THEOS Cybernova
THEOS CyberNova is a cutting-edge podcast that explores the dynamic world of cybersecurity, hosted by THEOS Cyber CEO Paul Jackson.
Each episode delves into the latest trends, challenges, and innovations shaping the cybersecurity landscape, featuring insights from industry experts, thought leaders, and technologists. Paul brings his expertise and passion for cyber security to engaging discussions on topics ranging from emerging threats and data privacy to the future of AI in cyber defense.
Whether you're a professional in the field or simply curious about staying safe in the digital age, THEOS CyberNova offers an invaluable insight into the world of cybersecurity.
THEOS Cybernova
Tom Wright: Following The Money & Billion Dollar Whales
How do you investigate people protected by money, power and political influence?
In this Season 2 finale of THEOS Cybernova, Paul Jackson speaks with Tom Wright, co-author of The Billion Dollar Whale, about the investigative journalism behind one of the largest financial fraud cases in history.
Tom explains how major fraud investigations are built, from following complex money flows to documenting evidence, managing operational security, and protecting sources under real risk. The conversation explores why powerful institutions often look the other way, how investigators validate information, and why attention spans shape what the public remembers.
Production Credits:
Presented by: Paul Jackson
Studio Engineer & Editor: Manny Peñamora
Executive Producers: Paul Jackson and Ian Carless
Co-produced by: Theos Cyber and W4 Podcast Studio
This week on the Theo Cybernova podcast.
SPEAKER_01:You've upset a lot of very rich and powerful people. Um, how safe do you feel?
SPEAKER_02:These are the people that are calling up your mum and dad and and and and mom and pubs and screwing them over of their life savings, and and that and that's that's a billion-dollar business. There is a risk when you do this that kind of work because if you're the only one reporting it for a while, I think there's a risk when, you know, maybe killing you would lead to that information not getting out. Bradley called me at three in the morning in in Kolumpur and I took a taxi to the to the Singapore border. Um and then I didn't go back to uh Malaysia for about four years after that. And that keeps me awake at night, like that somebody could have set up a fake persona with a bunch of fake information.
SPEAKER_01:And especially in the age of a element, right?
SPEAKER_02:DMake. Yeah, to then make me report something that is totally fake, and then, you know, that's that's terrible.
SPEAKER_00:The Theo Cybernova Podcast, hosted by Paul Jackson.
SPEAKER_01:Welcome to the Theo Cybernova Podcast with myself, Paul Jackson. Today, we're gonna have a very special guest with us today, it's Tom Wright. Thank you for joining me, Tom. Yeah, so this will be a special two-part podcast episode to close out season two in style. Tom, you're the co-author, together with uh Bradley Hope, of the acclaimed book The Billion Dollar Whale. Now, the Billion Dollar Whale is an eye-popping account, really is, of one of the most brazen heists of all time. A best-selling book that I'm sure will be familiar to all of our listeners. What they may be less familiar though, uh Tom, with is is your subsequent work in, as you term it, whale hunting, which I think is a great name. And I want to dive into that more in these episodes. Um and I guess, you know, you're under this umbrella of Project Brazen, so I I think that's a fitting name, isn't it? You obviously you chose that uh deliberately there. So let's start with uh um you know a little bit of background because your your work on the um the one MDB scandal uh with the Wall Street Journal was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, if I'm right, in 2016. I mean, that must have been a great feeling, right? Well, we didn't win it, we were only nominated.
SPEAKER_02:You were finalists. I actually I was once in a sort of uh battle on Twitter with some somebody in China, one of these apologists for for the Chinese regime, and he pointed out, oh, on your on your LinkedIn you say you're a Pitzer finalist, but you didn't win it. I was like, Yeah, that's true. But you know, we were we got pretty close. We were we were I think we were beaten by the New York Times. But yeah, it was uh it seems like a long time ago now, it was a decade ago when we uncovered the the Jolo story. We weren't the ones who broke it, that was uh a Malaysian newspaper and a blogger. But we I spent like a good uh three to four years of my life on that story and you know started out with who is this guy Jolo? Why has he got billions of dollars, what's his relationship with the uh Malaysian Prime Minister? And you know, we unraveled it from there to to sort of prove the one of the biggest heists in history. Incredible story.
SPEAKER_01:A truly incredible story. And uh, you know, we met around a decade ago just after I'd left JP Morgan, and uh I was so in you know inspired by your dedication to get the facts. And as it turned out, it's a massive book and a lot of facts in it.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, it's like a 110,000-word book, so it it really took a lot of work. I mean, it honestly it was uh very, very difficult to do because every I mean, so my co-author Bradley Hope was also at the Wall Street Journal at the time. Um he had lived in the Middle East, and there was a huge Middle East component to this. I mean, for your listeners who don't know the story, basically, um, this guy Jo Lowe was in his twenties. He he got to know the Malaysian Prime Minister. The Malaysian said, okay, you run this sovereign wealth front from behind the scenes, and that and you know, they went ahead and stole billions of dollars and used it to make the film The Wolf of Wall Street with Leonardo DiCaprio to date, you know, Joe Low, uh, a pudgy Chinese guy in his twenties, ended up dating Miranda Kerr, the Australian supermodel. They threw hundreds of thousands of dollars at Jamie Foxx to play the piano for five minutes, that kind of stuff. So that's a story we unraveled. But of course, it had much more important implications as well because Goldman Sachs was involved, they helped raise the money. One of their partners has gone to jail, not for very long, but uh he went, uh Tim Lyson, their partner went to jail. The Prime Minister of Malaysia is in jail, which is an amazing thing. The system held in Malaysia, you know, a very corrupt place, but the system held and they were able to put the Prime Minister in jail who'd given cover for all of this stuff to happen. And then, of course, lots of financial institutions were involved abetting this stuff because so much money was slushing around, people were making so much money, they allowed it to happen.
SPEAKER_01:So Yeah, the the looking the other way was staggering, wasn't it, really? You know, I guess when there's eye-watering sums like that, then you know, greed takes over a little bit, doesn't it?
SPEAKER_02:Well, well, it's you know, it's the old adage that if you or I want to move a few thousand uh dollars, we get a lot of compliance questions. Um, but if you want to move$100 million, then there aren't so many compliance questions because people's end-of-year bonuses are going to be very large.
SPEAKER_01:Right. Well, it's a fascinating book, and uh, you know, for those uh you know listening to this who haven't read it already, you know, I've read it twice now. Well, once I've read it, and the other uh eyesight's getting a bit bad, so I uh I downloaded the Audible version, which is excellent as well. Uh great, great narration. So the purpose of this uh conversation is not really to you know to rehash um the whole book and the and the and the story. But so you know, the audience, you know, our audience may be thinking, well, why invite somebody like you to a cybersecurity and investigation-focused podcast? And uh just to set the scene a little bit, perhaps. Um, you know, you know my background, obviously, I've been an investigator for a few decades now. And um what I try to do is in my work is try to avoid the silos of, you know, you've got cyber forensics, cyber investigations, forensics, you know, online intelligence, and then in another silo, you've got the guys who do traditional fraud, insider threat, uh, financial investigations, etc., when really they need to be meshed and merged and uh, you know, to get the greatest impact. Um so um the work that you've done though as an investigative journalist has has got many overlaps with my world in in the cyber investigation work. And my intention here today is to explore these aspects further. But um before we start, uh I'd like to sort of ask you a key question. I mean, you've upset a lot of very rich and powerful people. Um how safe do you feel?
SPEAKER_02:Well, you know, you're asking me this before, just before we came on, and I was saying, well, uh that's a question my wife uh asks me. Why do you have to piss off some rich and powerful people again? I mean, we don't set out to do it. It's like um it's we're we're really uh driven by finding stories that that uh people don't know. I don't want to cover the news that's already out there. You know, the latest story, for example, that we did was about this uh South African guy called Benjamin Maulberger who more or less took over the government of Thailand, bribing from the prime ministers all the way down. He was a money launderer for the scam centers in Cambodia. Uh, he's now on the run in Dubai. Yes. So we find stories like that, and we and often people come to us these days. You know, we've been doing it a long time as well. We get a lot of tips. A lot of times, as you know, whistleblower tips are not not great. You know, you get people who got fired or something, and then they don't go anywhere. But sometimes, you know, this story in particular, for example, we were we were tipped off a couple of years ago. Who is this South African guy who's buying, you know, tens of millions of dollars worth of planes for Cambodians and then for tax in Shinawat, the former Prime Minister of Thailand. And it turns out he was this huge money launderer for the scam centers. These are the people that are calling up your mom and dad and and mom and pops and screwing them over of their life savings, and and that and that's that's a billion-dollar business. So there is a risk when you do this that kind of work because if you're the only one reporting it for a while, I think there's a risk when you know maybe killing you would lead to that information not getting out. But in general, one of our very strict rules is to never threaten. You know, I would never say to a uh target of an investigation, uh, if you don't do X, I'll do Y, for example. So it's very much like, look, we learned this. We think this is really interesting. Do you have anything to say about it? Um and that's the way we approach things, I think. And if you do it that way, even people who, you know, we did a podcast about a guy called Fat Leonard who who had corrupted the US Navy, you know, we smuggled a microphone to him in in detention in San Diego. He basically broke up his uh ripped up his plea deal with the American government to do our podcast. Um, but he still talks to me because, you know, he doesn't see me as a threat. I never threatened him. I just gave him an outlet to talk about his his experiences. And even though he was a criminal and had ripped off the US Navy, he still, you know, he still wanted to tell his story. So, you know, sometimes very dangerous, but I think most of the time, if you operate in a in a truthful way and don't threaten, I think you can yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Well, you're a very brave person, in my opinion. But uh we'll talk in in part two of this podcast uh more about the scam centers, because obviously that's a hot topic for for us. Um but uh I in your book, you did recount a story where you were in the Shangri-Lar hotel in Kuala Lumpur and you received a threatening call which made you dash for the border. Uh tell us a little bit more about that.
SPEAKER_02:Well, that was a that's a story where Bradley, the co-author of the book, was um he got a call from someone who was pretending to be um a friend. And he said, Look, the Prime Minister of Malaysia knows that Tom's in the Shangri-Lar in in Kuala Lumpur and uh he's thinking of arresting him. So as a friend, you know, I'm saying to you, you should probably not he should probably not be there. But actually that person was part of the inner circle of what was going on and and was threatening us by doing that. But we didn't know that at the time, we took it as a as a friendly hint. And so Bradley called me, it was three in the morning in in Kuala Lumpur, and I took a taxi to the to the Singapore border. Um and I didn't go back to uh Malaysia for about four years after that. Oh wow, until you know Najib lost power in an election and then was subsequently jailed. So the Prime Minister was was jailed, and Jolo ended up in uh China, which we can talk about if you're interested, but like the the the the danger levels went down a lot at that point.
SPEAKER_01:Right, right. So let's go uh to the the the backstory, because I always like to uh understand the backstory of our guests. Um and and what really drove you to get into investigative journalism in the first place?
SPEAKER_02:Well, as a kid growing up in England and grew up in Birmingham in the UK. Oh, I'm sorry. Um, really? Where are you from? Yorkshire. Well, I haven't I haven't been to Birmingham for years, but I'm gonna stand up for it. I think it's a great thing. It was a great place to have a charter. So um, yeah, no, I I I was very interested in the film The Killing Fields, you know, obviously about the Khmer Rouge um and the New York Times journalist uh who reported on it and then the Cambodians were involved. And I did like a, you know, my when I was probably in middle school, I did a project on it and always wanted to become a foreign correspondent. I ended up in Indonesia in the 90s. Uh I actually lived in Indonesia between high school and and and university, learned Indonesian, lived in Bandung, and then went back and worked for Reuters at the end of the Sahato era. So when when Megawati was coming up and Sahar, the dictator of 32 years, Sahato was falling. And I got a taste for the whole sort of running with the very dangerously at that time, with no training, running with, you know, between the protesters and live bullets and all that kind of stuff. And I did that, I got a job at the Wall Street Journal eventually, did AFPAC coverage, did Pakistan coverage. Um I was a Pakistan cover uh reporter for a while when Osama bin Laden was killed. And the first proper investigative story I did was about a company called Suzlan in uh India, which is a wind turbine company. And it was a billion-dollar company uh at one point, but they were sort of stealing their technology. And I sort of found out about it, and we ended up reporting to a degree where the the share price totally collapsed. The company basically had to reset. So you get a sort of uh a bit of an adrenaline rush with that kind of reporting because it's not something anyone else is doing. You have to pick why you're doing it, you don't do this stuff gratuitously. There's normally, you know, in that case, India had this story of being a huge boom economy at the time, but it didn't have the uh sort of good governance practices in place. And so that was an interesting story to sort of to put out there at the time. There was a public reason to do it. The journal was happy with me spending a lot of time on it. And so yeah, I got more job satisfaction out of spending, you know, more weeks doing it than than the sort of daily news or the or the sort of more press conference type of journalism.
SPEAKER_01:Right.
SPEAKER_02:What what made you leave the Wall Street Journal in the end then? Oh well, so then we ended up doing uh the billion-dollar well book that you've referred to that came out in 2018. And then the next year, I mean, at one point I I well actually the the the initial reason to quit was because the journal wouldn't allow me to do public speaking. And when you have a best-selling book, for a while you have uh quite a lucrative uh public speaking uh opportunities. So I did that for a while. Then COVID happened and that uh killed that. So then I'm like, okay, well, do I go back to do I go back to journalism? And then I managed to persuade persuade Bradley, who was the co-author of the book, who was still at the journal at the time, to leave. Um and we set up Project Brazen, which is actually named after uh it is Brazen because you know we like the name, the word, but it's also because Jolo had a um the the Malaysian fraudster had a shell company called Brazen Sky.
SPEAKER_01:Right.
SPEAKER_02:So we quite like the the sort of uh link to link to one of the. So we set up a company and the company's sort of modus operandi is to find true stories that are adaptable for TV and film. That's what our business model is. We try to produce uh Hollywood films that are based on true events.
unknown:Right.
SPEAKER_01:Again, switching gears slightly, um I I read a review by the Tribune Star of your book, which says details in the book can be a slog, but give the book authority. And gotta be honest, they're not wrong, right? And there is an incredible amount of detail and research. So what I'm curious about is how you document all this. Because in my prior life as a cop and obviously as an internal corporate investigator, uh, I needed to use tools like iTunes, Analyst Notebook, but I have visions of you, you know, with a huge board covered in uh photos, documents, and bits of string uh tying them together. So what so what's your secret, or do you just have a phenomenal memory?
SPEAKER_02:Uh no, I don't have I'm not very well organized either, actually. But um, if I had my time again, and yeah, I think Bradley would agree with this to do the book again, we'd probably put less detail in. The problem with a nonfiction book like that is if you come at it as a journalist, you're like, oh, I'm writing a version of history here that that we need to put everything in. But there's another half of you which is like, well, I'm trying to write an entertaining nonfiction book, which which draws people along. And so you actually get complaints from both sides. You get people saying, Well, you haven't given enough of the financial background to explain the fraud. And then you get people who say, Well, it's a slog, it was hard to get through these pages. So we had a we had a rule of like short chapters, lots of scenes, trying to trying to keep it as light as possible. But yeah, there's probably a little bit too much uh money trying that. In terms of how do we work? One way to write a book like this or to do any work like this is to keep a timeline. Uh, that's the first thing we would always do is like develop a uh, you know, thousands of words timeline from you know, person born, this, this, this, and color code it, different characters, different things. That then gives you the spine, the narrative spine to then create like uh a chapter outline of like how you're gonna tell the story. Because you you you probably don't want to tell it like purely chronologically. And then in terms of organizing, you would then have uh lots of files that are then related to the timeline. So, okay, this person is this color, this file is related to this person. Doing a billion dollar well in the age of AI would be a lot easier. Oh, for sure. Because back then, you know, we would get, say, for example, somebody gave us uh an Excel spreadsheet of Jolo's WhatsApp uh not WhatsApp, uh BlackBerry messages. And you imagine like Jolo, the fraudster, has is is apart from being a fraudster, he's also just organizing where he's going for his you know lunch or or drinks or whatever, and he's like sharing restaurant recommendations with people. You've got to s you had to physically slog through all of that on the Excel spreadsheet to get to the bit where he goes, Have you opened the ACME time-limited shell company for me? And you go, then your brain goes, Oh, I remember seeing that elsewhere in financial documents. So it was very it was almost like that. It was very much not happenstance, but you had to remember salient names and things and then just cross-reference them, which I think could be done now with with you could train uh uh uh AI to look for that for you. So I don't know, I don't have a phenomenal memory, but I do have a a very good um instinct for okay, I've heard of that shell company somewhere else, and then remembering where that was and going and finding it with always always with a narrative in in mind, because I needed to have a little narrative moment somewhere.
SPEAKER_01:It's a shame you didn't end up in law enforcement because I think you know the skills would have been very I think they're similar, right? Very similar. Oh, 100% similar.
SPEAKER_02:When you were in the the Hong Kong police.
SPEAKER_01:Yep, correct. Correct. You know, it was a uh you know, you and again, AI would have definitely helped then, uh, but you're bombarded with facts and trying to you know make it make the story story straight is is challenging, right?
SPEAKER_02:But I'm very disappointed you don't have a massive board with photos and uh No, it's not like those Netflix uh B movies where you go down to the basement and there's a there's a thing. No, but it did have a whiteboard in I so I wrote uh uh you know my part of the book, and you know, Bradley was in in the US and London. I was in in the Hong Kong uh university when I did it, and I had a I did have a whiteboard uh with with those kinds of things. Right.
SPEAKER_01:So your books sold well over half a million copies. I don't know what the latest number is. What is the latest number? I guess over a million, yeah. Oh, over a million, wow, well done. And uh, you know, obviously the 1D uh MDB scandal has been widely reported in Wall Street Journal and other publications. But part prior to this podcast, I actually asked a few of my friends, you know, what they actually knew of the incident, what they what details, and very few could recall details other than it was a massive fraud. I was curious about this, and and there's a bit of psychology, I think, in this. Do you think that these stories that you come up with, and we'll talk more about your current investigations, do you think they're just so complex and the sums are so hard to fathom that people just fail to comprehend, perhaps? Or or or is it just it yeah, another sign of the shortening of attention spans in this day and age?
SPEAKER_02:I think it I think it's just a shortening of attention spans. I think there's so much content out there at the moment that that you know to get uh to get someone to really know something, to actually read it, is hard. And it's actually already a win. So, for example, this new story I'm I've been writing about, which we'll get into later about this South African fraudster who took over the Thai government, that's the elevator pitch for it. You know, if anyone's even heard of his name, Benjamin Maurberger, and can tell me and can tell me that he took over the Thai government, that's already a win, you know, because your friends, you might send them the PDF of the 7,000-word story you wrote on it, but they're not going to read it, or some will read it. People like yourselves will read it for maybe professional reasons. You try to make it as sexy as possible, you know. You you you play up the the the most Netflix, you know, adaptable elements of any story to hook people. So we we know how to do that. We know how to do you know Twitter threads that try to hook people or LinkedIn books. But to for someone to really engage with with a story that's quite complex is difficult, right? And then you know you look at the news flow, it at the moment it's 90%, you know, what's going on in Minnesota, right? Very easy to grasp, you know, Ice Agent shot someone. And that that those things sort of suck out all the air out of the room. So when you when you're working on other stuff, it it it better be like uh catnip for audiences, otherwise they're not gonna engage with it, you know.
SPEAKER_01:Well, that's a real challenge making something like the one MDB scandal into bite-sized pieces, isn't it?
SPEAKER_02:Well, that's why we you know we originally wrote the book at uh 18 chapters, and our editor um was like, well, you better do this like a James Patterson novel and make it 40 chapters, with each one being three pages, because then people feel like they're making progress and you can cut the narrative. So you know, you know, you see you're seeing now there are these Chinese, I think they call them vertical, they're basically like vertical telling of others on phones where episodes are like 90 seconds or a couple of minutes, whatever. But over time you can still tell a three hour story and do it in those bytes. It's challenging, but I think I think that is the future of this kind of content. You need to keep things short and then build up detail over a longer a longer sort of time frame.
SPEAKER_01:So let's talk a little bit. About operational security, because uh in our world this is a huge topic, uh, especially when we're dealing with cyber threat intelligence. I I I've got a feeling it must be a critical part of the way you operate. Um, because there's two parts to this protecting your own anonymity sometimes when you're trying to get facts out without them knowing who you are, uh uh, you know, what your objectives might be. And secondly, obviously you've got informants who have a very strong reason for staying anonymous, that you have to protect their identities. So can you talk a little bit about what you do to in both those uh contexts?
SPEAKER_02:Well, in the first context, I never will pretend to be someone I'm not. This is I I'm not I I just personally don't like that. I think the British press do it a bit, the American press don't really do that. Um, you know, James O'Keefe does that at Project Veritas, and I think it's terrible, right? Like you pretend to be someone else and you got your people. And the reason the reason for that is you you're just sort of stooping to a the level of of of other criminals, right, by pretending to be other people. There may be reasons why you might do that in an operational setting if you're a police or something. But if you're a journalist, I think it's much better uh to say, look, I'm this is who I am, this is what I'm doing. And you I think people trust you more than like well going back to you talking about safety as well. I think if you uh start to pretend you're someone you're not and trick people, your safety, your danger levels go up quite a lot as a journalist. Whereas if you say, Look, I'm working on a story, this is what I found out, what's your response? Always give uh you know a right of response to people so they can they can come back. I would do all of that out in the open because I just think it's better it's better for us. In terms of the protecting the source, that's totally different. You know, you see a lot of discussion now on social media about whether you should give anonymity to sources, right? Um there's there's been a big debate this week about whether a hit piece, well, I shouldn't call it a hit piece, there's been a piece about Barry Weiss at CBS, her takeover of CBS, where it's been criticized by a lot of people in CBS who were all given the right to be off the record. And you could argue, well, that's not important enough. And if you're gonna criticize another journalist about journalism, do it on the record, right? So I I kind of I think I would agree with that. But if it's somebody who's deep inside a corrupt government, a country with no rule of law, who's giving you secrets at the risk to their own safety, then it's very important that um you know you protect them. So in terms of operational security, I mean we talk about that if you like, how do you how do you keep those people safe?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so okay. So uh I mean, yeah, well, I mean, how do you protect their identities? Because uh, you know, you you you have to trust that you're really speaking to the right people, so they you know you have to validate that part, and and yet that validation probably comes in some form of communication uh or you know, messaging that you have to protect them.
SPEAKER_02:That's a very good question about how do you make sure you're not being I that I that keeps me awake at night, like that somebody could have set up a fake persona with a bunch of fake information.
SPEAKER_01:And especially in the age of AI, right?
SPEAKER_02:Deep fake. Yeah, to then make me report something that is totally fake, and then you know, that's that's terrible. Yes. Um so so you know, let's put it into into onto the meat of a real example. So this Benjamin Maurberger story that, you know, that again, just to recap, South African guy laundered billions of dollars for the Chinese uh mafia networks in Cambodia, the ones that are doing the scam centers, you know, calling Americans, getting them to invest in fake crypto. He's laundered a lot of the money. A lot of a lot of the money moved through Singapore, you know, over a billion dollars moved through the fund management structures in Singapore. He set up a fake uh fund management company here. So there are there are sources to this. You don't just report this because you, you know, somebody gives you a document, you need human sources and documents, you need to triangulate it all. Um and you know, can't get into very specific details because of source protection, but you know, you need to ensure that the people who who are talking to you really are who they say they are. So I would spend a lot of time doing that um work. And you can do that social media, you can do it by talking to other people and just figuring out who they are really are. And then when they give you things, you need to sort of triangulate that against other sources as well to make sure that they're not doctoring documents or they don't have an axe to grind. But you know, in this particular case where we were, you know, trying to prove the movement of hundreds of millions of of dollars, we were able to find multiple ways to see that movement and then feel uh careful enough, uh safe enough that this was real. And then then sort of to answer your initial question, how do you protect those sources? Well, uh first of all, you don't put their name in the in the story. Yes. That's obvious. But then what if what if I were to get hacked by somebody? Well, exactly, yes. So I would keep their I would keep my notes. Well, you have to have notes that you take when you talk to them. Because if I were ever to get subpoenaed or uh have a defamation suit against me, I would need notes, right? Like, oh, I talked to this person. So you keep those, but I would keep those physic physically somewhere. Right. Right? Then I would have uh then any documents they gave me, I would have without their name on it somewhere else. And so you somebody couldn't hack my computer and go, okay, there's a name and there's there's an interview.
SPEAKER_01:Do you worry about your phone though? Because uh uh last week we had Bill Marksack uh on the show from the University of Toronto Citizens Lab, and and they do great work, you know, in terms of uh understanding the threats to mobile phones uh hacking of journalists, especially those operating in areas where their life is is a threat, you know. We we all know those places, right? You know, uh probably the most famous tool out there is Pegasus, which is a um um uh basically a hidden tool which allows full access to your phone. Do you not worry about you know that because obviously you're probably communicating with most of your contacts via your phone?
SPEAKER_02:Yes, I uh yeah, and there's other you know safety protocols you can take, like using uh apps like Signal, not having having the person not use their real name on their on their uh user login. So, you know, we'll be very careful that when I'm talking to a source who's you know, I think taking a big risk that they would be using some kind of pseudonym on their special account that they've set up on Signal or Telegram or something. So if you were to hack the phone, you wouldn't know who they were necessarily. Um so things like that. Is it foolproof? I don't know. But you know, we do our best to ensure the safety of sources.
SPEAKER_01:And talking about sources, you obviously had a number of sources from inside government bodies and financial institutions who uh you know dealing with their very sensitive uh information. How do you cultivate these sources or or do they all come to you?
SPEAKER_02:Again, let's let's talk about the specific case of this story we've been working on. So the the way that this story first came out was that this guy Benjamin Maurberger was raising suspicions in Southeast Asia because he was he was operating on a he was a a boiler room operator from 20 years ago. So basically selling worthless stocks from people might remember the the Ben Affleck movie from 2000 called Boiler Room. Yes. Vin Diesel. It's a good movie. So he was selling these things for years, got on the radar of a bunch of um of authorities, and he s he had a Cambodian diplomatic passport because he wasn't able to travel to other places because he was wanted for the Boiler Room stuff. And then a few years ago, he suddenly starts buying bombardier private jets and you know, for for various people for Cambodian rich kids. And then, as I said earlier, for for Thailand's prime minister. So that's how he came onto our radar. That's how people often come into our onto our radar, is when they start spending uh a lot of money. That's how Jolo came onto people's radars. He was he, you know, back in you know, 2009-2010, he was putting on these he invented the bottle parade, uh, the fraudster Jolo, you know, when people come in with the sparklers and the champagne and the ace of spades, whatever it is. He invented that basically in uh in Saint-Tropez. So that's how he came onto our people's radars at that time. So often the inability not to spend garganch and sums of cash when you've stolen it is one way that we start to hear about people.
SPEAKER_01:Interesting, yeah. Yeah, no, that's all good. So, of course, let you know, talking about Jolo, right, um, who obviously is the subject of the billion-dollar whale. You recently exposed that he apparently travelled to China on a fake Australian passport. And now it and also, you know, as part of your whale hunting, you obviously have the hunt for Jolo. Is it a source of frustration to you that you, you know, he hasn't yet had to answer to the numerous allegations um surrounding his involvement in the fraud?
SPEAKER_02:A little bit, but honestly, you know, I'm sure just like you were pretty hard hard-boiled by this point, hardbitten. I don't know what the best way to describe us is. But I mean, justice is always partial, right? You're never gonna have true justice, and I'm not naive about that. I think in the in the case of Jolo, the fact that the prime minister of of the country who you know gave him the cover to do what he did, the fact that he's in jail is is like something I never would have imagined, right? Um and he and just recently got uh given a bunch more years. So you saw that. Yeah, yeah. So he's so Nadjib, the former prime minister, is in jail. Jolo, you know, we we um launched a uh a sort of online search for Jolo last year. We bought up a bunch of of meme coins. Someone someone had not us, someone had come up with the the dollar Jolo meme coin, which had was languishing, wasn't doing anything. So we just bought it all up and we offered it as a reward for people who had any tips, which is not something you you'd be able to do at the Wall Street Journal. That wouldn't be and it was honestly, to be honest, it was a bit of a stunt because no one had made any money out of it. But we did end up getting some really good tips, including that Jolo was in China, he tried to check into a a place with uh a fake Australian passport, but somebody'd recognized that he was that was him because it was still the same photo. Uh he was using this ridiculous name Konstantinos Veres, which was I think a Cypriot sounding name because at some point he'd had to move money via Cyprus. I think that's why.
SPEAKER_01:And he was wearing glasses in the photo.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, he was wearing glasses in the photo, which you're not allowed to do in an Australian passport photo, someone pointed out. So so that was clearly fake. And you know, we got we found out where he was living in Shanghai and all of that. So he's, you know, if anyone's listening and is interested in why a fraudster is living in China, it's because he was involved in a lot of corrupt belt and road infrastructure deals involving China after the 1MDB fraud. And so that's why he's given protection in China to continue living there, basically. He knows where the bodies are buried when it comes to Chinese corruption.
SPEAKER_01:Right, right. So most of his assets, or all of his assets, I think, were sold off, right? The physical assets, that is. Um, but uh towards the end of your book, you you you do note that the that he still had the boat, but uh I don't believe he's got that anymore, right?
SPEAKER_02:No, no. So what you're referring to is like uh the the US Department of Justice seized one and a half billion dollars of assets, I think, or actually might have been closer to two billion dollars of assets. This is stuff like the the this is a civil suit, not a criminal suit against him. Uh it was called the US versus the Wolf of Wall Street, because he actually went over after the proceeds of the film that Jolo Jolo became great powers with Leonardo DiCaprio. He you know funded uh the Wolf of Wall Street. So they they seized all those assets, you know, mansions in LA, uh hotels, uh his his stake in EMI music publishing, you know, he had all this all these businesses. Um and then the process of that, a lot of that flowed back to Malaysia in a settlement. Uh and then, of course, there were criminal actions against him too. So he's still wanted in he's still wanted in Malaysia, in the US, and in actually in Singapore, um, for for criminal indictments.
SPEAKER_01:Right, right. Okay. Well, hopefully one day he'll have to answer to them. But um uh in the meantime, uh I guess you've been probably sued by quite a few of the people or organizations that you mentioned in the in the book. How many, how many is it to date? We haven't been sued by anybody. Oh, you haven't been sued by anybody.
SPEAKER_02:It's very hard to sue someone if everything's correct, you know. I mean, uh so so we know we've we we from billion dollar well, we did not receive uh a single um defamation suit, um, which I honestly I'm quite proud of because it's almost 400 pages of of a nonfiction book. And it was as like I said earlier, it was very stressful because you know, you every time you say something, it has to be backed up with with documents and facts, right? The Maulberger story we're doing now, we have had a lot more legal action.
SPEAKER_01:Right. And we're gonna come to that in uh part two of this uh this podcast. But to close out this uh this first uh uh episode with you, I've heard rumors that they're maybe making the billion dollar whale into a movie or TV series. Any any any truth in that?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, yeah. So um it's it's a movie. Oh, it's gonna be a movie. Yeah, it's a movie. It's it's the script is fantastic. It's it's completed and uh can't talk too much about the the details of the package that's being put together, but but the script is is fantastic. Um it's written by a screenwriter who who wrote War Dogs, which is the um the Jonah Hill movie and Miles Teller movie about uh guys who who take uh sell arms into Iraq and it's a sort of like a dark comedy. So it's got that it's got that sort of dark comedy feel to it, uh the billion dollar whale script that we have. And it yeah, it's gonna be a fantastic movie. Do we know who's gonna star as Jolo? No, no, no, no, no, no casting uh secrets available yet, but it's um it's gonna be a great movie. It's just you know, these things take uh about twice as long as you'd imagine they were gonna take when it's only imagined.
SPEAKER_01:Will you have involvement in as you know?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, so that's so our business uh Project Brazen, yes, that we've built, which is a TV and film business, it came out of selling the rights to billion dollar whale to another company, SK Global, who were our partners in many of the shows we're developing. Um SK Global famously did uh Crazy Rich Asians. Uh, they were the producers of that movie, if people remember that from 2018. Yes. And uh yeah, we we sort of started to learn about the Hollywood adaptation process from being journalists and writers. And that's why we set up Brazen that you know does podcasts mainly, but we also still do books and and long-form magazine articles. We have our own online magazine called The Foundry, and all of what we do is like amazing stories that we think would have uh adaptation potential.
SPEAKER_01:Yes, well, I I particularly like the uh whale hunting subdomain of your website. Uh it's one that I look at regularly, and also your your weekly newsletter, uh, which I think Bradley uh um uh uh puts out. Puts out on the weekend. Yeah, the roundup of other media. Which is superb. And I do encourage anybody listening to go to uh um is it brazen.com.
SPEAKER_02:Uh yeah, if you want to if you want to subscribe to whale hunting, it's whalehunting.projectbrazen.com.
SPEAKER_01:Whalehunting.projectbrazen.com.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, and that's our that's where it's sort of like we have an outlet for the journalism we still do. So when we're not producing TV shows and films, you know, we still we still do our original journalism there.
SPEAKER_01:Right. And of course we encourage all our listeners to hit the like or subscribe button on this podcast on whatever platform you happen to be listening to. It really helps us to get the message out there with these important stories. And we uh obviously thank you for listening. And uh Tom, I really uh appreciate you know your your your giving up time here in Singapore to have a chat with us, and I'm looking forward to uh the second session where we'll dig into some more of your investigation since uh the billion dollar one when it was published. Famous Cybernova was presented by myself Paul Jackson, the studio engineer and editor was Money Penny More, the executive producer was myself and Ian Cumblis, and this podcast is a co-production between Famous Cyber and the Worldcast Studio in Dubai.