THEOS Cybernova

Tom Wright: Following the Money and Billion Dollar Whales Pt 2

• Theos CyberNova • Season 2 • Episode 16

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What happens when global systems are misused at massive scale?

In Part 2 of the two-part Season 2 finale of THEOS Cybernova, host Paul Jackson continues his conversation with investigative journalist Tom Wright, co-author of The Billion Dollar Whale.

This episode looks at how financial and digital systems are exploited to enable modern corruption. Wright explains how crypto crime has changed the mechanics of fraud, allowing Southeast Asia scams to scale through weak controls and fragile on- and off-ramps.

The conversation also covers Havana Syndrome, the challenge of reporting on investigations that are still unfolding, and the pressure that comes with scrutinizing powerful people and institutions.

A strong close to Season 2—and a reminder that many of today’s cyber risks are rooted in systems that outpace accountability.

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

SPEAKER_00:

This week on the Theo Cybernova podcast.

SPEAKER_02:

We would never rely on AI to do reporting, but we use it actually to help bolster our reporting. I do think that the world for criminals has changed significantly with the advent of Bitcoin. Crypto is clearly, I mean, don't need to tell you, it's got a massive use case for criminals. People know about the scam economy. I think everyone knows someone who got scammed, right?

SPEAKER_00:

The Theos Cybernova Podcast, hosted by Paul Jackson.

SPEAKER_01:

Welcome to the second of our two-part episode to close out season two of Theos Cybernova Podcast. I'm here again with Tom Wright, the co-author of the acclaimed best-selling book, The Billion Dollar Whale. And in this episode, we'll be diving into the post-billion dollar whale work, which includes fascinating topics such as the Havana syndrome, crypto heists, corruption in Thailand, Cambodia, and an alleged vendetta in Indonesia. Phew. Thanks for continuing the conversation, Tom, and uh welcome back. Good to have. Good to be here. Well, to start this episode, I'd like to go back and just revisit again your journey to the beginning of Project Brazer and your relationship with the with Bradley Hope. And it must have been a bold step for you to leave presumably pretty well-paid jobs with uh, you know, Wall Street Journal to go it alone. Well paid. It was journalism, let's not forget.

SPEAKER_02:

Okay, fair enough. But yeah, no, okay, no, I'm being facetious. It was a great place to work and really loved my time. I was over 20 years there at Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal, so it's a fantastic workplace. And yeah, it was more that, you know, Bradley and I had formed this amazing partnership at a journal. He's 10 years younger than me, American guy, I'm British. I was on a tram in Hong Kong, sitting on the the top floor when he called me for the first time ever, saying, Hey, I see you're working on this one MDB story. This is for the newspaper, and he and I know Abu Dhabi, and I've seen that there's a big element of money of the money that was stolen moving through the Middle East. That's how that's how I got to know him. There was a worrying moment where I'd quit, as I said in the in the first part of our conversation, I quit the journal to go public speaking. And then that all kind of imploded during uh COVID. And then I decided to set up the company. And I was waiting for Bradley to quit the journal, and I was hoping, you know, he was going to do so. And he didn't do it. And I was like, oh, Bradley, come on, we've got to do this. And eventually he did. And uh in 2021, we set up Brazen. We we initially called it Project Brazen, we're now calling it just Brazen. It's been fantastic. We've uh in the last five years, we've created, you know, over 20 pieces of what we call intellectual property, which are basically like podcasts or books. Uh Bradley wrote a fantastic book called Blood and Oil uh about Mohamed bin Salman in the Middle East. And, you know, we've won awards for our podcasts in our journalism, won awards for for Havana Syndrome, for Kabul Falling, for uh Fat Leonard. You know, you can go you can go and listen to all these for free on Spotify or on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts, basically. Yeah, and we are developing a slate of movie and TV shows and documentaries based on these these pieces of IP.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, they're they're awesome. And I do encourage, because obviously this is an Asia Pacific focused podcast. And I I do hope that our listeners out there will check out your site and subscribe to your your valuable words, a very nominal fee, I think six dollars a month or something to get the full.

SPEAKER_02:

I think it's free if you want it to be. There are subscriber benefits if you want to this is for the podcast. You can subscribe to Brazen Plus and you get early access and some subscriber-only content. But yeah, no, this is this is something that everyone can just subscribe to for free.

SPEAKER_01:

Right. And as a reminder to the uh to the listeners, the the website is uh projectbrazen.com and there is a subdomain over whalehunting.projectbrazen.com, which has a lot of your ongoing interests. Yeah, whale hunting is where we're breaking news and uh giving you giving you weekend tips for what to listen to. And there are dizzying number of exposes, if you can call it that, on the site. But how do you you know, because obviously you you must have people reaching out to you from all over. How do you prioritize? You've you've only got so many hours in the day. How do you prioritize you know what you want to investigate? Well, you turn down a lot of stuff.

SPEAKER_02:

Uh-huh. Yeah. I mean, there's the I mean, honestly, like you get a lot of I mean, somebody I I won't go into details, but somebody got in touch with me over the Justice Weekends saying there'd been this massive corruption scandal in a in a national sports federation. Just leave it at that, right? And it sounds pretty interesting. And I think, you know, if I was a sports reporter with time on my hands to do that, I'd do it. But I just don't have the the bandwidth to do it. And we're not, we're not a full newspaper, you know, with the with the time to really investigate everything. So we would really take on stories that we think are like either very important or with a huge impact on the institution or a country. And then also, to be honest, we'll do it because it has great narrative potential. That's really one of the things we look for. So great characters and a great three-act structure.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. Interesting. And uh, how do you and Bradley hope divide the responsibilities then?

SPEAKER_02:

Well, Bradley's really the CEO of the company. He's uh more of a business-minded person. So he's uh thinking about what kind of business lines we're in, how we develop those. He's actually very good with uh new technology. And I'm I don't know if this is a 10-year, he's like an older millennial and I'm Gen X, right? So or it could just be skill sets. But anyway, he's very good at using AI, uh figuring out how we we use that to develop things. We don't we would never rely on AI to do reporting, but we use it um as we discussed in the first section to help bolster our reporting. So he's very he's very, very good at that, but we kind of have a skunk, skunk works division that uh develops a lot of new products. And I'm really like the sort of head creative guy. So I'm like thinking about how we're developing stories, what kind of structures we're using to tell those stories, uh, what kind of podcasts we're doing, what kind of magazine articles we're doing.

SPEAKER_01:

Now let's switch gears and talk about some of your investigations because obviously this is a technical uh podcast, uh cyber podcast. And you could call me an old cynic as an ex-cop, even in my work with Theos Cyber. I I seldom take things at face value. I always want to, you know, have evidence and proof. But I'm really interested in the work that you've done on what is dubbed the Havana syndrome. And now I I always thought in the past, I'd heard about it before, right? And I always thought this was a tinfoil hat kind of thing, you know, where you know people were making stuff up or it was just uh coincidences or whatever. But you've been really reporting quite heavily on this recently. Um, can you explain what the Havana syndrome actually means and why your research is uncovering perhaps more details on this rather scary sounding threat?

SPEAKER_02:

Well, Havana syndrome is called Havana syndrome because it was first noticed in in Havana, Cuba. It was a mysterious illness which hit US service people. This was like State Department employees at the at the embassy, CIA employees working undercover at the at the US Embassy in Havana. And they started to complain about headaches that were very, very debilitating. You know, they would a number of people had to leave the service and go into retirement because they were they were unable to work because of these debilitating head headaches. So it was permanent. Uh it was permanent. Then started to affect a number of other service people, State Department, CIA, and others, uh military around the world at different US outposts, Shenzhen, Europe. And the the theory was that this these were uh attacks by a invisible weapon developed by the Russians, uh sonic attacks. So that the the they would like um You see, this is where the tinfoil hatbit comes in a bit, isn't it? Well, I gotta say, I gotta say, I'm sort of, you know, as we uh the way we divide our work, I wasn't actually that involved with the the Havana syndrome podcast, so I may be describing this slightly broad brush strokes, but the the sufferers were not believed. That's the sort of bottom line that that this was like psychosomatic, where they they had been making this up. Nikki Wolf, who was the so the way the way the Brayson's podcasts often work is that we will partner with other journalists who have projects. And Nikki's a great British journalist. He wanted to do this project, and we fund it and work with him to develop it. It won awards the podcast for its soundscape. We were we were able to sort of like replicate the pain of the of the sound that these people say that they're suffering from. What we were able to uncover in the podcast was we we didn't definitively say whether it was true or not, but we did come across the fact that the US had developed these weapons in the 90s. It wasn't just the Russians developing it, it was also the US. And then just in the last few weeks, CNN reported that I mean, I think this is about a month ago, CNN reported that the CIA have claimed to have purchased one of these devices from the Russians. So so you you know, using uh interesting. Obviously not out in the open, but the CIA managed to purchase one. You know, there was a there was another also a Russian operative arrested in Florida on the highway with some kind of device in his backseat. And it's all very it's all very sort of mysterious, but it looks like this is a real undeclared warfare between the US and and Russia using these sound waves, basically, to create headache.

SPEAKER_01:

In your report, you say that you state that this is a a really expensive piece of tech. But is there a danger perhaps that advances such as AI could help develop this to be a more affordable tool for terrorists or organized crime groups?

SPEAKER_02:

Aaron Powell I honestly don't know the answer to that. It's not great if you're progressing, I don't know, but I really don't know. But but um I'd I'd say the only the only thing that we've learned recently is that it seems that it's been it's clear that it's been developed.

unknown:

Right.

SPEAKER_02:

And it is real.

SPEAKER_01:

Aaron Powell Well, I I I mean anybody who looks at your website or the whale hunting part of it anyway will notice that there are many follow-ups on this. So you know you've done you know quite a few follow-ups. So it's obviously a hot topic on on your on your end.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, because you know, we are a developer documentary. It's a it's a great, it's a great subject for a documentary. And one and one of the issues we had with it was that the third act hadn't been written. And that's often one of our challenges at Brazen is that we're doing these stories that are really still bubbling along. So when you pitch them to you know to Netflix or Amazon or whoever, whomever, they're like, well, what's the what's the third act closure of this thing? And you're like, well, it's still ongoing. And you've got to find the right balance there because if you do stories that are very historical, it's also hard to sell them into Hollywood because people say, Well, why do you want to do that 70s story now? You know, like what's the what's the point? And also historical stuff is expensive to make, right? If you have it ongoing or being very, very current, that's a good sell. But you've also got to figure out how you how you would tie up the fictional version of it, or even or even the non-fiction documentary version.

SPEAKER_01:

So in some ways, your career has uh branched almost from, you know, obviously more factual investigative journalism to trying to be creative as well, you know, to try and uh Yeah, I think that there's you know, there's truth in fictional versions of stories.

SPEAKER_02:

You can do the a very bad adaptation that sort of takes huge liberties and and that that's not good. But I think if you do an adaptation of a true story in a in a good way and in a sophisticated way, it could actually enhance the truth. And also you're just gonna reach a much larger audience. I talked about that earlier about attention. Yes. A book like Billion Dollar Well, you know, sold a lot of copies, but a film version of it will get to many more people.

SPEAKER_01:

Okay. Well, I'm definitely looking forward to seeing the film version. Um anyway, okay. So so switching to another topic then that you um uh that you focused on in your reporting, it was around Venezuela, which of course has been you know, talking about topical is extremely topical at the moment. But one of the things from our point of view uh on this podcast is uh looking at how money gets laundered through cryptocurrencies and how the criminal organized crime groups use it, etc. It, you know, as I say, it's a core focus for us, and indeed was the subject of a recent Theos Cybernova podcast uh that we made with UC Atola from the uh Sphere State group, whose company traces crypto assets, which is not an easy thing to do. Um so Venezuela was back in the news recently, and in connection with a bit of a Bitcoin mystery, because back in 2018, Maduro, the president, they made headlines by launching the first state-backed cryptocurrency called the Petro, which was backed by Venezuela's vast oil reserves. And now speculation exists that the crypto assets linked to this could be in the tens of billions of US dollar uh value. You've been investigating who may control these assets. Um so can you update us on how you do this and the and the latest status?

SPEAKER_02:

Well, again, you've caught me on a story that's more of Bradley's and not mine, so I'm not I'm not deep in the weeds on this, but this is a there was a fascinating connection between an earlier podcast we did, Fat Leonard, and this this story, which was there's a there's this interesting character called Alex Saab, who was Maduro's bagman, basically. He he's not a Venezuelan, he's a Colombian. Um and he was arrested in, I think, the Cape Verde Islands by the Americans and wanted for being sort of like a drug, uh drug mule or a money mule for for the Maduro regime. And Bradley, sorry, that guy was arrested. He was eventually a prisoner swapped with Fat Leonard, who's uh it gets pretty complicated, but Fat Leonard was the subject of another podcast we did called Fat Leonard. He's a guy who corrupted the U.S. Navy, was a contractor for the US Navy, threw big parties for admirals, including orgies and gifts for their wives and all this kind of stuff, huge national security risk for America, was arrested and went on the run to Venezuela, was arrested in the US, went on the run to Venezuela, was rearrested in Venezuela, and then prisoner swapped for this guy, Alex Saab. And uh so the Americans got Fat Leonard back, and he's in jail in San Diego, and Maduro got Alex Saab back. Why did he want Alex Saab back so badly? Well, he was he knew all the secrets of the Maduro regime. This guy Alex Saab did.

SPEAKER_01:

How did he get involved with it in the first place?

SPEAKER_02:

I'm not so sure about what Alex Saab's original connection to Maduro is, but he and then what Bradley's been reporting on more recently is is his role, uh Alex Saab's role in the crypto, potential crypto fortune. And, you know, in Whale Hunting, Bradley uh put out a post recently that did very, very well, got huge readership, that that the Maduro regime could be one of the biggest holders of Bitcoin in the world, uh, with Alex Saab playing a huge role. And that's why Maduro was so keen to get Alex Saab back to Venezuela and did that prisoner swap for him.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, that that's a pretty crazy story. Obviously, as we as we were aware, you know, if if it's not your key, it's not your money, is the uh is the sort of saying in in crypto. And who actually holds that key is is gonna be a very interesting story, right?

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, I mean, I I again I'm not a crypto expert, but um I do think that the the world for criminals has changed significantly with the the advent of of Bitcoin. If you look back at the 1MDB scandal, you know, Jolo had to move money in the old-fashioned way, right? He took over Swiss banks and he f he found failing Swiss banks so he could take them over with his cronies and then have ways to move money in the in the Benjamin Malberger story that we've been talking about over the last episode and and we'll talk about more today. You know, this South African who was washing billions for the for the for the crypto scams in Cambodia, they are relying much more on crypto to move money around. And crypto is clearly, I mean, don't need to tell you, it's got a massive use case for criminals.

SPEAKER_01:

Oh, 100%, yes. Um it would be interesting if the uh if the one MDB scandal had actually happened later, wouldn't it? To see to see how that you know the the fund transfers would have differed.

SPEAKER_02:

Or or to find out what, you know, Jolo's still sitting on billions of dollars of stolen money. He didn't give it all back. And how much is he using crypto today? I'd say a lot, right? We don't know. We don't have any reporting on that, but I'd say he's sitting in China, and you know, I've heard rumors that he's helping, you know, uh move Iranian oil in the past, you know, and and that that all involves crypto these days as well.

SPEAKER_01:

Very interesting stuff. Um, yeah, there's uh sadly there's a lot of uh use cases around crypto in the underground economy. And talking about the underground economy, uh in another recent podcast on the Theos Cybernova, we interviewed a guy called Steve Santarelli, whose work with Team Cymru in the US sheds light on the underground economy and organized crime groups who are responsible for the plethora of scams that we see online. So this obviously brings us to something we've been alluding to throughout the these these two-part podcasts, that one of your recent major investigations sheds light on the Chinese Cambodian scam centers and how the proceeds are laundered. And so can you tell us more about this and and what triggered your investigation in the first place?

SPEAKER_02:

So these this is like one of the biggest cases of malfusiness at the moment. Or should you just say corruption? Don't need to use big words, right? So yeah, I was I'm always getting told off by Bradley for being British and using these these uh these words, like the French, the French borrowed words that English people like to people know about the scam economy. I think everyone knows someone who got scammed, right? This is you know, the phone calls you get that are very irritating if you live here in Singapore or anywhere, I suppose, like saying and US estimates that about$200 billion a year is lost in in savings to these scams, which is larger than the annual revenues of General Motors or Ford. I mean, it's incredible. They often target lonely people. Um they have a romance element to them. The the people who are carrying out the scams are also victims. These are typically Africans or Asians who are lured to Cambodia with the promise of what they think are good white-collar jobs, maybe at like four times their last salary. Maybe they're gonna make 40 grand a year, six, fifty grand a year. So they're lured there. When they get there, they find that they're virtual slaves kept in these compounds behind barbed wire. Right, their passports taken away. Passports taken away under fictional debts, or we paid for your flights here or whatever. And then they're they're sort of tasered and forced to work 17 hours on the phones scamming. And the biggest part of this scam, you know, there's a sextortion part, which is teenagers in America sending nude photos onto what they think is a sex site and then getting extorted, and there have been suicides. But the largest part is like fake crypto. Oh, you know, look at my Maserati, look at me, I'm a beautiful woman, I've I've invested in this, you should invest. Fake, fake crypto sites that then lure you in to invest, look like you've made some money on the site digitally, but it's just a whole fake site, and then eventually you lose real, real money. You put real money in and you lose, you lose it. The way that then works is that the the crypto is is stolen, it's exchanged for maybe 80 cents on a dollar with one of these companies in Cambodia, these money changes like Huen, that's now shut down. And then you have this, you have cash, you have US dollar cash, which is maybe dollars at tourists brought in, I don't know, visiting anchor what or something. Then you have to do something with that, those dollars. Okay. That's where this guy, Benjamin Maulberger, comes in. And as I as I mentioned in the first part of this conversation, he he came on our radar because he was buying, you know,$30,$40 million planes for Cambodian princelings. That's how he came on our radar. His job, Maulberger's job, former boiler room operator, was to help move the billions of dollars that were getting stolen from these scams. The way he did it was they set up a bank in Cambodia called Bic Bank. You won't find Maulberger's name on any of the ownership documents, but him and his Cambodian partner, Yim Leek, owned that bank. And then, you know, when the crypto was exchanged into those dollars, it was taken into the bank and it was that was into the system. And it it was moved into Thailand via a correspondent banking relationship with Casicorn Bank. And then they had oodles of cash to start bribing everyone in Thailand to to to help to launder this huge amount of cash. At the beginning, they were taking suitcases on private planes with with chains around them. How do you know that? Without getting into the sources, just yeah, we know it. Okay. Yeah. You gotta protect the sources, but yeah, this is all this is all this all firsthand. And uh I wouldn't say this stuff without without being backed up. Once it was in Thailand, the m the huge amounts of money, I think this was, you know, Maulberg himself was showing off that he had four billion dollars of assets, which makes you real these these scams really took off after cr after COVID as well.

SPEAKER_01:

Um so well, I I saw a lot because as a as a former cop, you know, a lot of victims uh who felt they weren't getting support from the police would come to companies like like The Os, you know, and and um try to get help with recouping the money they'd lost, etc., which of course is uh a fantasy, unfortunately, is gone. Or class action lawsuits as well. Yeah, but you know what, it it's it's so difficult, you know. And you know, you feel very sorry because there's very little sympathy. Um, I think, you know, people typically say, How could you be so stupid to fall for something like that? And that's really uh insulting, I think, to the to the victims, because these scams are very clever, they're very compelling, and they play on psychology so very well. And you know, I can understand why there is these huge sums that you talk about, but four billion? That's an eye-watering amount.

SPEAKER_02:

Well, it was yeah, I mean, uh like I said, if if 200, if well, so they're working on the assumption that uh in America that only 5% of these kinds of cases ever get reported. You know, it's quite shameful to admit it. And, you know, so that's how they come to the 200 billion estimate. Um, it's so it's huge. What this meant was that Maulberger, so Benjamin Maulberger, a South African from Cape Town, grew up in Cape Town, best private school, and um went to Bishop's school in in Cape Town, ran boiler rooms in the 2000s, early 2000s in Bangkok. There was a big one called the Brinton Group, you might remember from your from your police days that was shut down. He he has this history of escaping every time. So his his his friends or his co-conspirators would always go to jail and he would escape. And anyway, he's world narrowed, couldn't travel to various countries because of all this boiler and past, and he ends up he ends up sort of getting this Cambodian diplomatic passport and playing this huge role for the um, we should say the scam centers are uh run by Chinese mafia.

unknown:

Yes.

SPEAKER_02:

They're not run by Cambodians. The Cambodians is a sort of lawless country that the Chinese Mafia is able to operate in. And in this case, in Maulenberger's case, uh the scam centers were run by a guy called Deng Pubing and his company, Zhengheng. They had they had gone in and tried to build this huge tourism resort under with Chinese money, under the Belt and Road Infrastructure Project. From China, it takes up about a third of Cambodia's coastline and totally failed. Nobody wanted to go on holiday there, just empty buildings. And it ended up becoming and this this is true of a lot of these, you know, Schnoopville, all the casinos didn't work out and ended up becoming scam centers. So that was the that's the genesis of how these scam centers developed and the mafia move in and they run these scam centers with the with the slaves. Maoberger then became very powerful in Thailand, the neighboring country to Cambodia, because he had so much money at his disposal and needed to launder it. So he ends up helping Tax and Shinawat come back to power, who's obviously the former Prime Minister of Thailand, who'd been in exile for corruption for many years, had come back. And Maoberger became very important to him because he's has the financing for his political comeback, including some of the parties in his coalition. So that's basically what Maoberger did. Maoberger was turning up at cabinet meetings in Thailand and telling the finance minister of Thailand, I outrank you. And that because he had so much money and he plowed that into Thailand's system. So Thailand was on the precipice of becoming a captured state, much like Cambodia is. And, you know, I'm proud of our reporting because we exposed it. And Maoberger is now on, I say he's on the run. He's not indicted, but he had to leave Thailand. He's now in Dubai, as far as we know.$300 million of assets were seized by the Thai authorities, including a boat that he owned, another hundred million boat that he owns now in Dubai in the harbor there, which is something we're seeing more and more of Dubai playing this role for people who are otherwise wanted elsewhere. And this is all down to your reporting. Yeah, no one else has reported about him. So yeah, we're we're proud of what we did. And in Thailand, they've got elections coming up next month in February. And this is a huge this is playing a huge role, this realization in Thailand, you know, a country with a lot of smart people, a lot of real industry, that their governing class and their political system was basically taken over by this scam center money. And if you look at the border war that's been going on between Thailand and Cambodia, you'll see that the TIE is recently have been, Thai Air Force has been blowing up Cambodia's scam centers. Part of what's going on is that the current prime minister is trying to distance himself from Maoberger by saying, look, we're attacking these scam centers, and this is a Cambodian problem, and Maoberger is a Cambodian problem. But ignoring the fact that he he got so high up inside the Thai system.

SPEAKER_01:

Very interesting. You told me earlier that you know you you're a keen cyclist, obviously, and that you may be planning on going to Thailand. Are you happy about that?

SPEAKER_02:

Well, yeah, I mean, I like I said, um we talked about safety earlier, right? I think I didn't receive any threats on this, uh, this story at all, like in terms of stop doing this or we'll get you. Nothing like that happened. But we did receive a lot of um legal threats. So one was from the Deputy Prime Minister of Thailand who threatened me with an interpol red notice arrest. It never materialized. And then, you know, is we should talk about the crypto element of this, because we got we got a lot of well, we didn't get lawsuits, but we got cease and desist emails, which is like the the kind of cheap way to do it when you don't have much of a case. Qcoin. So Qcoin is a crypto company, crypto exchange. Maurberger, when he became very powerful, it wasn't good enough anymore to take bags of cash in private planes or to move it via this big bank that's now shut down. So he was what he was looking to do was create an on-off ramp between crypto and the and the finance system. Yes, which is always the challenge, isn't it? Well, do you want to explain to people what an on-off ramp is, actually?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, certainly. It's the it's the challenge of actually, you know, moving the the crypto uh funds which have been gained illicitly through uh the scams or through ransomware in our world or or whatever it might be into actual money, real money, I suppose you call it fiat fiat money. And those on-off ramps are very difficult because there should be KYC in place, know your customer, and increasingly there is pressure on exchanges to make sure they understand who their clients are, that they shouldn't be allowing the uh um the laundering of uh criminal proceeds. Right.

SPEAKER_02:

So the way Maoberger got around that was it's it's it's really incredible, is that he teamed up with a crypto company called Qcoin and they illegally took over a Thai financial institution called Financia. And what they were looking for is an on-off ramp. You know, he's talking to all of the people at that time, like obsessed with creating this on-off ramp. So Maoberger used his wife, his ex-wife, his Cambodian partner to buy up a stake in this company, Financia. He then offloaded it to this crypto company, Qcoin. Qcoin last year was fined$300 million in the US for allowing various criminal actors to use its exchange. It's quite quite a big exchange at one point. Not as big as Binance, but but fairly big. Um it's now banned from operating in the US because of that. Iranians, we were able to prove that Iranians have used Qcoin to move money uh in contrahension of sanctions. And yeah, they basically, along with along with Qcoin, he was able to take over this finance institution, creating this on-off ramp. And even more extraordinarily, he was able to set Thailand's digital policy. So Maulberger was involved in writing digital laws in Thailand. I mean, you know, for example, it's illegal to do online sports betting in Thailand, but they created a sandbox, uh, a regulatory area where they could do that. And he he got uh 500 visas that he was able to he never did this, but he he got the right to bring in worker, IT workers under these 500 visa program. And this is all part of his attempt to create this on-off ramp for crypto because he needed to move so much illicit crypto. And it's just incredible that that that that got so high. Anyway, going back to the the legal thing, QQine sent us uh a cease and desist. Retract everything you've said about us, or we will sue you. And what what what we've been doing is we've been publishing those cease and desists, which is probably not what any lawyer would tell you to do, but it's been our, you know, we're a small company and that's our way to sort of like say, look, you're trying to terrorize us, but everything we've said is true. Here's the the cease and desist. And we put it out and let our readers kind of make their own decision about whether they think we're lying or not. And until now, the cease and desists haven't led to an actual lawsuit. So it's really just like an attack dog attempt by their in-house lawyers to get us to stop looking at them.

SPEAKER_01:

Interesting, interesting story. And again, I encourage uh, you know, all the the listeners to check out the full story on your on your website. Uh a couple more questions before we close up and uh thank you again for uh spending the time with us today. It's been absolutely fascinating. But you know, you talk a lot about the dark side and these, you know, I keep referring to eye-watering sums of of of money. I mean, you know so much about this. Not tempted to go to the dark side?

SPEAKER_02:

What, take a bribe to not do something? Well, I uh without naming a name, I'll say very, very, a very, very wealthy person has tried to bribe me recently, you know, to write something that would be in their favor, and I ignored it. Look, I mean, we we're all reading the news these days and feel like a lot of things that we thought were carved in stone about how we operate as societies are uh aren't carved in stone. Without getting into that, we haven't got time to get into all of that. But just at a very high level, I'd say a lot of us feel like when we're hanging out with our friends or families that the people are good. But then when we look at things like on a from 10,000 feet, it looks bad. It looks corrupt, right? I guess what I'm trying to say is that bigger, bigger systems are where the corruption happens. And that's where you feel, you know, bigger countries, bigger amounts of money, bigger crypto companies, that's when it's easy to make like a what you might call an evil decision. Whereas when things are small and devolved, they just seem to be better and more healthy.

SPEAKER_01:

I don't know if I'm making sense, but that's my You are, you are, and I'm glad you have this sense of ethics and what's right and wrong, because um, yeah, quite honestly, we need that. And uh, you know, as as we close out this this episode, I I do have to congratulate you on your uh on your tremendous work. I mean, and I'm really you know honored that you spent the time with me uh today to to talk about all of this. Um as I say, there's much, much more to uh to what the work that you're doing than in our brief discussions over these these two podcasts. I'm sure our audience will be uh you know checking out your your works and hopefully following you moving forward just as I am. But I always close out uh the podcasts um and I haven't primed you on this, by the way, so uh this will come a bit out of the blue, but I always, you know, the the work we do, well both of us do, is can be quite stressful. My way of decompressing is is to listen to music. I'm a real music fan, I've got a big hi-fi setup, etc. Um, read a book whilst uh you know listening to music. So I always like to ask my guests what what music they listen to. And I'm sure you you must have uh eclectic music taste, but what's currently on your playlist?

SPEAKER_02:

Uh oh, so what did I have in my Apple Music 2025? Uh the weekend I listen to a lot.

SPEAKER_01:

The weekend, okay.

SPEAKER_02:

I like the weekend. I like Frank Ocean. Right. So my my teenage daughter got me into Frank Ocean, and I I really like him. And then my son, who's uh middle schooler, he got me into a liver pudlian rapper called SD Kid. Like me. Black blacked out like a phantom. Do you listen to this while you're cycling? No, I don't. People are using those G Shock uh, you know, those bone um conducting things to cycle with, but I think it's pretty dangerous. No, no. This is uh running only. But yeah, those are but the weekend is really my favorite thing to listen to, yeah, if I'm going for a run.

SPEAKER_01:

All right, Tom. Well, uh thank you once again for joining us on these podcasts. Um one more reminder, uh, you know, please don't forget to hit that like and subscribe button on whatever platform that you're listening to, and we will keep you updated with news of season three after we take a break for a couple of months. And I promise you that we're gonna start that season with a bang. Thank you so much for joining us, Tom. Thank you. Theos Cybernova was presented by myself, Paul Jackson. The studio engineer and editor was Manny Penny Mora. The executive producer was myself and Ian Carlos. And this podcast is a co-production between Theos Cyber and W4 Podcast Studio in Dubai.