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The next morning in Bangkok, he called the agent, an East African man, who told him briefly to take a 12-hour bus to Chiang Mai, then a taxi to the border with Laos. When Red Bull got there, he had to take a selfie showing he was outside the immigration office and send it to the agent. A few minutes after Red Bull carried out his instructions, an immigration official came outside, showed a selfie he had obviously received from the agent, and demanded 500 Thai baht — about $15. Red Bull paid, the official stamped his passport, and he was sent to a boat waiting for him on the Mekong River below. The ferry crossed the river just south of the point where the three borders of Thailand, Laos and Myanmar meet in one nexus: the Golden Triangle.
After the boat crossed into Laos, a young Chinese man waiting on the river bank opposite Red Bull showed the same selfie. He took Red Bull’s passport without explanation and gave it to immigration officials along with some Chinese currency. She came back on a visa.
The Chinese man put the passport in his pocket and asked Red Bull to wait for the East African agent. Then he left, carrying his Red Bull passport with him.
An hour later, the agent arrived and took him in a white truck to a hotel in northern Laos, where he would spend the night. He was lying on the bed of that bare hotel room, completely focused on the anxiety and excitement of his first real job interview, which was scheduled for the next day. He still doubts anything.
The next morning, he was taken to an office, a gray concrete tower surrounded by other drab buildings amid the green mountains of northern Laos. Red Bull sat nervously at his desk while a Chinese man and a translator took a typing test and an English test, both of which he passed. They informed him of his death, and began asking him about his familiarity with social media networks such as Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
Red Bull eagerly answered their questions. Finally, they asked him if he understood the job he was starting. “As an IT manager?” He asked. They said: No, because he once said without euphemism: He would be a “crook.”
When the truth of his situation finally became clear, the Red Bull team panicked. The Chinese president told him that he would start immediately. In an attempt to gain time, he begged to return to the hotel to rest for one night before starting work. The president agreed.
That night in the hotel room, Red Bull frantically searched the Internet for information about Golden Triangle scams. Only then did he see the dimensions of the trap that had spread around him: it was too late, he read about thousands of Indians who had been deceived and trapped like him, without a passport or means of escape. In the midst of this disgusting perception, his parents called him via video to ask if he had gotten the IT manager job. He said he buried his shame and remorse, smiled and accepted their congratulations.
Over the next days, with little guidance, he was drawn into the machinery of the fraud organization he came to know as the Boshang Complex: he was trained to create fake profiles, give out fraudulent texts, and then began working on a nightly schedule, manually sending hundreds of introductory messages each night to attract new victims. At the end of his shifts, he would return upstairs to his six-person room — slightly larger than the hotel room he occupied those first nights — with a toilet in the corner.
However, he says that from the beginning he was determined to challenge his circumstances again. It struck him that he knew more about computers than most of his coworkers, or even his bosses, who seemed to only understand how to use social media, artificial intelligence tools, and cryptocurrencies. Within days, he began dreaming of using his technical skills to quietly gather information about the complex, and somehow uncover it.