Won't Fix Episode 2 With Project Brazen's Tom Wright

[Music] I'm really excited today to talk to Tom Wright, an award-winning British investigative journalist based in Singapore. Famously, he wrote a book that turned into a bestseller called Billion Dollar Whale, which was about the Wall Street Journal's investigation into the one MDB scandal, along with his co-author Bradley Hope. In recent years, they've launched something called Project Brazen, which actually was the code word, apparently, that they used for the original one MDB investigation. It's a multimedia journalism studio, produces podcast newsletters, and develops stories for film and TV. They've been covering some very interesting and disturbing news out of Southeast Asia around scams, and I think you'll enjoy the conversation. And as always, love your feedback. Please let us know what you think of this conversation and what are some of the other kinds of guests that you would love to hear. Thanks so much. [Music] Well, Tom, it's just a chat with you. I guess we were saying earlier, I don't think we've ever been on a video call before, but we did interact. I think I was trying to get you to come out and talk to my team when I was working at Facebook. And then this weird thing called COVID happened, and you didn't end up traveling to the US at the time. So, yeah, I think it was a few years ago. Yeah, you're one of those people that I feel like I know, but I don't know. In this wonderful world of Twitter and LinkedIn or wherever it is, but yeah, we've never met before. It's nice to be on a quality. Yeah, same here. So the reason I had originally reached out to you was I read the billion dollar whale, and I thought it was a fantastic book. I really enjoyed it. It got into some of the things that it gets into where it kind of things I've always found interesting like at ASC Shells, Bearer companies or whatever that whole part of it was. But anyway, can you tell us just so we'll get to what you're currently working on. But tell me a little bit about that, like how you ended up writing that book or what was the whole genesis of that project? I'm very curious about how these things come together. You know, Jim, I was a reporter at the Wall Street Journal, and for your listeners who don't know the story about Jolo and one MDB, it's about this Malaysian guy who manages to persuade the Prime Minister of Malaysia to allow him to run a massive part of government money, you know, billions of dollars. And he just goes ahead and steals it all and uses it for crazy things like making the film, The Wolf of Wall Street, directed by Martin Scorsese, he was Leonardo DiCaprio and he showers all this money on DiCaprio and Hollywood stars. And he actually invents the bottle parade more or less in Santa Pay, you know, when champagne comes out with sparklers on it, he was the biggest nightclub well anyone had ever seen, Casino, else we called the book billion dollar whale. How do we get onto it? Well, you know, the story had been broken by a small blog called the Sarawak report and Malaysian newspaper. And then we were at the Wall Street Journal and we were looking for how to get in on the story and we basically were leaked the Prime Minister's personal bank accounts as a sitting Prime Minister of a country. And it showed that he had $681 million in this account, which was from the stealing of the money from this fund. You know, Jolo had to give, you know, he's he used the money to make films and stuff, but he also had to pay off his political protectors and ended up with Najib going to jail after many years. The Prime Minister Jolo is still missing facing indictment in a number of countries, including Malaysia. He's hiding out in China where he's got a lot of protectors. I mean, one of the things about, you know, we write a lot about fraudsters and these guys, you steal billions of dollars, they often end up with still with billions of dollars when they go on the run. And so that keeps some free for a long time because they're able to pay off people. So that's how we got in on it when we went to the Wall Street Journal. We we wrote a book called billion dollar whale. That was eight years ago now and set up a company with Bradley Hopes, the guy I wrote the book with former colleagues of the journal. We set up a company called Project Raising and now we're making films and TV shows based on these kinds of crazy stories. Yeah, I've been I've been following the your work with project brazen and whale hunting. It's just fascinating. And I think what was also fascinating recently was the intersection with some of the scam compounds. This story stories coming out of Cambodia. Last year there was the big DOJ seizure of supposedly $15 billion of Bitcoin. And I think last year I spoke to someone whose family member had been that essentially had seven figures some stolen their life savings. Just incredibly, incredibly difficult stories to hear. So tell me a little bit more about kind of the the scams and I guess we'll get into some of the details of I mean these stories are crazy. But yeah, so tell me a little bit more about how you got into this the scam area and the project brazen and how it intersected with some of this world. Well, you know, Jolo, the story, you know, you asked me about at the beginning that one MDB story that's that's stealing money from a government, you know, the government went ahead and raised that money. You know, Goldman Sachs helped raise money on international markets and they just stole it. And that was in 2009, 2010. So we're talking about, you know, 15 years ago now. The world has changed a lot since then. That fraud involved using the traditional banking sector. You know, Goldman Sachs were involved, private banks moving money around by a Singapore and another financial, you mentioned the seashells at the very beginning, offshore centers. The world has become, as everybody knows, who's alive these days knows the wars become pretty crazy. Everything's gone into hyperdrive, you know, whether it's politics and when it comes to scams, a number of things have happened that have changed the face of it, of the house scams operate. One of them is crypto. Crypto has come along and it's given piping for criminals. And yeah, we've happened upon this incredible character called Benjamin Maulberger. He's a white South African grouping Cape Town and he effectively became the biggest, one of the biggest money laundries in the world. And you know, in the last few years since COVID, this guy went from being a two-bit, you know, Jordan Belfort type, Wolf of Wall Street, stock scammer, you know, scamming mom and pops, scamming your auntie, scamming your granny for the worthless shares to laundering billions of dollars of money coming out of these scam centers in Southeast Asia. For those of the listeners who don't know what scam centers are, they're basically these industrial-sized complexes in places like Cambodia and Myanmar where, you know, thousands of workers round the clock are calling Americans and getting them to invest in fake crypto schemes. You know, this is the the call you SMS you might get or the telegram message or the WhatsApp message saying, hey, there's a great scheme, you should get involved, you can triple your money, you can quadruple your money. And a lot of these schemes are, the platforms where you think you're investing crypto or fake and you just get the money stolen. It blew up in COVID. It's a combination of very skillful ways of playing the victim so that they think that they're going to make money and that making a little bit of money at the beginning as well, so you'll roped in. And then, everyone's seen a friend or a colleague making a lot of money in crypto and they think, well, you know, that primes them to do this. But by one estimate, by one US government estimate, $200 billion is lost every year in the US economy to this kind of scam, which is more than the annual revenues of general motors or Ford. So it's incredible. This guy, Malberg, he ended up becoming the money launderer that these Chinese mafia run scam centers targeting Americans. And he overnight becomes himself like a fake billionaire because he's taking his cut. He's got so much money. He's buying $100 million yachts. He's buying Fifth Avenue apartments in New York City. And it's that's very similar to Jolo in the Malaysian scam, you know. And in both cases, that's what upends the scammers. They start to spend too much money and they get noticed just by basically journalists. So that's that's what happened. And we've been on that story for the last few months now. That's what recently there was some Instagram photos. Was it one of the family members was posting, you know, various Richard Miele watches and other things. I think a lot of times it's that those kinds of things that lead to the unattended attention and then, you know, things go from there. Yeah, we got on this story because, well, you know, obviously Malberg is South Africa. And he needs again, like Jolo's and Malaysian, you had the his protector was the tie prime, the Malaysian prime minister, Nudgey. Who's gone to jail. Malberg has a bunch of protectors as well, including, you know, very senior type politicians right up to the top level and also Cambodian politicians. A lot of those characters started to post, you know, ostentatious things on Instagram, you know, $2 million watches. Whenever, whenever anyone's wearing a Richard Miele watch, I start to think while something's up, you know, a tour, the tour beyond Skull one watch seems to be the one that the preferred watch of scumsters. So yeah, these guys, these these Malberg connected politicians were posting all these things. Our coverage actually led to the deputy finance minister of Thailand having to resign because we proved that his wife had taken a $3 million crypto payment. Malberg was using Thailand to move the money. He was taking over the banks, taking over crypto companies, taking over other bludged high companies because he needed to get the money that was stolen into the global financial system. He used Thailand to do that. And yeah, the deputy finance minister resigned, but he said, well, look, I didn't do anything wrong. He framed us with a defamation suit. But then his son stupidly had posted pictures from Malberg as $100 million yards and from his jets. all over his Instagram. It was a private, but we got a link with photos and we put those out in a story a few weeks ago and it got, I think, about like, five million hits on X because, you know, the time media isn't covering this story because of the very terrible deformation laws there, which make it very difficult for tight journalists to write meeting without facing criminal prosecution. The defamation laws there are criminal, not civil. So, yeah, the stories made huge waves. There's actually been an interpol red notice issued against Malburger, the South African. He's now run. It's always told that the story of the multiple yachts and that was fascinating. It tells a little bit more about the yachts. I also, by the way, was, I'm very curious about, you know, the, the, like, laws of the sea and the international waters and the, I mean, that's, that's got to be a whole other thing into itself. I'm just curious, what, like, what's the status of this fugitive at this point? Well, so he, you know, in October last year after we started reporting on him, the Thai authority said, look, get out of Thailand to embarrass saying because, you know, he'd been tied up with, you know, he's been funding political parties and involved with military and the police and the judges and everybody. And when you've got billions of dollars, you can, I mean, it's basically what we call state capture, right? Like, you know, to go over the whole country. So he moved to Dubai where he'd already had a base and Dubai, as we all know, is the, I call it the, you know, like the Star Wars, Katina of, of baddies, you know, a lot of people there and, and that's where he ended up, you know, very unlikely to prosecute you for money laundering in Dubai. And, you know, he got involved in funding one of Dubai's most prominent new hotel developments, this, this January Dubai, which is a $1.3 billion project, you know, he's super connected there. And he moved his yachts there. But then eventually, it got too hard to bury this story in Thailand and they ended up issuing an arrest warrant for him for all of the money laundering that he'd been doing. They didn't really issue any arrest warrant against Thai politicians. They covered that part up, but they, they went after him. And this is very similar to what happened to Jolo in Malaysia as well, you know, Jolo fled Malaysia, the China, Malberg, a fled to Dubai. But then after the stories came out about the arrest warrant, he decided that Dubai was too hard and he, he got on his $100 million yacht and he went through the street of Hormuz. And he got out a day before the Iranian war started. So he's very lucky to, to have been able to get out of the Persian Gulf. And he has $200 million. He sent one to the Moldus as a decoy and he sailed the other one to the Seychelles. So the last time we know knew where he was, was in the Seychelles, but that was two weeks ago now. So as regards the law of the sea, Rob, I don't know. I mean, I think when you're in international waters, you're safe, but if you've got a $100 million on, you've got to take it into port, right, to refuel and to get food and things. But I know the Seychelles authorities were thinking of arresting him, but I don't think that happened. They don't have extradition treaties with Thailand or many places. So his worry about this right now is a bit unclear, but he's, he's the dragon head is sort of closing in on this guy. Yeah, I also, I'm also curious, like it sounds like his wife was also quite instrumental in some of the things that have been in terms of the in Thailand and so on. I'm curious as you want to share a little bit more about that part of the story. Well, you know, these, these master con artists, they never put their own names on things. You know, Jolo back in the one MDV scandal, he would use a guy called Fat Eric, who was his, you know, friend from the, from his nightclub days when he was a kid. He used to use guy Eric Tan's name on all these documents. And these guys get paid for that. A Malberger, you know, he was a boiler room operator. So, you know, this is like, you know, your listeners may have seen the 2000 film with Ben Affleck and Vin Diesel boiler room, you know, like selling, chilling these stocks. And that was, you know, the new millennium scam, you know, beginning of this kind of modern era globalization and you could call people up around the world and sell them stocks. And Malberger was that, right? You know, so he, he was a two bit scamster. But his, you know, the scam really accelerated over time. And he ended up, it ended up becoming a much, much bigger, bigger operation. Yeah. The scale, the scale of these scams to me is one of the most more surprising things in the last couple years. I've, I've talked to, you know, folks at the FTC and law enforcement others. And firstly, one of the big problems is under reporting, you know, people are embarrassed and after being scammed. And so there's a systematic undercounting of things. But with crypto, I mean, one of the things that actually convinced me that I needed to work on some of these problems was just seeing people feeding money. Unfortunately, a woman feeding money into a Bitcoin ATM. And so, you know, I think the scale and also the, the speed with which this stuff gets moved around due to crypto networks, I think has been one of the things that is supercharged at least from my perspective. Is that, is that kind of born out by what you've seen in terms of how is crypto side of it as supercharged the fraud on the scamming? Yeah. When we wrote a billion dollar whale, we thought that that was, you know, the apogee of scams scamming, right? You know, money raised by Goldman Sachs for supposedly to be used by government to, for the betterment of this people, billion stolen overnight and, you know, spent on the crap tables or the packer out tables in Vegas, whatever it was, paying Paris Hilton hundreds of thousands to appear at events and that kind of thing. You know, that was, we thought that was the, but really you're right. I think you're right that crypto has supercharged fraud. And you can see it in the Malbenz and Malberg story, which is the South African carman we're talking about. You know, he worked with a company called Qcoin, which is a huge crypto exchange. The way this fraud worked is if you send your crypto, you change money for crypto and you invest in one of these platforms. The platforms are fake and they steal your money and you go back and, you know, it's no way to be found, but they have your crypto. They would then exchange that for dollars in a place like Cambodia, in a money, money changer, and then they would put it into a bank. They owned this network, Malberger, he owned his own banking Cambodia and the money would, would, would then go in there. It's still, however, needed to enter the global financial system. And that's where Qcoin comes in. So Malberger, Qcoin is an exchange where you combine, so crypto, it used to be one of the largest in the world. You may have heard of Binance or Coinbase, you know, all these companies. Qcoin got fined last year in the US, $300 million for a Larian's exchange to be used by money laundress. And just weeks later, it's already, it's owners who are a couple of Chinese guys, a meeting Malberger, and their local office in Thailand is negotiating with Malberger to illegally take over a brokerage in Thailand. And the reason is, you know, you'll hear a lot about on-off ramps, which is the need for people who have crypto to get their money into the regular banking system to get their hands on regular dollars. That's, that's what they did there. They were able to legally take over a finance institution in Thailand secretly, basically, by acquiring a controlling state with multiple parties and front companies. And Malberger was even setting digital policy in Thailand. You know, he was, he was writing the rules of crypto engagement for the country, because that's how powerful he had become. He was like a quasi-government minister. He had so much money. You mentioned earlier, you know, the Prince Group, which is a bit like, we call our network, the Malberger Network, the Prince Group is another one that's been scamming Americans. The US government seized $15 billion in crypto from that network, which is the largest ever asset seizure in US history. That you know, in fortune history. They didn't seize $15 billion. They seized, I think, a few billion, and the money went up. The value of that Bitcoin went up while they were holding it. But that again comes from scam from Americans and related to Cambodia. So it's a huge, huge, criminal enterprise. And unlike, you know, the, you know, John Gotti or the US Mafia of the 90s, this is like, we call it like, it's like an octopus cut off one arm and there's many other arms. This is the Chinese Mafia operating in places like Cambodia, laundering their money through people like Malberger or others. It's very hard to see all the tentacles, very, very hard to act against it. Yeah. So it's certainly, it's certainly difficult. I think I've also been listening to some other folks like Aaron Westu has been doing a podcast about some of this and various other folks journalists writing about some of the connections between the Chinese influence in some of these areas in different countries, Myanmar and Cambodia and so on. So I can imagine that what you're doing, though, it sounds, it sounds like obviously you're doing very important work. But I think this is another one where you mention getting threats and other things like this. It's got to be difficult, not only for you, but the other folks working on this and your partner and others working on this kind of work. So what, as you think about this, what keeps you going and motivated and what, where do you think it's all headed? Yeah, I mean, I think about threats as when you're working as a journalist is, I feel you just do your job very well. You don't report rumour or slander and you don't threaten people. I think that's very important. You never say, "Hey, if you don't give me the ass, I'll do this." You just go ahead about, you know, it's about shining light into places and it's uncomfortable for some people for sure, but I think if you operate like that, it's your respective more even if you're adversarial to somebody in a way, right? Because you're just trying to get the truth out. Also, journalists aren't really players in a situation, you know, like Malberg, the reason that so much information started to leak about him was he'd flown too close to the Sun in Thailand. They were very rare. which, you know, there were billionaires, Thai billionaires who really disliked how Malberg was turning up at Thai cabinet meetings and telling the finance minister, "I outrank you because he was so powerful." You know, as I said, he was setting digital policy. He was going to open a casino in Thailand. They were going to legalize gambling and he was going to open a casino with a Chinese investor and other people were missing out. And so, you know, he started to, he started to ruffle feathers amongst, you know, in a country where foreigners really, you know, it's very hard to become Thai or it's not like America where you can come and become an American, right? And so, very unusual situation where a white South African's doing this. Yeah, so he flew too close to the Sun. And I think, you know, journalists aren't, they reflect what's going on in a situation rather than being a player themselves. I think that's a very important distinction, you know, and I'm sure, you know, we're all following different, all the news that some social media and often when journalists do become the news, it's often very bad for that journalist and it also sort of is complicating for the, it detracts from the actual facts that you're trying to report on and the situation you're trying to bring light to. So. Yeah, absolutely. I think even what's, so it's crazy to me at a higher level, even though, you know, there was this large, the largest seizure in US history, the cryptocurrency and scams and obviously the human toll of this, I still feel like this story isn't yet kind of a mainstream story in the United States. And certainly you're part of it, I think. It also hasn't kind of hit the top level. I like, what do you think, do you think that it's going to, like how do you think about what it'll take for people to pay more attention to this or is this just like, I mean, again, you referenced the Iran conflict, there's so many things going on now that make that also just, you know, increase the, make it difficult for things to break through. I'm curious how you think of this story in the larger context as well. But it's a very noisy world when it comes to news and it's very hard to get anyone's attention for a long period of time. But yeah, I think this, you're just, you're just an early podcaster on this Malberg story. He's going to be world famous pretty soon and very well known because he's not just laundering money for, you know, scam centers in, in Southeast Asia targeting Americans. He's also laundering money for a host of other people that will, we're going to sort of unveil as we go on. So he's really a key figure in global money laundering industry. And he's, to me, he's sort of symbolic of this world of scams we live in, the fact that you can be involved in these kinds of scams and not just be quite rich, but be a billionaire and have, you know, $100 million yachts. And I mean, that's not something we've ever seen before in the global economy, I don't think, you know, to be that wealthy you'd had to, you know, run a Bernie made off type of scheme, not be a guy living in Bangkok, right? Doing scams. So this goes back to this thing you see. So I think Benjamin Malberg will be very well known, and, you know, in fact, I've, the fact that podcasts like yourself are reaching out to talk about it and it's starting to increase. I think shows that people are getting interested in it. The more broad story about scams, why, you know, given that 200 billion a year potentially has lost by Americans, two scams, why isn't it a bigger story? I think partly it's hard to grasp what's going on, you know, people don't talk about it like you said, people are very embarrassed. You know, there's a, there's a, there's a version of this called sex torsion where you send a new photo on a sex trap to somebody you think you're chatting with a, maybe a woman or a man, turns out it's a scam center. They then extort you for those photos. Teenagers are killing themselves under the pressure of this, thinking that their nude photos are going to get released. A couple are really terrible. There's a kid called Bryce Tate who killed himself, thinking he'd sent nude photos for a local girl to not to be scamsed as they asked for, I think a few thousand dollars, he didn't have it, just really tragic, tragic things that are happening. I think as these stories filtered through, people are going to realize this is also like, there's a national security element to this, right? This is being run outside of America and targeted on Americans. But I think it's just if you, maybe if you haven't been the victim of a scam yourself, it's very hard to understand how it happens or why it would happen. The scam centers themselves are behind, but we should say that the people working in the scam centers are also victims themselves. You know, they're lured, they're normally like other Asians who are lured to Cambodia, thinking they're getting cool, you know, good white collar jobs, a cool center workers, something like that. And they're basically kept prisoners, they're tazered, they're raped, they're beaten, there are torture rooms in these places. You know, it's hard for the average American to sort of picture what's going on behind these barbed wire doors. I think as the Maliburga story starts to break through, the fact that there's this guy is a great photo of Maliburga with a assault weapon, he wearing a suit with an assault rifle, a helmet across his body, I don't know if you've seen that, but like, I think it's gonna start to help to put a face onto this crime, you know, and people will start to realize, this is a person, this is a key person here who's involved in this crime targeting Americans. Yeah, I agree with that. I think when people can see both sides of this, the victims as well as the perpetrators, or alleged perpetrators, and it becomes more tangible, I think it'll change. I mean, I was in Washington DC speaking at an event a week ago, focused on older folks. And what I heard from some of the people there was that a lot of people are just afraid to pick up the phone. They're afraid to use the internet to get their benefits. People are choosing, or their families are encouraging them to do paper-based processes that take 90 days to get health care, instead of actually going on to the website, because are they on the actual website, or are they on something that is trying to scam them out of what little money they have? And so I do think that there's one of the reasons I want to have these kinds of conversations is because I think people need to understand how the stuff works, what's happening, what are the different pieces, how do they connect, fishing the fishing text that you get, or are you picking me up at the airport, what's that message that seems to be a wrong number, or whatever it is, and turns into a conversation which then turns into something else. And I think it's also important to understand that sometimes, there's more that many companies can do because these things don't happen immediately. It may take a day, a week, a couple of weeks before actually money changes hands. As you point out, there might be multiple steps in the process. I think we need to spend more time all figuring out and understanding how those kinds of things actually happen to people. Yeah, so you mentioned Aaron West earlier. So she's a former prosecutor in California who has set up a great NGO that basically pushes for the changes of legislation on this in America, for the authorities to take it more seriously, representing victims as well. I think part of this is when I first got involved in this, which is last year, it's hard to figure out how people get scammed or who they are. And as you report on it, you get contacted by people who have been scammed and you realize, or not least, I had a big change of mind about this. It's easy to say, well, I think this is a certain kind of person, or maybe a person who's looking to make money and isn't thinking properly, and is maybe a little bit greedy. But actually, that's not the profile of most victims. And this is hitting a wide range of people, including, I know of one case where somebody in the White House is relative was scammed. So it's hundreds of thousands of dollars. And so this is hitting all walks of life from PhDs and well-educated people. And so it's not one kind of victim. There's all kinds of victims. And I think it's clearly, it's become a problem that the American government is taking seriously. So I think President Trump issued an executive order earlier this month or last month about this. There's an interagency task force that's being set up in the States to go after this. I think it's based in Washington, which I'm not sure why that's the case. But yeah, it seems that there's motion in the US government to try to take this more seriously and try to figure out what to do about it. As you mentioned earlier, obviously, there was the seizure of the Prince assets. I mean, the largest seizure in US history, but it hasn't-- you're right, it hasn't really become a massive story in the US, whether that's because of other news, other focuses, like the Iran conflict, I don't know. Or it could just be these things. In general, stories take time to percolate into the general consciousness. But I'm pretty certain these stories will do. Yeah, yeah. I think so. I think there's a lot of things, a lot of stories that also I think are somewhat disconnected from each other. So it's OK. Scam ads here and this fishing story and this Bitcoin ATM story over there. And there's more connections between these things than I think people recognize yet. And I think also the money laundering, I mean, that's been-- I remember at one point looking back at various stories about traditional banks getting fined for money laundering or not keeping records or whatever it was. And there's been tens of billions of dollars of fines. But most people wouldn't know that I wouldn't remember that that's the case. These are things we're talking about. We're also, I think the other thing that I think is a problem is there's this degree of in almost inevitability or resignation that sometimes people have that like they can do nothing about scams, which I think is another problem that I think plays into that as well. I think you're right about the the the piecemeal coverage of stuff. So for example, you know, Singapore arrested two financiers and seized 120 million US dollars of money related to Benjamin Mauburger last month. And that just appears in the local media here as a line item. Nobody understands what it is. You know, we're the you know, my blog whale hunting, which you can subscribe to, it's whale hunting and project raised and you'll find it with the only ones that really reported the what that means. So if this stuff just comes out, you know, it's hard to put it all together. And I think there is a level of complexity to these these schemes and they're they're they're global, you know, they involve multiple countries, they involve crypto companies, banks. The other the other factor is I think maybe the US is not as focused on policing the global financial scam industry as it might have been. I mean, I did say there was an executive order from Trump recently. So there's that. But Trump, of course, when he came into power for this second term, he went into the Department of Justice and he shut down the kleptocracy initiative, which was an initiative that was going after white collar crime globally, you know, the Foreign Crot Praxis Act. The rationale was that he wanted to focus more on the the southern border and the Trump problem. You know, is the Department of Justice, is the FBI? Are they going after these kinds of things as aggressively it made it may have done before? I don't know. But you know, this is this executive order doesn't make it doesn't make it seem that scams are a growing priority for the administration. That's probably because so many Americans are getting scammed. Well, someone when I was in DC, someone told me that if things are affecting kids or they're affecting seniors, that's much, much more likely something's going to be done. So, you know, I'm hopeful, you know, I'll say it. I've said it before, which is that there's lots of legislation around things like privacy and other things that haven't gotten done at the federal level that should have by now. You'd think so, you know, you still have the normal issues. But this is definitely something where I just think it'll only take a few stories to break through before people will really push and create more pressure for action. I do believe that. I do believe that when I was at Facebook years ago, we stopped allowing, you know, in the early days of cryptocurrency ads, people trying to ask for cryptocurrency, we stopped ads for cryptocurrency. People did the same thing for a while and then eventually those ads or things related to them came back. And I think I still look back at that and think that that could have been helpful to, to know, and it was a very broad-based ban. If you mentioned certain words, we wouldn't allow your ad to run. So, you know, ads is just one part of it, but by no means is it the majority I don't think. But there's so many places where this kind of stuff, people still feel like they can, you know, make money out of it. And I think it's a real problem and we need to be actually able to talk about this in a lot more honest. Well, I have huge questions about the rise of prediction markets, you know, companies like Polymarket and CalShi, you know, they are gambling companies, but they say they're not, and they're not regulated as such. And huge valuations, you know, the founder of CalShi, Luna Lopez is now, I think, the youngest female billionaire in history. They say that they want, that they want to be good corporate citizens and regulated, but the prevalence of the gambling mindset in everyday life is just incredible. And you know, you can now bet on whether, you know, Lady Gaga is going to come out of the Super Bowl halftime show or not. And of course, you're dumb to take that bet because everyone betting on it, a dancer in the show or a tree in the show or whatever, with bad money. And then she comes out and somebody makes money, somebody loses money, right? And you know, in the old days, if you and I were sitting in a boardroom of a company and we go and trade on that information, we go to jail because we had proprietary information that broke securities laws, right? Yeah. For now, to me, it's like, it's very, very unclear how, I mean, there are people, I saw that it was thinking is really soldier was jailed for instead of trading on something relating to the Gaza war. So there is, there's some strange news out there, but I just don't know how you stop inside of trading in the, in the current world. And it's not quite the same thing, obviously, as scams and people being, you know. But there is definitely a gambling mentality that is visible across all types of people, all types of society and inside as an outsider's and potentially very damaging. I think that's right. I think there's this idea that the shortcuts get rich quick. It's that, I mean, so the thing I saw last week, which I also was, I don't know how you wrote this, how this person, the story was written, which was a New York Times story about the $1.8 billion GLP one company that, you know, these, these folks had, and it was just very clear that they was, there was shenanigans in terms of how they, how they, how they built that up. So I do think there's this, you know, I think we find it very appealing that this stuff can happen. Anyone can strike it rich and like, you know, et cetera, et cetera. Anyone can be successful. But I think that also comes with a lot of downsides when that becomes the, the thing that frames a lot of people's, you know, willingness or unfortunately, likely to get involved in scams and schemes. Like, yeah, there was, there was an article in the New York Times last week about high age, the importance of high agency behavior. And what I notice is sometimes I will, I will tweet something, you know, about a fraudster. And somebody will quote tweeted saying, you can just do things. That's like that phrase is very popular on the internet right now. Yeah. And it's, it's not exactly, you know, I don't want to be hectoring or like, you know, polyanage, whatever. But it's like, you know, that's not, that's not the lesson you'd expect people to take from some of these scam stories that we're writing about. You know, it's not, it's Jolo or Malberg are incredible characters in the sense that what these scams just carry out, it's not easy. It's not easy to become a fake billionaire and, and take over a Southeast Asian country. And, you know, there's a level of skill involved in it. But yeah, I wouldn't say it was, you know, I wouldn't say it's almost like we're entering an A moral time, right? Where the outcome is the outcome. And there's a certain philosophy now that, oh, if you're, if you're a, maybe actually, maybe this is why people don't care about scam victims. Because they just think they're dumb, you know, and they, you know, win a take-sall. Well, you know, I would say that that I was speaking to someone just a week ago about someone who worked at one of the big tech companies and, you know, Silicon Valley person who got scammed. And it was someone who's an immigrant. And the scammers basically just knew exactly the buttons to push the way to scare them into thinking they were going to get, you know, kicked out of the country and lose their visa and all kinds of things like that. And they were able to push the head enough personal information to make it credible. But, you know, it also, this person realized that multiple points that this wasn't didn't all add up. But there's still the human, the ability to tap into those human fears. It's, it's insidious. And I think I would just caution people that anyone can be scammed. You know, certainly there are people more vulnerable to it than others, probably, especially if you're unfamiliar with certain kinds of knowledge. But it's certainly not a thing that is the province only of the elderly or the week or anything like that. This is happening to more people than I think we're going to than we'd like to admit. Yeah. I mean, look at meme coins, right? You know, these coins that were issued a few years ago, they came in a huge rage in the crypto world. I mean, I don't think anyone ever made money out of those apart from the promoter groups, the people who are issuing them, right? If you thought those and they went down, were you scammed? Actually, yes. Right. What's, I mean, I mean, and then if you go back, I mean, you know, obviously the libertarians, you promote all of this, they say, well, that's how the stock market works anyway. And it has always worked like that. You know, IPO's go to certain favorite groups of people and of course, there's, of course, there's non-stop front running and insider trading in the normal high frequency trading is all front running, you know, hedge fund friends will tell me. So, you know, the world, the world's not perfect as it is, but like this new frontier of crypto and, you know, all these crypto Q coin that Malberger was involved with the crypto exchange, you know, they used to be based in the Seychelles, which he started this conversation by referencing, you know, very easy to hide your money there, but they're getting more serious. And Seychelles actually got to regulated for Q coin, so they moved to the Turks and Kekos islands. So, there's always be a place, there'll always be a place for you to go if you want to, you want to find a less regulated place, you know, and that's how that's how the insider groups work. They find places that aren't regulated, they, you know, and those who aren't in the know will always get scammed, my view. Yeah, I mean, I, what I think about it is you're never going to be able to get out of having to play the cat and mouse game with scammers, forsters, et cetera, but, you know, I think you can make it more difficult for them. You can increase their costs. You can push them to other countries. I think the one thing that's underappreciated is probably that regulators can probably, you know, do things to make their country or their citizens somewhat less attractive. I, again, I don't think any of this is trivial and easy to do, but I do think it's possible and companies. can do more, but it just does require being thoughtful about it, does require actually spending time on the problem. And so more conversations about these kinds of things, you know, more collaboration across different governments and countries. But I think also, frankly, stories like the ones you all are writing are going to be an important part of that. So I'm glad you're doing the work that you're doing. Yeah, thank you. I mean, you have to, you have to continue to shine a light, you know, Qcoin, for example, have recently signed up, um, Tadeep Pogaccia. I love cycling. You can tell from my backdrop here. And, um, I'm a keen amateur cyclist. Tadeep Pogaccia is one of the worlds, if not history's most talented athletes. You know, he's won the Tour de France many times. Amazing. Amazing athlete. I mean, people don't know him because cycling is still in each sport, but, you know, he is a alien in what he can do, the power that he can put out. And he, unfortunately, has recently signed a sponsorship deal with Qcoin, which is the crypto exchange that is involved with, with Benjamin Malburger. His agent came out and said, well, you know, um, the money didn't go to him. It went to his development squad or whatever, but, you know, this is, this is the kind of whitewashing that happens. And, and, you know, unless we have people who stand up and say, look, this company has done something that's really bad. It's, it's, it's a lady taken over a bank in Thailand with a guy who's scamming people who's involved in scam networks and moving their money around. Yeah. Again, it comes down to its complicated. His agents don't know people, people just don't understand. And, but the more people we have reporting on it, the more, the more it will come to like. Yeah. I agree. We'll share the link to your, your work in the, in the show notes. And, uh, I really appreciate you coming to, to chat with us about this. This is just, I think a very tricky, challenging area, but a very important story to get out there and, um, really grateful for what you're, you and Bradley are doing on, on this one. Thanks for having me, Rob.