Following the Money and Billion Dollar Whales

Connect with Tom Wright: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tom-wright-819888a1/

About Project Brazen: https://projectbrazen.com/

Whale Hunting: https://whalehunting.projectbrazen.com/

Connect with Paul Jackson: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacksonhk/

Connect with THEOS Cyber: https://www.linkedin.com/company/theos-cyber/

Connect with THEOS Cybernova: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/theos-cybernova/

Paul Jackson: 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 bestselling book The Billion Dollar Whale. 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.

Thanks for continuing the conversation, Tom, and welcome back.

Tom Wright: Good to be here.

Paul Jackson: Well, to start this episode, I’d like to go back and just revisit again your journey to the beginning of Project Brazen and your relationship with it with Bradley Hope, it must have been a bold step for you to leave presumably pretty well-paid jobs with Wall Street Journal to go it alone.

Tom Wright: Well-paid, it was journalism, let’s not forget.

Paul Jackson: Okay. Fair enough. But yeah.

Tom Wright: No, okay I am being facetious. It was a great place to work and really loved my time. I was over 20 years there. And I don’t regret any of it. But I think it was a time when you had to make a decision. And I think Bradley and I realised together that there was a model where instead of an institution backing us, or maybe despite our best efforts, trying to get in the way of our stories, was the way things can go sometimes with established media, we could go it alone.

He’s ten years younger than me, an American guy, I’m British. I was on a tram in Hong Kong, sitting with a friend at a dinner, and he said, do you know Bradley Hope? And I said, no. And he said, you should know him. And the next day I reached out to Bradley and within like a year we’ve written this, we started The Billion Dollar Whale together.

So that’s how I got to know him. There was a worrying moment where I quit as I said in the first part of this podcast. I quit the Journal and Bradley was still at The Journal. I was hoping, he was going to do so and he didn’t do it. I was like oh Bradley, come on, we got to do this together.

I was hoping, he was going to do so and he didn’t do it. I was like oh Bradley, come on, we got to do this together.

In 2021 we set up Brazen, initially called Project Brazen and we’re now calling it just Brazen. It’s the brainchild of both of us, it’s something we’ve been talking about for a long time. The journalism kind of grew out of The Billion Dollar Whale and the podcast network we then built and then we started doing the film and TV. So it’s got three parts really.

Yeah, now we are developing a slate of movie and TV shows and documentaries based on these pieces of investigative journalism. So it’s quite interesting. It’s a different model.

Paul Jackson: Yeah, they’re awesome. I do encourage because obviously this is an Asia Pacific focused podcast, I do encourage the listeners to really go and dig into some of the. There’s a dizzying amount of content there. But go and have a look at Project Brazen, because there is some amazing content there that is very relevant to the listeners.

Tom Wright: I think it’s free if you want it to be that there are subscriber benefits. If you want to. This is free. It’s not like you have to pay. We do have a subscriber model for whale hunting, which gives you some extra benefits. But yeah, the main content is all free.

Paul Jackson: Right, As a reminder to the listeners, the website is Project brazen.com and there is a subdomain of

whale hunting.project brazen.com

Tom Wright: Yeah, whale hunting is where we’re breaking news and giving you weekend tips for what to listen to.

Paul Jackson: There are a dizzying number of exposes, if you can call it that, on the site. But how do you because there’s clearly a risk, you know, going after powerful people and institutions, how do you how do you protect yourselves and your journalists from litigation?

Tom Wright: Well, you turned down a lot of stuff. I mean, honestly, like, you get I mean, I won’t go into details but you get these pitches, and sometimes they’re from whistleblowers, sometimes from people who’ve gone to the newspapers first, and for whatever reason, they feel they haven’t been able to get their story out. You’ve got to be very selective. You’ve got to be very selective about what you pursue because you can’t take all these stories. Number one, you don’t have the resources. And number two, some of them just don’t pass the bar of newsworthiness or where there’s a public interest, et cetera.

So we would really take on stories that we think are either very important or with huge impact on an audience. And also the ability to turn into something more than just a long form piece. The Havana Syndrome story is a great example, because we were able to turn it into a stunning podcast that won all these awards. We have the ability to use audio in a very different way than a newspaper would. Similarly, the fat Leonard story, people love it because it’s fun. It’s unbelievable, you know.

Paul Jackson: Yeah. Interesting and how do you and Bradley divide the responsibilities then or?

Tom Wright: Bradley’s already the CEO of the company. He’s more business minded person. So he’s thinking about where we’re going commercially and building out the film and TV side. I sort of head up a lot of the journalism and also some of the film TV deals from a journalistic point of view.

Paul Jackson: Now let’s switch gears and talk about some of your investigations, because obviously this is a technology and cybersecurity-based podcast. So, let’s first talk about the Havana Syndrome investigation. Because some people might not be familiar with it, can you summarise what it is for the listeners?

Tom Wright: Well, Havana syndrome is called Havana syndrome because it was first noticed in Havana, Cuba. It was first noticed when US spies there and some other officials started suffering from some kind of attack, where they were getting pain, mostly in their ears. And then there were they were losing the ability to process certain things, they were having memory issues.

Paul Jackson: So it was permanent.

Tom Wright: It was permanent, it then started to affect a number of other service people State Department, CIA and military in different places, Vienna, India. It was a very widespread phenomenon that’s affected, I think, over 1,500 Americans. The US government commissioned a report, which said it’s very unlikely to be psychological, which was the earlier view. So the earlier view was that this was some kind of mass hysteria that people were just imagining it and they basically said, no, that’s not what’s happening here.

Paul Jackson: So you see, this is where the tinfoil hat becomes a..

Tom Wright: Well, I got to say I’m sort of, as we.. the way we divide a work. I wasn’t actually that involved with the Havana Syndrome Podcast. So, I may be describing this slightly broad brush strokes, but the sufferers were not believed. That’s the sort of bottom line that this was like psychosomatic. But they had been making this up.

Nicky Wolf, who was, the way The Brazen Podcast often work is that we will partner with other journalists who have projects in the GIS, a great British journalist who wanted to do this project, we funded and worked with him to develop it. It won awards, the podcast for its soundscape.

We were able to sort of like replicate the pain of the sound that these people say that they’re suffering from. What we were able to uncover in the podcast, was 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 was also the US. Then, just in the last few weeks, there was a Russian operative arrested in Florida on the highway with it, with some kind of device that is consistent with what these attacks could be.

There was also a Russian operative arrested in Florida on the highway with it, with some kind of device that is consistent with what these attacks could be.

Paul Jackson: In your report, you state that this is a really expensive piece of tech, but is there a danger perhaps of a lower cost version?

Tom Wright: I honestly don’t know the answer to that. Yeah, it’s scary, it’s not all great for your podcast but it’s a great listen. So, I do encourage people to listen to it.

Paul Jackson: Well, I mean, anybody who looks at your website or the whale hunting part of it and you will notice that there is a disclaimer at the bottom, right, talking about potential legal or personal threats to the journalists, which suggests that you are all taking safety very seriously.

Tom Wright: Yeah. Because you know, we developed that documentary. It’s a great subject for a documentary. One of the challenges of selling into Hollywood, and this is my whole journey from journalism to film and TV. There are two challenges that I’ve noticed. One is you need the story you want to sell, it can’t have run its course. What I mean is if the trial is over and everybody knows the ending, it’s harder to get people excited about it.

If you do stories that are very historical, it’s also hard to sell them into Hollywood because people want something contemporary. So this is this tension that journalists like us face where we’re always breaking the story, but then you’ve kind of, by the time you break it, you’ve in a way, it’s slightly harder to sell it.

If you have it ongoing or being very current, that’s a good sell. But you’ve also got to figure out how you how you tie up the fictional version of it or even or even the nonfiction documentary version.

Paul Jackson: So, in some ways, your career is almost obviously more factual investigative journalism to trying to be creative as well, you know, to try

Tom Wright: Yeah, I think that there’s truth in fictional versions of stories. You can do a very bad adaptation that sort of takes huge liberties, and that’s not good. But I think if you do an adaptation of a true story in a good way and in a sophisticated way, it could actually enhance the truth. Also, you’re just going to reach a much larger audience. I talked about that earlier about attention, a book like Billion Dollar, well, it sold a lot of copies, but a film version of it will get to many more people.

Paul Jackson: Okay. Well, I’m definitely looking forward to seeing the film version then. Anyway. Okay, so switching gears now, you mentioned crypto, you know, the relevance of it, you know, there are obviously from our perspective, you know, huge criminal use cases around crypto. Can you sort of explain to us or touch on the two stories there around Venezuela and sort of crypto and money laundering and then the second one which is the Southeast Asia scam centres?

Tom Wright: But one of the things from our point of view, on this podcast, is looking at how money gets laundered in modern times. I think one of the things is that when you look at how financial crime has changed since The Billion Dollar Whale, crypto has changed everything.

So Venezuela was back in the news recently, and in connection with a bit of a Bitcoin mystery, because a guy called Alex Saab, who is a Colombian businessman, who was seen as one of Maduro’s main money men. So Nicolas Maduro, the Venezuelan dictator. Alex Saab was arrested and extradited by the US. And Bradley has been reporting on a story about some missing Bitcoin linked to that.

Tom Wright: Well, again, you’ve caught me on a story that’s more Bradleys now. Okay, so I’m not deep in the weeds on this one. But what I know is that

Basically, he’s not a Venezuelan. He’s a Colombian, he was arrested in, I think, the Cape Verde Islands, which is why this was quite an international incident when the US got him extradited and put it on trial.

Paul Jackson: How did the how did he get involved with it in the first place?

Tom Wright: I’m not so sure about what Alex Saab’s original connection Maduro is, and then what Bradley’s been reporting on, which is linked to the sort of missing Bitcoin or Bitcoin that’s alleged to have been used to move money around sanctions. And I think the story is still evolving there.

Paul Jackson: Yeah, that that’s a pretty crazy story obviously. As well as you know, if it’s not your key, it’s not your coin.

Tom Wright: Yeah, I mean again, I’m not a crypto expert but I do think that the world for criminals has changed dramatically since The Billion Dollar Whale. In The Billion Dollar Whale, Jho Low had to go to huge lengths to move the money around. He was using Goldman Sachs, he was using Swiss banks, it was not easy to move the money. He used shell companies but he still needed to launder it through the banking system.

We’ll talk about more today. This South African who was washing billions for the crypto scams in Cambodia. They are relying much more on crypto to move money around, and crypto is clearly… I need to tell you, it’s got a massive use case for criminals.

Paul Jackson: Oh, 100%. Yes, it would be interesting if the 1MDB scandal had actually happened later, wouldn’t it, to see how the fund transfers would have differed.

Tom Wright: Or to find out what you know, Jho Low is still sitting on billions of dollars of stolen money.

He didn’t give it all back, and how much is it 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. I’ve heard rumours that he’s helping move Iranian oil in the past and that all involves crypto these days as well.

Paul Jackson: Very interesting stuff. Suddenly, there’s a lot of use cases around crypto in the underground economy. So this is, and it does tie back to what I thought you were going to say earlier, which is around the Southeast Asia scam centres and the specific story around Benjamin Mauerberger. Tell us about that.

Tom Wright: So, obviously, it brings us to something we’ve been alluding to throughout these two-part podcasts, Southeast Asia scam centres. And this is linked to crypto. So, the way the pig butchering scam works to explain. You get a phone call. You probably got one just as I described in the first part, you get a phone call out of the blue, and this person you might then start to get WhatsApp messages and they present an investment opportunity, which in this case, involves crypto, because crypto is very hard to police, the on off ramps are hard, and it’s a great vehicle for a scam.

So this is like one of the biggest cases of malfeasance at the moment. Oh, actually, just say corruption at the moment, at least in Asia, maybe globally. The Southeast Asia scam centre business, where you have these basically camps where people are enslaved, forced to run these scams. So people are lured there.

Tom Wright: Right, you know the phone calls you get that are very irritating if you live here in Singapore or a. They’re all coming from these scam centres. These people running the scams are themselves victims.

So, they’re lured there. When they get there, they find that they’re virtual slaves kept in these compounds. They can’t leave. They have to run these scam operations and they are used to scam people.

Their passports taken away

Paul Jackson: They’re taken away under fictional debt. So we paid for your flights here or whatever, and then they’re held like sort of bonded labour.

Tom Wright: There have been suicides, but the largest part is like fake crypto, oh look at my Maserati. Look at my private jet. And they target they look for. I mean, think about it from a criminal point of view. You want to target people who are a little bit lonely, maybe not so sophisticated, but have money.

The way that it works is that the crypto is stolen. It’s exchanged for maybe $0.80 on the dollar with a money launderer. That money launderer then has these large dollar amounts of crypto and needs to get it into the banking system as real money.

That’s how he came on our radar. His job now, bogus job, former boiler room operator, was to help move the money. The way he does that is through on off ramps. So he teams up with some of the big crypto exchanges, who are willing to do it under the table.

And then you know, when the crypto is exchanged into those dollars, it was taken into the bank and into the banking system. So it’s a classic money laundering operation.

In the beginning they were taking suitcases on private planes with chains around them.

Paul Jackson: How do you know that?

Tom Wright: Without getting into the source, it’s just we know it. Yeah, you are to protect the sources. But yeah, we know it, and I think by the time we publish, we’ll be able to prove it.

Once it was in Thailand, the huge amounts of money, I think this was, Mauerberger himself was showing off photos of himself with all these cash, which is very stupid. And then once it got to Thailand, a lot of it went into real estate, went into, Thaksin’s political party, I think we reported that he was paying a cabinet minister who was basically from a coalition partner of Thaksin to protect him. Really just amazing corruption. It was really, so much just brazen corruption in the truest sense of the word.

Paul Jackson: Well, I saw a lot because as a former cop, a lot of victims who felt they weren’t getting support from the traditional channels, and they would come to me as a consultant to kind of help navigate these things. The thing that shocks most people is the amounts being stolen. You know, we talk about $4 billion being stolen in one financial year by one set of scam centres, right?

Tom Wright: Or class action lawsuits as well.

Paul Jackson: Yeah, but you know what is so difficult, you feel very sorry because there’s very little sympathy. It’s almost like they feel like the victim blaming that goes on is… because people assume the victim was greedy or naive. And it’s not that straightforward, is it, Tom?

Tom Wright: I can understand why there are these huge sums that you talk about. But 4 billion? That’s an eye-watering sum of money.

Paul Jackson: Well, yeah, I mean, like I said, if 200. Well so they’re working on the assumption that in America that only 5% of these kinds of cases ever get reported. It’s quite shameful to admit it. So that’s how they come to the 200 billion estimate; it’s huge. What this meant was that Mauerberger. So Benjamin Mauerberger, a South African from Cape Town, grew up in Cape Town, best private school and went to Bishop’s School in Cape Town, ran boiler rooms in the early 2000 in Bangkok. There was a big one called The Brinton Group. You might remember from your police days that it was shut down.

He has his history of escaping every time. So his friends or his co-conspirators would always go to jail and he would escape. And anyways, world narrowed. Couldn’t travel to various countries because of all the boiler and past, he ends up sort of getting his Cambodian diplomatic passport and playing this huge role for, we should say the scam centres are, run by Chinese mafia and Cambodia, and he was the key laundering guy for them. So he was taking the crypto proceeds and finding places to put them.

In this case, in Mauerberger case. The scam centres will run by a guy called Deng Pibing and his company, and the money came from these scam centres. Mauerberger was the man to launder it. And in Cambodia, and many of these countries that have had these scam centres, there’s been a kind of a Chinese Mafia capture of the state. So in Cambodia, you have this coastal development. It was supposed to be a sort of a coastal resort, a gambling resort. Prince Sihanoukville.

It takes them about a third of Cambodia’s coastline and totally failed. Nobody wants to go on holiday. They’re just empty buildings and it ended up becoming and this is true of a lot of these Asian. All casinos didn’t work out and ended up becoming scam centres. So that was the that’s the genesis of how this scam census developed. The Mafia move in and they run these scam centers with the with the slaves. Mauerberger then became very powerful in Thailand, the neighboring country to Cambodia, because he had so much money at his disposal needed to launder it. So he ends up helping Thaksin Shinawatra come back to power is obviously the former prime minister of Thailand, who’d been in exile for corruption for many years, had come back. And Mauerberger became very important to him because he has the financing for his political comeback, including some of the parties in his coalition. So that’s basically what Mauerberger did. Mauerberger was turning up a cabinet meetings in Thailand.

Tom Wright: So Thailand was on the precipice of becoming a captured state, much like Cambodia is. I’m proud of our reporting and I think it’s had an impact. Mauerberger was arrested after we published. He’s been in jail in Thailand. He’s facing trial in Thailand now. I think the US Treasury has sanctioned him and the US Justice Department has charged him.

Another 100 million boat that he owns now in Dubai, in the harbour there, which is something we’re still covering.

Paul Jackson: And this is all down to your reporting.

Tom Wright: Yeah. No one else has reported about him. So yeah, we’re proud of what we did. In Thailand, they’ve been very grateful. What I’m more worried about is that there has been what I believe in, what I’ve been told is a serious attempt to create negative coverage of us in the Indonesian media.

If you look at the border war that’s been going on between Thailand and Cambodia, you’ll see that there’s been a huge amount of movement of refugees from Myanmar, from Cambodia, from Thailand. And Cambodian PM Hun Manet, the son of the old PM Hun Sen, who many people accuse of being the person who let the scam centres proliferate. Manet is sort of trying to get out of that image. But I also wonder whether the Thai Cambodia war is in some way related to these scam centres, because I don’t think the Cambodian side would want to lose control of that.

Paul Jackson: Very interesting. You told me earlier that, you know, you’re a keen cyclist, and that you may be planning a cycling trip around Indonesia, but given what you just said is that wise?

Tom Wright: Well, yeah. I mean like I said, we talked about safety earlier right? I think I didn’t receive any threats after the Billion Dollar Whale. There was a concern about going to Indonesia at the time and I did that anyway. Malaysia was fine. I’ve been to Malaysia since I’ve been to Indonesia since, and I think there are, I’ll just say there are very unpleasant people who I’ve crossed in this story who are not happy about our reporting and we’ll just leave it at that.

Paul Jackson: We should talk about the crypto element of this, because we got a lot of, we didn’t get lawsuits, but we did get what’s the term? sort of like legal letters, cease and desist letters from the KuCoin Crypto Exchange as a result of the Mauerberger reporting, and I just want to make it really clear to the listeners that we stand by every single word that we published.

Tom Wright: Yes. Which is always the challenge, isn’t it, to.

Paul Jackson: Well, do you want to explain to people what an on-off ramp is?

Tom Wright: Actually, yeah, certainly. It’s the challenge of actually, you know, moving the crypto funds which are in a crypto exchange to actual dollar bills basically. That’s what an on ramp is. So you need these exchanges to be able to do that. And some are you know, like Coinbase is very. Well regulated, well, well run exchange. But you’ve got other exchanges that are much more tolerant of criminal activity.

Paul Jackson: Those on off-ramps are very difficult because there should be KYC in place. Know your customer, and anti-money laundering controls in place, and these things should be effective. But clearly, in some cases, they’re not.

Tom Wright: Right, so the way Mauerberger got around that was, it’s really incredible is that he teamed up with this Iranian American businessman called Sean Vahedi, who was connected to the Iranian regime. And what he was doing is that he had an arrangement with the KuCoin crypto exchange, which is a huge exchange, to be able to move money. And we don’t think this was officially sanctioned by KuCoin, but rather this was someone at KuCoin who was on the take.

Iranians, we were able to prove that Iranians have used KuCoin to move money, in contravention of sanctions. And KuCoin has said that they have not admitted to any wrongdoing. They’ve said that any transactions that we’ve shown them are not in their records. And I think the story was very complex and it involves some things that we’re still corroborating. So we’ll say KuCoin has denied all wrongdoing and we’re continuing to report on this.

We put it out and let our readers kind of make their own decision about whether they think we’re lying or not, basically.

Paul Jackson: Interesting. Interesting story. And again, I encourage you, you know, the listeners to check out the whale hunting part of Project Brazen, which is where they publish their breaking news stories. And this is one that’s been going on for a while. Let’s talk about you know, we’ve talked about all the things that you’re after powerful entities and people. Have you ever been asked to take a bribe to not run a story?

Tom Wright: What? Take a bribe to not do something?

Paul Jackson: Yeah.

Tom Wright: Well, without naming a name, I’ll say a very wealthy person has tried to bribe me recently, to write a positive piece, which is essentially a bribe. I said no. This person has been the subject of some of our reporting and they wanted us to write a positive piece about them. And we said no, we’re not for hire basically.

Paul Jackson: Well, I guess what I’m trying to say is that the bigger systems are where the corruption happens, and the systems themselves are part of the problem. And what you are doing, you know, with Project Brazen and what Brazen is doing, is you’re actually following the money, and what’s behind the money, which is the corruption, which is the scam centres, which is the crypto, which has underpinned it all. It’s all joined up.

Tom Wright: You are, you are. And I’m glad you have this sense of ethics and what’s right and wrong because quite honestly, like it’s a rare quality in some people. I think it’s particularly rare in some quite powerful countries in Southeast Asia.

Paul Jackson: As I say, there’s much more to what you’re doing than in our brief discussions over these two podcasts.

So, this will come out of the blue, but the work we do, both of us, can be quite stressful. My way of dealing with that is cycling long distances in remote places. How do you deal with it? What’s your form of unwinding?

Tom Wright: Oh. So what did I have in my Apple Music 2025? The Weeknd, I listen to a lot, I like the weekend. I like Post Malone. I listen to a Lot of kind of hip hop. I like Travis Scott.

Paul Jackson: Do you listen to this while you’re cycling?

Tom Wright: No, I don’t. People are using those Shockz. You know, those bone conducting things to cycle with what I do is I’m a complete Audible fanatic. I listen to all of my books. And actually, it’s also great for research. I listened to I think, the Gideon Rachman book on Asia and geopolitics and the coming conflicts. Great book. Very relevant to what we talk about. And I listened to that while I was running just recently. I listened to biographies. And I do listen to podcasts while I run as well.

Paul Jackson: Thank you once again for joining us on these podcasts. One more reminder. You know, please don’t forget to check out Project Brazen. And there is there’s a whole wealth of content there.

And we will keep you updated with news of season three. And after we take a break for a couple of months, hopefully we’ll be back with an equally impressive lineup of guests as we’ve had in season two. And so stay tuned for further information about the season three launch.

Thank you so much for joining us, Tom.

Tom Wright: Thank you.