Global Criminal Billionaires and Crypto Money Laundering

Transcript

There may be transcription errors: we apologize for those in advance.

Tom Wright is an award-winning British investigative journalist based in Singapore, co-author of the bestseller Billion Dollar Whale (with Bradley Hope) and co-founder of Project Brazen, a multimedia journalism studio.

Rob: I'm really excited today to talk to Tom Wright, an award-winning British investigative journalist based in Singapore. Famously, he wrote a bestseller called Billion Dollar Whale, about the Wall Street Journal's investigation into the 1MDB scandal, along with his co-author Bradley Hope. In recent years they've launched Project Brazen — which was apparently the code word they used for the original 1MDB investigation. It's a multimedia journalism studio that produces podcasts and newsletters and develops stories for film and TV. Lately they've been covering some fascinating and disturbing news out of Southeast Asia around scams, and I think you'll enjoy the conversation. As always, we'd love your feedback — let us know what you think and what other kinds of guests you'd like to hear from.

Well, Tom, it's good to chat with you. 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. That was a few years ago. You're one of those people I feel like I know but I don't actually know — this wonderful world of Twitter and LinkedIn. But we've never met, so it's nice to be on a call with you.

Tom: Yeah, same here.

Rob: The reason I originally reached out was that I read Billion Dollar Whale and thought it was fantastic. It got into things I've always found interesting — shell companies, bearer companies, that whole world. We'll get to what you're currently working on, but first: how did you end up writing that book? What was the genesis of the project? I'm always curious how these things come together.

Tom: Well, I was a reporter at the Wall Street Journal. For your listeners who don't know the story about Jho Low and 1MDB — it's about this Malaysian guy who manages to persuade the prime minister of Malaysia to let him run a massive pot of government money, billions of dollars. And he just steals it all and uses it for crazy things, like making the film The Wolf of Wall Street, directed by Martin Scorsese with Leonardo DiCaprio. He showers all this money onto DiCaprio and Hollywood stars. He more or less invents the bottle parade in Saint-Tropez — you know, when champagne comes out with sparklers on it. He was the biggest nightclub whale anyone had ever seen, a casino whale, so we called the book Billion Dollar Whale.

How did we get onto it? The story had been broken by a small blog called the Sarawak Report and a Malaysian newspaper, and at the Journal we were looking for a way in. We were basically leaked the personal bank accounts of a sitting prime minister of a country. They showed he had $681 million in an account, from the stealing of money from this fund. Jho Low used the money to make films, but he also had to pay off his political protectors. It ended up with Najib going to jail after many years. Jho Low 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.

One of the things about the fraudsters we write about — these guys who steal billions — is that they often still have billions when they go on the run. That keeps them free for a long time, because they're able to pay people off. So that's how we got in on it at the Journal. We wrote Billion Dollar Whale — that was eight years ago now — and set up a company with Bradley Hope, my co-author and former colleague. We called it Project Brazen, and now we make films and TV shows based on these kinds of crazy stories.

Rob: I've been following your work with Project Brazen and Whale Hunting — it's fascinating. What's also been fascinating recently is the intersection with the scam compounds, the stories coming out of Cambodia. Last year there was the big DOJ seizure of supposedly $15 billion in Bitcoin. I also spoke to someone last year whose family member had a seven-figure sum — their life savings — stolen. Incredibly difficult stories to hear. So tell me more about the scams, and how you got into this area and how it intersected with this world.

Tom: Well, the 1MDB story you asked me about is about stealing money from a government. The government raised the money — Goldman Sachs helped raise it on international markets — and they just stole it. That was in 2009, 2010, so we're talking 15 years ago. The world's changed a lot since then. That fraud used the traditional banking sector: Goldman Sachs, private banks moving money via Singapore and other offshore centers — you mentioned the Seychelles at the beginning.

The world's become pretty crazy. Everything's gone into hyperdrive, whether it's politics or scams. A number of things have changed the face of how scams operate. One is crypto. Crypto has come along and given criminals new piping. And we happened upon this incredible character called Benjamin Mauberger. He's a white South African, grew up in Cape Town, and he became one of the biggest money launderers in the world. In the last few years, since COVID, this guy went from being a two-bit Jordan Belfort–type Wolf of Wall Street stock scammer — scamming mom-and-pops, scamming your auntie, scamming your granny for worthless shares — to laundering billions of dollars coming out of these scam centers in Southeast Asia.

For listeners who don't know what scam centers are: they're industrial-sized complexes in places like Cambodia and Myanmar where thousands of workers, round the clock, are calling Americans and getting them to invest in fake crypto schemes. It's the SMS you might get, or the Telegram or WhatsApp message: "Hey, there's a great scheme, you should get involved, you can triple or quadruple your money." A lot of the platforms where you think you're investing in crypto are fake, and your money just gets stolen. It blew up during COVID. It's a combination of very skillful ways of playing the victim so they think they're going to make money — letting them make a little at the beginning so they're roped in. And everyone's seen a friend or colleague make a lot in crypto, which primes them.

By one US government estimate, $200 billion is lost every year in the US economy to this kind of scam — more than the annual revenues of General Motors or Ford. Mauberger ends up becoming the money launderer for these Chinese-mafia-run scam centers targeting Americans, and overnight he becomes a fake billionaire himself, because he's taking his cut. He's got so much money he's buying $100 million yachts and Fifth Avenue apartments in New York. It's very similar to Jho Low in the Malaysian scam. And in both cases, that's what upends them: they start to spend too much money and get noticed — basically by journalists. So that's what happened, and we've been on the story for the last few months.

Rob: Recently there were some Instagram photos — one of the family members was posting Richard Mille watches and other things. A lot of the time it's those kinds of things that draw the unwanted attention, and then things go from there.

Tom: Right. We got on this story because Mauberger, like Jho Low, needs protectors. Jho Low's protector was Malaysian Prime Minister Najib, who's gone to jail. Mauberger has a bunch of protectors too, including very senior Thai politicians right up to the top level, and Cambodian politicians. A lot of them started posting ostentatious things on Instagram — $2 million watches. Whenever I see someone wearing a Richard Mille, I start to think something's up. The Tourbillon skull watch seems to be the preferred watch of scamsters.

Our coverage actually led to the deputy finance minister of Thailand having to resign, because we proved his wife had taken a $3 million crypto payment. Mauberger was using Thailand to move money — taking over banks, crypto companies, and other large Thai companies, because he needed to get the stolen money into the global financial system. The deputy finance minister resigned but said he'd done nothing wrong and threatened us with a defamation suit. Then his son stupidly posted pictures from Mauberger's $100 million yacht and his jets all over his Instagram. It was private, but we got the photos leaked, and we put them out a few weeks ago. It got, I think, five million hits on X — because the Thai media isn't covering this story, thanks to terrible defamation laws that make it very hard for Thai journalists to write about it without facing criminal prosecution. Defamation there is criminal, not civil. So the story made huge waves. There's now been an Interpol Red Notice issued against Mauberger, the South African. He's on the run.

Rob: The story of the multiple yachts is fascinating. Tell us more about the yachts. I'm also always curious about the law of the sea and international waters — that's got to be a whole thing in itself. What's the status of this fugitive at this point?

Tom: In October last year, after we started reporting, the Thai authorities told him to get out of Thailand — it was too embarrassing, because he'd been tied up with everyone: funding political parties, involved with the military, the police, the judges. When you've got billions of dollars, it's basically what we call state capture. So he moved to Dubai, where he already had a base. Dubai is what I call the Star Wars cantina of baddies — a lot of people there, and very unlikely to prosecute you for money laundering. He got involved in funding one of Dubai's most prominent new hotel developments, a $1.3 billion project. He's super connected there, and he moved his yachts there.

But eventually it got too hard to bury the story in Thailand, and they issued an arrest warrant for him for all the money laundering. They didn't really issue warrants against Thai politicians — they covered that part up — but they went after him. It's very similar to what happened to Jho Low: Jho Low fled Malaysia for China, Mauberger fled to Dubai. Then, after the arrest warrant came out, he decided Dubai was too hot, got on his $100 million yacht, went through the Strait of Hormuz, and got out a day before the Iranian war started. So he was very lucky to get out of the Persian Gulf. He has two $100 million yachts; he sent one to the Maldives as a decoy and sailed the other to the Seychelles. The last time we knew where he was, he was in the Seychelles, but that was two weeks ago.

As regards the law of the sea — I don't know. When you're in international waters I think you're safe, but if you've got a $100 million yacht, you've got to take it into port to refuel and get food. I know the Seychelles authorities were thinking of arresting him, but I don't think it happened — they don't have extradition treaties with Thailand or many places. So his whereabouts right now are a bit unclear, but the dragnet is closing in.

Rob: It sounds like his wife was also quite instrumental in what happened in Thailand. Do you want to share more about that part?

Tom: These master con artists never put their own names on things. Jho Low, back in the 1MDB scandal, used a guy called Fat Eric — Eric Tan — a friend from his nightclub days as a kid. You saw Eric Tan's name on all these documents, and these guys get paid for that. Mauberger was a boiler-room operator — your listeners may have seen the 2000 film with Ben Affleck and Vin Diesel, Boiler Room, cold-calling people to sell them stocks. That was the new-millennium scam, the beginning of this modern era of globalization, where you could call people around the world and sell them stocks. Mauberger was that — a two-bit scamster — but the scam accelerated over time and became a much bigger operation.

Rob: The scale-up of these scams is one of the most surprising things of the last couple of years. I've talked to folks at the FTC, law enforcement, and others. One big problem is under-reporting — people are embarrassed after being scammed, so there's systematic undercounting. But with crypto, one of the things that convinced me I needed to work on these problems was seeing people feed money — a woman feeding money into a Bitcoin ATM. The scale, and the speed with which the money gets moved due to crypto networks, has supercharged it, at least from my perspective. Is that borne out by what you've seen?

Tom: Yeah. When we wrote Billion Dollar Whale, we thought that was the apogee of scamming — money raised by Goldman Sachs, supposedly for the betterment of a country's people, billions stolen overnight and spent on the craps tables or the baccarat tables in Vegas, paying Paris Hilton hundreds of thousands to appear at events. But you're right that crypto has supercharged fraud, and you can see it in the Mauberger story.

He worked with a company called KuCoin, a huge crypto exchange. Here's how the fraud works: you change money for crypto and invest in one of these platforms; the platforms are fake and steal your money, so you go back and it's nowhere to be found — but they have your crypto. They'd then exchange it for dollars in a place like Cambodia at a money changer and put it into a bank. Mauberger owned this network — he owned his own bank in Cambodia, and the money would go in there. But it still needed to enter the global financial system, and that's where KuCoin comes in. KuCoin got fined $300 million in the US last year for allowing its exchange to be used by money launderers. Just weeks later, its owners — a couple of Chinese guys — are meeting Mauberger, and their local office in Thailand is negotiating to illegally take over a brokerage there.

You'll hear a lot about on- and off-ramps: the need for people who hold crypto to get their money into the regular banking system and get their hands on regular dollars. That's what they did. They illegally took over a finance institution in Thailand — basically secretly acquiring a controlling stake through multiple parties and front companies. Mauberger was even setting digital policy in Thailand, writing the rules of crypto engagement for the country, because that's how powerful he'd become — like a quasi-government minister.

You mentioned the Prince Group earlier — that's another network that's been scamming Americans. The US government seized $15 billion in crypto from it, the largest asset seizure in US law-enforcement history. Actually, they seized a few billion, and the value went up while they were holding it. But again, that comes from money scammed from Americans and relates to Cambodia. It's a huge criminal enterprise. Unlike the John Gotti–era US mafia of the '90s, this is like an octopus: cut off one arm and there are many others. It's the Chinese mafia operating in places like Cambodia, laundering money through people like Mauberger. It's very hard to see all the tentacles, and very hard to act against.

Rob: It's certainly difficult. I've been listening to folks like Erin West, who's done a podcast on some of this, and other journalists writing about the Chinese influence in Myanmar, Cambodia, and elsewhere. What you're doing is clearly important work, but — you mentioned getting threats — it's got to be difficult, not only for you but for your partner and others doing this kind of work. What keeps you going and motivated, and where do you think it's all headed?

Tom: On threats — as a journalist, you just do your job well. You don't report rumor or slander, and you don't threaten people. That's very important: you never say, "Hey, if you don't give me this, I'll do that." You just go about shining light into places. It's uncomfortable for some people, but if you operate like that, you're respected more, even by an adversary, because you're just trying to get the truth out.

Also, journalists aren't really players in a situation. The reason so much information started to leak about Mauberger was that he'd flown too close to the sun in Thailand. There were very rich Thai billionaires who really disliked how he was turning up at Thai cabinet meetings telling the finance minister, "I outrank you," because he was so powerful. He was setting digital policy, and he was going to open a casino — they were going to legalize gambling and he'd open one with a Chinese investor, and others were missing out. So he started to ruffle feathers in a country where it's very hard for a foreigner to be accepted — it's not like America, where you can come and become an American. A white South African doing this is a very unusual situation. So he flew too close to the sun.

Journalists reflect what's going on rather than being players themselves — that's an important distinction. When journalists become the news, it's often very bad for the journalist, and it detracts from the actual facts you're trying to report and the situation you're trying to bring to light.

Rob: Absolutely. What's crazy to me at a higher level is that even with the largest seizure in US history of crypto — and the human toll of this — I still feel this story isn't yet a mainstream story in the US. It hasn't hit the top level. How do you think about what it'll take for people to pay more attention? Or, given the Iran conflict and everything else going on, is it just hard for anything to break through? How do you see this story in the larger context?

Tom: It's a very noisy world for news, and it's hard to hold anyone's attention for long. But you're an early podcaster on this Mauberger story — he's going to be world famous pretty soon, because he's not just laundering money for scam centers in Southeast Asia targeting Americans, he's also laundering for a host of other people we're going to unveil as we go. He's a key figure in a global money-laundering industry, and to me he's symbolic of the world of scams we live in. The fact that you can be involved in these scams and not just be quite rich but be a billionaire, with $100 million yachts — that's something I don't think we've ever seen in the global economy. To be that wealthy, you used to have to run a Bernie Madoff–type scheme, not be a guy living in Bangkok doing scams. So Benjamin Mauberger will be very well known. The fact that podcasters like you are reaching out shows people are getting interested.

On the broader question — given that potentially $200 billion a year is lost by Americans to scams, why isn't it a bigger story? Partly it's hard to grasp what's going on, and people don't talk about it because they're embarrassed. There's a version of this called sextortion, where you send a nude photo in a chat to someone you think is a woman or a man, and it turns out to be a scam center that then extorts you over the photos. Teenagers are killing themselves under the pressure, thinking their nude photos will be released. There was a kid, Bryce Tate, who killed himself thinking he'd sent nude photos to a local girl; it turned out to be scamsters who asked for a few thousand dollars he didn't have. Really tragic.

There's also a national security element — this is being run outside America and targeted at Americans. But if you haven't been the victim of a scam yourself, it's hard to understand how or why it happens. We should also say the people working in the scam centers are victims themselves. They're lured — often other Asians who are told they're getting good white-collar call-center jobs — and then kept prisoner. They're tasered, raped, beaten; there are torture rooms in these places. It's hard for the average American to picture what's going on behind those barbed-wire doors. As the Mauberger story breaks through — there's a great photo of him in a suit holding an assault rifle across his body — I think it'll help put a face on this crime, and people will realize this is a key person involved in a crime targeting Americans.

[Note: this transcript references reports of self-harm. If you or someone you know is struggling, support is available — in the US, you can call or text 988.]

Rob: I agree. When people can see both sides — the victims as well as the alleged perpetrators — it becomes more tangible, and I think that will change things. I was in Washington, DC, speaking at an event focused on older folks a week ago, and what I heard was that a lot of people are just afraid to pick up the phone or use the internet to get their benefits. Families are encouraging paper-based processes that take 90 days for healthcare instead of going onto a website — because are they on the actual website, or something trying to scam them out of what little money they have?

That's one reason I want to have these conversations: people need to understand how this stuff works — the phishing text, the "Are you picking me up at the airport?" WhatsApp message that seems like a wrong number and turns into a conversation and then into something else. It's also important to understand that many companies can often do more, because these things don't happen instantly. It may take a day, a week, a couple of weeks before money changes hands, and there are multiple steps. We all need to spend more time understanding how these things actually happen to people.

Tom: You mentioned Erin West — she's a former prosecutor in California who set up a great NGO that pushes for legislative change in America, for the authorities to take this more seriously, and represents victims. When I first got involved in this last year, it was hard to figure out how people get scammed or who they are. As you report, you get contacted by people who've been scammed, and — at least for me — it changed my mind. It's easy to say the victims are a certain kind of person, maybe a bit greedy or not thinking properly. But that's not the profile of most victims. This is hitting a wide range of people — I know of a case where someone in the White House had a relative scammed out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. It's hitting all walks of life: PhDs, well-educated people. There's no single kind of victim.

It's clearly become a problem the American government is taking seriously. I think President Trump issued an executive order about this recently, and there's an interagency task force set up in the States — based in Washington, I'm not sure why. But there does seem to be motion in the US government to take it more seriously.

Rob: The seizure was the largest in US history, but you're right, it hasn't become a massive story — maybe because of other news, like the Iran conflict, or maybe these stories just take time to percolate into general consciousness. But I'm pretty certain they will.

Tom: I'm pretty certain they will too.

Rob: There are a lot of stories that feel disconnected from each other — scam ads here, a phishing story there, a Bitcoin ATM story over there — and there are more connections between them than people recognize. The money-laundering angle, too: I remember looking back at stories about traditional banks getting fined for money laundering or failing to keep records — tens of billions of dollars in fines — but most people wouldn't remember that. Another problem is a kind of resignation, where people feel they can do nothing about scams, which plays into it.

Tom: You're right about the piecemeal coverage. For example, Singapore arrested two financiers and seized $120 million related to Benjamin Mauberger last month, and it just appeared in the local media here as a line item — nobody understands what it is. My blog, Whale Hunting, which you can subscribe to at Whale Hunting and Project Brazen, was the only outlet that really reported what it meant. When it comes out piecemeal like that, it's hard to put together. There's real complexity to these schemes, and they're global — multiple countries, crypto companies, banks.

The other factor is that maybe the US isn't as focused on policing the global financial scam industry as it once was. There was that executive order, but when Trump came into power for this second term, he went into the Department of Justice and shut down the Kleptocracy Initiative, which went after white-collar crime globally under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The rationale was to focus more on the southern border and drugs. So are the DOJ and FBI going after these things as aggressively as before? I don't know. But the executive order does make it seem scams are a growing priority — probably because so many Americans are getting scammed.

Rob: Someone in DC told me that if things affect kids or seniors, it's much more likely something gets done, so I'm hopeful. That said, there's plenty of legislation — on privacy and other things — that hasn't gotten done at the federal level that you'd think would have by now. But this is something where it'll only take a few stories breaking through before people push for action. I really believe that.

When I was at Facebook years ago, we stopped allowing cryptocurrency ads in the early days. Then Google did the same for a while, and eventually those ads, or things related to them, came back. I still look back and think the ban could have been helpful. It was very broad-based — if you mentioned certain words, your ad wouldn't run. Ads are just one part of it, but there are so many places where people still feel they can make money off this. It's a real problem, and we need to talk about it more honestly.

Tom: I have huge questions about the rise of prediction markets — companies like Polymarket and Kalshi. They're gambling companies, but they say they're not, and they're not regulated as such, with huge valuations. But the prevalence of the gambling mindset in everyday life is incredible. You can now bet on whether Lady Gaga is going to come out at the Super Bowl halftime show. Of course you're dumb to take that bet, because someone betting on it is a dancer in the show, or on the crew — they have inside knowledge — and when she comes out, somebody makes money and somebody loses. In the old days, if you and I sat in a company boardroom and traded on that information, we'd go to jail, because we had proprietary information and broke securities laws.

So it's very unclear how you stop insider trading in the current world. I saw that an Israeli soldier was jailed for insider trading on something relating to the Gaza war, so there's some strange news out there — but I don't know how you stop insider trading now. It's not the same thing as scams, obviously, but there's a gambling mentality visible across all types of society, insiders and outsiders, and it's potentially very damaging.

Rob: I think that's right — this idea that there are shortcuts, get-rich-quick, and so on. Something I saw last week was a New York Times story about a $1.8 billion GLP-1 company where it was very clear there were shenanigans in how they built it up. We find it very appealing that this stuff can happen — anyone can strike it rich, anyone can be successful — but that comes with a lot of downsides when it frames people's willingness, or unfortunately their likelihood, to get involved in scams and schemes.

Tom: There was an article in the New York Times last week about high-agency behavior. Sometimes I'll tweet about a fraudster and someone will quote-tweet it saying, "You can just do things" — that phrase is very popular on the internet right now. And that's not exactly the lesson you'd expect people to take from the scam stories we're writing about. Joe Low — Jho Low — and Mauberger are incredible characters in the sense of what they carried out; it's not easy to become a fake billionaire and take over a Southeast Asian country. There's a level of skill involved. But I wouldn't say it's admirable. It's almost like we're entering an amoral time where the outcome is the outcome. Maybe that's why people don't care about scam victims — they just think they're dumb. Winner takes all.

Rob: I'd say this: I was speaking to someone a week ago about a Silicon Valley person who worked at one of the big tech companies and got scammed — an immigrant. The scammers knew exactly which buttons to push, how to scare them into thinking they'd get kicked out of the country and lose their visa. They had enough personal information to make it credible. This person realized at multiple points that it didn't all add up, but the ability to tap into human fears is insidious. Anyone can be scammed. Some people are more vulnerable than others, especially if they're unfamiliar with certain kinds of knowledge, but it's certainly not only the province of the elderly or the weak. It's happening to more people than we'd like to admit.

Tom: Look at meme coins — coins issued a few years ago that became a huge rage in the crypto world. I don't think anyone ever made money out of those except the promoter groups issuing them. If you bought them and they went down, were you scammed? Actually, yes. The libertarians who promote all this say, well, that's how the stock market works anyway, and always has — IPOs go to certain favored groups, there's non-stop front-running and insider trading, and high-frequency trading is all front-running, as my hedge-fund friends will tell me. So the world's not perfect as it is. But this new frontier of crypto — KuCoin, the exchange Mauberger was involved with — used to be based in the Seychelles, which we started this conversation referencing, very easy to hide money. But the Seychelles actually got too regulated for KuCoin, so they moved to the Turks and Caicos Islands. There'll always be a place to go if you want somewhere less regulated. That's how the insider groups work — they find places that aren't regulated, and those who aren't in the know will always get scammed, in my view.

Rob: The way I think about it: you're never going to get out of playing the cat-and-mouse game with scammers and fraudsters. But you can make it more difficult, increase their costs, push them to other countries. What's underappreciated is that regulators can probably do things to make their country or their citizens less attractive as targets. None of it is trivial or easy, but it's possible. It requires being thoughtful, actually spending time on the problem — more conversations like this, more collaboration across governments and countries. And frankly, stories like the ones you're writing are going to be an important part of that. I'm glad you're doing the work you're doing.

Tom: Thank you. You have to continue to shine a light. KuCoin, for example, recently signed up Tadej Pogačar. I love cycling, as you can tell from my backdrop — I'm a keen amateur cyclist. Pogačar is one of the world's, if not history's, most talented athletes; he's won the Tour de France many times. People don't all know him because cycling is still a niche sport, but he's an alien in what he can do, the power he can put out. Unfortunately, he recently signed a sponsorship deal with KuCoin, the exchange involved with Benjamin Mauberger. His agent said the money didn't go to him but to his development squad — but this is the kind of whitewashing that happens. Unless we have people who stand up and say this company has done something really bad — illegally taken over a bank in Thailand with a guy who's scamming people and moving scam-network money around — it just gets normalized. It comes down to: it's complicated, the agents don't know, people just don't understand. But the more people we have reporting on it, the more it will come to light.

Rob: Agreed. We'll share the link to your work in the show notes. I really appreciate you coming to chat with us about this — a tricky, challenging area, but a very important story to get out there. I'm really grateful for what you and Bradley are doing on this front.

Tom: Thanks for having me, Rob.