

Yeah, many good questions. Yeah, I was struck by how well The Prince was received. I guess when you're making a long-form podcast, you never really know whether people will listen, will people be interested. So I guess for journalists, we want people to read our articles, listen to our podcast. So it's been a very pleasant surprise that so many people seem so curious to learn more about Xi Jinping. And I still sometimes get confused

comments three years on from the making of the series. Would I make a follow-up? Well, I mean, I'm now based in Singapore and I cover Southeast Asia, so I have no plans. I think that would be a task for someone based in China who still covers China. So I'm going to get to the main subject of the day, which is also what you have been covering in the Southeast Asia, which is about Scam Inc., the podcast series.

So the first question is, what was the initial inspiration for Scam Inc.? How did the collapse of this bank in Kansas actually serve as the starting point before exploring the global issue? So I arrived in Singapore about two years ago to start my new beat covering Southeast Asia. And once I arrived, I realized scams were a huge story in Asia.

especially in Southeast Asia. And so I started covering bits and pieces of the story. And the more I covered it, the more I realized, actually, this is an enormous global issue.

but it really has its roots in Asia. And so I thought to myself, this would actually make a really, really interesting long-form narrative podcast. And then I went looking for a way into the story for an audience that perhaps isn't as familiar with the Asia angles, given the economist has subscribers all over the world and is very global. And so when I read the news that a bank had collapsed in rural Kansas, I thought, wow, there's something here about

I need to go and investigate it and figure out if it's in any way connected with what I'm seeing every day here in Southeast Asia as I go about covering my own beat, which is a world away from rural Kansas.

And then from there, you actually, the series actually covered quite a lot of ground involving fraud, human trafficking and money laundering. What are the key takeaways that you hope your listeners will remember after listening to this eight episode series? Oh, there's many things, but I guess...

What we're witnessing is the biggest shift in how transnational crime works in modern history. So gone are the days of familiar hierarchical structures where you have tattooed gangsters and powerful godfathers at the top of some kind of mafia pyramid. And in its place is a marketplace, incredibly entrepreneurial and much more of a network rather than a rigid structure. So if it's sort of like...

the gig economy of organized crime. So you might have one small group who works on just kidnapping people, another group that traffics them into scam compounds in Myanmar or the Philippines or Cambodia, and then another small group that just registers foreign SIM cards in iPhones that the scammers use, and another group that just specializes in one part of the money laundering chain.

So that, I think, is something really, really important to understand in order for us to figure out how to even begin tackling this problem. But I also think, apart from this big shift in how transnational crime works, I just hope people will remember the stories that we tell in this podcast series, because there's so many incredible characters who have

Sometimes very tragic stories, very moving stories, very inspiring stories. And I hope it's those voices that will stick with listeners. When I was listening to it, I could feel the emotional stories coming out specifically, not just from the people being scammed, but also the scammers because you profile some of them.

along the way. The first question I wanted to get the term pig butchering in this series, which I thought was very interesting because you got a Chinese podcaster to talk about it and explain the entire thing in itself. But why is this term so fitting for describing these scams and how do its origins in China inform the global phenomenon of scamming then?

It's quite a distinctive term, pig butchering. And that's because it's a direct translation from the Chinese, shuazhoupan. So I

I think what's important to understand about how the scam works is the criminals see scam victims as pigs to fatten up. And so they try to build trust and spend time talking to them before they go in for the slaughter. And that's when they try to dupe the victim out of a lot of money.

And I actually first heard about the term pig butchering in Chinese when I was covering China. One of my favorite Chinese language podcasts, Gu Xia FM or Story FM, has done a lot of reporting on pig butchering scams. And so I was very excited for Scam Inc. to be able to interview the host of that Chinese podcast.

about the origins of the term and how he's covered this huge story in China. Actually, that was one of the most memorable parts of the podcast when I was listening to it. But there were two stories that actually start from the people being scammed. So there was Shane Haynes from Kansas, and then there's a lady by the name of Karina who actually tells...

a pretty sad story who lost $152k to a crypto scam. Why are these individuals so susceptible to these scams? Is it because of the COVID era where people became lonely, they live by themselves? Or maybe there are some specific manipulation techniques that the scammers use to actually employ to exploit them in their vulnerable states? That's exactly right.

The scammers use incredibly sophisticated and predatory psychological manipulation to prey on all of our vulnerabilities.

And so they will find what our frailties are and really go after them, whether it's greed or fear or loneliness or grief or even boredom or just exhaustion. You know, at the end of the day, sometimes I'm scrolling through my phone and I'm sent a link and I don't think that much about it. But if that's malware, that can completely ruin my life if I click on it.

So the scammers are very good at identifying our human vulnerabilities and then they have all kinds of tactics.

to, to catch us unaware. So for example, especially in love scams, they might start by love bombing and really paying you a lot of attention. And then once they've built trust with you, they might use a sense of urgency. Like you've got to put your money in right now, or a sense of fear. Like if you don't do this, you're going to regret it. Or they might gaslight and they'll try all kinds of different things to, to get you to do what they want. So I

One of the parts of this story I became really obsessed with as I was reporting out scamming was the psychology behind scamming and why do we fall for scams? And I myself went on my own journey. I started out this project thinking, oh, I wouldn't fall for a scam. Like, I wouldn't be so stupid to do that. And after working on this for several months, I've completely changed my mind. And I actually believe any of us could fall for a scam depending on what

where we're at mentally and emotionally, and how well the scammers know how to press our buttons. So I feel like I've come away with a lot more humility than I started with. I follow this particular conference called DEF CON, which is the world's largest cybersecurity conference. And one of the competitions was actually social engineering. There was actually a story that I listened to how the social engineering was able, within four minutes, could get so much information off people

from someone on the other end, even though it was totally, you know, just sitting right there and just talking through and asking qualifying questions on that. The whole aspects of how emotionally manipulate people is something that people don't think about on that. From the scammers and then we go into the interconnected nature of scamming. One issue is about the crime, right? Some of one of the things I probably also

hear from the podcast was about China started to have their crime lots actually moving their gangs down to Southeast Asia even to the other parts of the world. What kind of insights can you share about the evolving landscape of cyber crime and what is it doing to say global economies and societies? This is one of the most under-covered parts

I mean, even myself living in Southeast Asia, I'm pretty worried about my kids. Some just got human trafficking on there. When you told the story of the lady from Philippines, the Nigerian person on the show, how they got tricked into being supposed to go to Thailand and ended up in Myanmar.

Yeah, so just like pig butchering is a term that comes from China, actually the origins of this whole industry can be traced to China. So for many years, Chinese criminals were mostly scamming mainland Chinese in China.

And that was partially because of the rise of online payments, like WeChat and Alipay. That all took off earlier in China than it did in the rest of the world, where bank transfers were more common. But when Xi Jinping came to power, he decided to do a sweeping anti-corruption campaign. And

One of the places affected was Macau, which is the sort of gambling hub for Asia and in fact the world. And a lot of the criminals who were operating there were pushed out into Southeast Asia. So they first went to the Philippines, but then they went to places like Myanmar, Cambodia, Thailand as well. And that's really the origins of the globalisation

global online scam industry because these Chinese origin criminals realized that actually committing online fraud was a very lucrative business line. And so they transitioned from just doing, you know, drugs, prostitution, online gambling into online fraud. Even in Southeast Asia initially, these syndicates were mostly targeting mainland Chinese victims. But once COVID hit, uh,

And it became harder for the criminals to recruit low-level scammers from China because so many borders were locked down. They started diversifying and realizing, actually, we don't have to just target mainland Chinese people. We can target

people all over the world. And that's when they really started kidnapping English speakers from all kinds of countries. So in our podcast, we feature stories from people from the Philippines, Uganda, South Africa, South Asia. And now it's become a really big global problem when once it was just mostly China's problem. Yeah, and the whole part of it, and one of the interesting things

Part of the series was actually to look at it from the other perspective, the person scamming the person. I'm talking about Rita, that person from Philippines where she provided insider perspective on the operations within the scam compounds in Myanmar. What are the kind of takeaways from her experiences regarding the structural motivations and even ethical dilemmas by individuals who worked

in these compounds. I know some of them escaped and they managed to tell their story in a podcast. And I'm pretty sure that there are a very sizable chunk of people who are still working in those compounds on there. With my heart to their families also trying to find, locate their loved ones wherever they're being abducted to.

Yeah, it's a very, very tragic story. So the United Nations estimated in 2023 that there were around just under a quarter of a million people in Myanmar and Cambodia alone who had been trafficked and forced to scam victims all over the world. And that has been a problem that has remained where you have hundreds of thousands of people who are somehow tricked into

into getting taking a job that they think might be in customer service or online marketing in Bangkok for example and they given a plane ticket they fly to Bangkok and at the airport they're picked up ostensibly to be taken to their hotel in Thailand where they'll live as they sort of find their feet and start their new customer service job but in reality they're trafficked

across the border into Myanmar, for example. And so this is a really, really big problem. But actually, the vast majority of people scamming in scam compounds are actually there voluntarily. And so this is another important aspect of this story. Whether it's because of

war or poverty or a lack of opportunities, there are a lot of people who just are looking for a relatively well-paid, stable job. And if you look at most of Southeast Asia, excluding Singapore, the average salary is a couple of hundred US dollars a month.

So there is a huge appetite from really smart, often university graduates who might speak multiple languages for employment. And so this is a big problem for law enforcement because what do we do if...

We have so many people who are incentivized to just try and find any kind of job to make a living and feed their families. So I think the human trafficking aspect of this story is huge and very tragic. And then there's this other aspect of the story where you have people voluntarily going into these scam compounds. It's also very, very challenging. And even for some of those who returned, they decided if they want to go back there and do the same job again, whatever.

I mean, they were mentioned during the podcast. I find it really sad. So what is the one thing you learned from making the podcast or scamming that very few people understand about the world of online scams and its broader implications? I think we're all vulnerable. And I hadn't thought about that previously. I thought, oh, it's only a small group of people who might fall for this. And what I've learned is actually...

These scammers are so sophisticated. They have so much money. Based on my reporting, this industry is maybe more lucrative than the illicit drug trade. And these criminal syndicates might be making over 500 billion US dollars a year. So that means they have access to the latest technology, whether it's, you know,

voice cloning or face-changing software. They can buy the latest in AI tools. And so they can stay several steps ahead of most law enforcement organizations in most places in the world and reinvest in their businesses because that's how they view what they're doing. They just see this as a business line and they want to make a profit. And that's why we called the podcast Scam Inc. because I think the way to understand what we're seeing is

that this is an industry and everyone's driven by profits. And so the fact that the criminals have so much money makes it really difficult for, whether it's governments or police or international organisations or...

or banks or crypto exchanges or social media companies to tackle this huge and growing problem. That's also one of the angles I thought that makes this story really interesting because when you mention it as an enterprise, there's a lot of economics driving a lot of incentives and behavior on there. So one question, one story that really came up was the story of Alice Guo, a mayor in

the Philippines that raises questions about state capture by criminal enterprises. What does her case reviews about, say, the intersection of politics, corruptions, and even the scam industry in Southeast Asia? Maybe you can talk a little bit about her story and why is it becoming so difficult to even deal with this issue socially? So as I was starting this project and sort of spending some time in Kansas, in America, I saw this story break in the Philippines.

about this small-town mayor who was being accused of being a Chinese spy. That's right. And somehow this was all connected to scam compounds. And I thought, what is going on there? And so I went to the Philippines and I visited this small town of Bamban, actually when she had already disappeared. And that turned into an episode of our podcast, Scam Inc. That's right. So basically what happened was there was this woman

woman who said she was Filipino and spoke very fluent Tagalog, who ran for mayor of this small town. But it came to light that actually she was there as an enabler for scam criminals and

And this town of Bamban is, it's really small. It's very run down. Most buildings are just one story, but there are, there is this enormous, what looks like a tech park that really belongs in downtown Singapore or downtown New York, a

36 high-rise buildings right next to the mayor's office in this very, very run-down little town. And that turned out to be a massive scam compound that was being run by criminals of Chinese origin. And Alice Guo, this mayor, was the one whose name appeared on utilities bills. And she was actually, it turned out that she was actually this

She was a Chinese national who had moved to the Philippines, gotten a Filipino passport and figured out how to navigate the political system of the Philippines and worked with these criminals to get them all set up so that they could run these scam compounds targeting people all over the world. It was just an incredibly extraordinary story that the whole of the Philippines was obsessed with last year. People were watching...

you know, really long Senate hearings when usually the average Filipino is not that interested in what's happening in the Philippine Senate. And the story became...

sort of more and more shocking as developments broke. So, you know, it came to light that Alice Guo was actually Guo Huaping, a Chinese national. And then while I was making the podcast, Al Jazeera put out a documentary saying she was a Chinese spy. And so then I sort of went down that rabbit hole and tried to figure out what to make of those allegations. Sort of

My conclusions, well, you should listen to the podcast. Yeah, I think they have to listen to the podcast and know what exactly happened. But I think it's worthwhile talking about that story, yeah. If I could just say, I don't think the Philippines is an exception, sadly. These criminal syndicates have figured out how to infiltrate the highest levels of business and governments across Southeast Asia. And so the Philippines is more of a case study than an exception. And the other really shocking thing is even though Philippines

This industry started in China, moved to Southeast Asia. It's now going global. So scam compounds have been discovered in places all over the world from Peru to Georgia to Ghana. One was even discovered last year in the Isle of Man, which is between England and Ireland. Eastern Europe as well.

Yes, Eastern Europe. So this problem is not going away. Since we are based in Singapore, so it really hits home when there is the famous money laundering case that actually highlights the illicit funds from scams being legitimized and spent. I think to be fair, the Singapore government did work with the Interpol to capture the perpetrators who were involved in the money laundering. And also in your podcast, you highlighted that they are probably the ones who's been trying to teach every citizen how to insulate themselves against the scams as such.

What are the common methods now for these scamming to sort of launder the money that they scammed? And how does it illustrate like how the vulnerability of the global financial networks?

So once I started digging into the bank collapse in rural Kansas, where the CEO fell victim to a pig butchering scam and stole $47 million from his own bank. That's right. And he thought he was making money on crypto, but in fact had sent the money off to these scammers. I became really obsessed with the question, where did that $47 million go? And where are the hundreds of billions of dollars from scam proceeds going? Like, where do they end up?

And so part of my series traces the money that was lost in the bank collapse, as well as trying to figure out more broadly where are all the scam proceeds going. And the Singapore money laundering case, which is the biggest money laundering case ever to break in Singapore and one of the biggest in the world, offers a really interesting case study in how the criminals operate. So once the scam money is stolen...

Often the criminal syndicates will sort of try to disperse the money in lots of different crypto wallets and move it very quickly so it's difficult for law enforcement to trace. And they might launder it in all kinds of different ways through different laundering services in the

industry of scamming. So earlier on, I was telling you about how there might be, you know, one small group of scam Inc that's just focused on money laundering. So the criminals will use these services to launder their money through, you know, multiple different crypto wallets

They might try and, you know, mix it with legitimate money. There's all kinds of different ways this money is laundered. And then the criminals try to reintegrate this dirty money into the global economy. And so in the case of Singapore, they were using money mules who are often Singaporean teenagers who are asked, you know, by a friend of a friend to open a bank account and

in their own name, but then register a different phone number to the bank account. And so you and I live in Singapore, everywhere we go, there's ads telling us not to become a money mule. And that's actually connected to Scam Inc and the Singapore money laundering case and money laundering more generally, because these low level money mules are one way the criminals try to move their dirty money into the legitimate economy by transferring it into these bank accounts.

that are in the names of these Singaporean teenagers. So that's one very common way. Another common way is the criminals will set up shell companies or try to set up shell companies and reintegrate the money that way. But, you know, ultimately these scam proceeds end up

wherever there's a financial center, wherever these criminals want to live, where they want to send their kids to fancy schools. And so that's often places like Singapore or Dubai or New York or London. And I do recall a story when I was the head of the Singapore Post Office Network. There was a couple of incidents where we have grandmothers that actually do remittances and

And they suddenly wanted to transfer like two, three thousand worth of dollars. I was pretty glad my service ambassador stopped them. We had to bring in the police to actually stop them from borrowing the money because they insisted that it was someone on there. And then after that, we had to actually work with the police force to how to stop these situations.

I think there is a recent law that was passed in Singapore relating that you cannot freeze the accounts, bank accounts on there. Actually, previously, it was actually, it's still their choice, right? Being a digital person on there, I often tell my counterparts in conferences where we talk about, it's very easy to take a button and just press and wire $2,000 of money. But luckily, there's a human in the loop in the process in the post office. Otherwise, a lot of grannies would just lose their money.

So these grannies were also recruited as money mules? No, they weren't. They were actually being asked to send their life savings. That was the very earliest version of this kind of scam victims has already been happening on there. And I remember seeing the part of it, I actually had to receive a reward on behalf of my service ambassadors. They should be the one receiving it. And I think they actually did the task of actually blocking the transfer. This is the one thing I find that people don't realise how vulnerable people

It is in terms of what is it frictionless way and seamless way of now moving money across on there. Coming back to this theme of laundering of scams, I actually have somebody from Chainalysis who came on my show before. I think Chainalysis plays quite a crucial role in actually tracing the flow of funds. Can you explain like the capabilities and limitations of using cryptocurrencies? And so how does it also give you some idea about the complexity of these operations? Because in what I understand as a cryptocurrency

investor myself, I do know that a lot of criminals now are very afraid of using cryptocurrencies because they get tracked easily on there.

Yeah, and I think that is a misconception that people have, myself included, because I really knew nothing about cryptocurrencies when I started this project. People sometimes believe crypto isn't traceable, but that's not true, actually. It's not true. You can trace crypto. What is different about crypto compared to fiat currencies is that it is anonymous, so you don't necessarily know who owns the crypto. And that was why the scammers really...

I encourage scam victims to send them cryptocurrencies because unlike a bank transfer where you have to register a lot of personal details, you don't necessarily need to do that when it comes to crypto transactions. But what Chainalysis, which is a firm that I interviewed for Scam Inc., does is they have people who are crypto tracers.

sort of like a private eye for cryptocurrencies. And so they were actually able to help me trace where the money from this bank in Kansas went after the CEO embezzled it. And so often you lose sight of the money eventually. You can sort of see it moving from wallet to wallet. What was really, really fascinating in the Kansas Bank case is that actually the

the funds ended up pooling with other scam money. So the scam that the bank CEO fell for was a reasonably common scam that other Americans were falling for. So a man in Minnesota lost over $9 million. That's right. A man in California lost over $2 million. But also,

all to the same scam that could be traced to a domain name called CoinRuleWeb3. And the scammers would just change the end of the domain from .net to .shop.

You know, as law enforcement tried to come after them. But the criminals are very good at sort of setting up new websites so that they can continue running their scams. But we did discover where 8 million of the stolen. Yes. Ended up. And so I encourage listeners to tune in to find out what we found.

Okay. So given that we now know all these things and pretty much more well-informed, what do you think would be the policy recommendations or even actionable insights that you hope your listeners will take away from the podcast series? It's very tough to sort of expect individuals to fight this multi-billion dollar industry. But I do have some thoughts on that side of things. But maybe first, I think...

What's really important is to acknowledge that this is an industry and there's a lot of different groups involved in the, what I like to call, quote unquote, scam chain. So, you know, a scam will often start with internet service providers or telecoms firms because the scammers use their platforms. That's right. And then it will shift to, say, a messaging app or a social media platform. And then maybe the victims will transfer money from their bank to a crypto exchange.

Sometimes the scammers use e-commerce platforms. So these are all different parts of the scam chain. And we don't begin to even solve this problem until every single part of the scam chain is working to try to fix this huge tragedy of the rise of online scams. So I think that's one really important thing to understand about what to do. And I think there are some countries in Asia that are doing very interesting, important work

So I actually tried to go to China for Scam Inc because I wanted to see what the Chinese Communist Party was doing to try to fight against scams. They're doing a lot. You know, they've put out all kinds of movies and TV shows and songs to try to educate the Chinese public. They have arrested over 800,000 criminals connected to online scams in the past three years. But it was very, very difficult to sort of get access to China. So instead I looked to Southeast Asia and there are countries like

like Australia, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, that have set up anti-scam commands, which is a place where they try and coordinate all these different groups under one roof. I think Singapore's is probably world-class at the moment because they actually physically locate the banks, the e-commerce firms.

and the police altogether so that when a scam is reported, immediately all these different parts of the scam chain can coordinate and try and get the money back for the victim. So I think that's really great and hopefully other countries study what is happening here in Asia. I guess in Asia we're on the front lines of scams, so governments here have sort of more advanced policy responses. But to your question of what can individuals do,

We all need to assume that every online interaction is a scam unless and until proven otherwise. And that's really, really sad in a way, right? I want to live in a society that's high trust. Imagine with AI now as well. Well, we haven't even got into AI. AI is going to make it so much worse. But I think given where we're at, I think that's the way we can protect ourselves. And then I think in contrast, I...

Offline, in the real world, I think it's really important to tell your friends and family what's happening in your life because one of the things the scammers do is they try and isolate people. And often one of the tactics is to say, you can't tell anyone about this crypto investment because most people don't understand crypto and they won't like that you're investing in crypto. When in fact, it's at that moment that if you think you probably don't think you're a scam victim, but it's

When someone tells you that you should go and check with your friends and family, hey, does this sound right to you or is something dodgy up?

And I think you also leave a particular tactic that I'm going to leave my listeners to go and listen to the podcast and almost in the last episode where you talked about what happens with AI. Now, part of it, as you've identified earlier on, the one thing is about vulnerability of individuals, right? How can individuals and communities actually build resilience against these scams, right? And also the other problem was

having a more forgiving and supportive society to help the victims as well. I mean, I remember the story of the Kansas Bank where the judge was supposed to make the final verdict. And one of the questions that came up from that judge was, why do you do this, right? And this was one of the parts of the podcast series that actually draws out my emotions about the whole story, how the person being scammed on there.

How did it draw out your emotions? Yeah, it's just how could this person fall into something so silly? And it's like, I mean, he's also respected by the community before this whole verdict. And a lot of in the whole process of going to the verdict, he has never said a single word about why did he do that? That was the part that really like he should have just said it.

Rather than just, you know, leave it as it is. I think it would be even fairer for the people who actually lost all their savings to know what happened. Sorry, when you say he should have just said it, do you mean before he stole all the money? Yeah, before he stole all the money and all that. I usually don't sympathize with a person being scammed, but that was probably the first time I felt.

I actually had some sympathy. I usually do not sympathize with people being scammed. Like the scam victim. The scam victim. But that was probably the only one few times that I was, well, maybe it's those, your podcast have done this job of trying to, you know, caught me

on there when I was listening to the intro. Well, thank you very much. So as you listened to the podcast, you became more sympathetic to the bank CEO. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Interesting. Interesting, yeah. I actually wasn't very sympathetic from the start of the story. It was such a quick movie. Maybe because I was binge listening. Yeah.

Yeah, but how do you actually think about like individuals and communities? You really mentioned things like you should talk to your family and friends more, communicate. How about people who are maybe the victims themselves? How do even society can help them? Like those scammers that you profiled who actually they were forced to do something like that. It's actually very hard for them to even get back to normal life after being cheated and trafficked and then forced into doing things that they shouldn't do.

as well. Yeah, there's so many different victims in the world of scamming. And that's what makes this story so horrible. I mean, there's many parts of this story that are so horrible, but that's one part. So I think on people who fall victim to scams, one really important aspect of this is we need more understanding of how these scams work. And we

I think we all need to be careful that we aren't victim blaming. So one thing I heard a lot from scam victims who I interviewed for this podcast series was they would go to the police after they'd been scammed and explain what happened to them. And the police would say to them, what? But you sent your money voluntarily. Like,

What's the crime? You were just stupid. But I think what we need as a society is to start to understand that all the tactics the scammers use really are psychological weapons, which is another part of the podcast that we delve into. And they need to be these tactics of love bombing, gaslighting, sense of fear, sense of urgency. There's so many different tactics.

should be thought of as kind of like a knife or a gun. And hopefully police officers, law enforcement, governments, anyone who's sort of trying to fight against the rise of scams needs to try and understand that that is what these scam victims are up against, right?

Now, of course, the story of the bank collapse is slightly different because the CEO did steal $47 million from his own bank. So it's a really, really complicated question that we do explore in the series. And I'm glad you actually put up the verdict.

of what finally transpired in that court case. I'll leave the listeners to go and find out themselves. So I have two quick questions and then we'll get to the closing. My first question is, what is the one question you wish more people would have asked you about scamming that they never bothered to ask? It was such a sprawling story to try to even figure out how to report it.

How to research it, how to report it, and then how to write the script. As a journalist, I'm obsessed with process. I love speaking to other journalists about their processes. When I meet writers or artists, I love to learn about how they create their works. So I could talk about that for a very long time. So you wish some people to ask you on the whole making of it, of the podcast.

Yeah, I'm not sure if that's what listeners would be interested in. But I guess as a journalist, that's what I think about all the time. I'll bear that in mind when I have another interview with another podcast series. So my traditional closing question, what does success mean for the Scamming podcast from your perspective?

Not just about listeners, right? You already have a sizable chunk of listeners. Oh, no, we can always have more listeners. I mean, genuinely, I think for journalists, we just want people to listen to our podcasts, read our articles, and

So that would be a success. And I hope in our own little way, we have contributed to helping people understand what is an incredibly sophisticated and complicated industry that is ultimately coming for all of us. And so I hope that people listen to the podcast, tell their friends and family about it, and slightly better understand what it is that we're all up against.

And also don't be judgmental. I think that situation when people, the lack of empathy really drives that in on that. So Liming, thanks for coming on the show and having this conversation. So in closing up, two quick questions. The last one is any recommendations which have inspired you recently? I just finished reading A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth, which is this very long novel about four families at home.

living through India's independence. But it's actually a story about life and what it means to live a good life. And it was completely gripping. I loved it so much. I'm so sad I finished the book because all I want to do is start reading it all over again. Oh, so it's a book that you reread all over again. Okay, how do my audience find you? You can search for Scam Inc. wherever you listen to podcasts.

The first three episodes are available for everyone. And then you can subscribe to Economist's Podcast Plus for as little as $2 a month right now. And, you know, this was a multi-month project and journalism is very expensive. So I'd be very, very grateful for anyone who subscribed to support what I think is important

important story to be told. And you can also find me on LinkedIn, X, Blue Sky and various social media platforms.

And you can definitely find this podcast on every podcast channel. Subscribe to us on YouTube and Spotify and also our LinkedIn newsletter. And of course, so many thanks for coming on to the podcast. I'm so glad to finally have that conversation because I've listened to both series. Many thanks and stay safe. Thank you so much, Bernard. Thank you so much for listening to both series.