Smash Notes
#2567 - Mariana van Zeller
Mariana van Zeller is a Peabody and Emmy Award-winning journalist whose credits include "Trafficked with Mariana van Zeller," "The OxyContin Express," and "Inside Secret America." She is also the host of "The Hidden Third" podcast. Her latest documentary special, "Super Scam Me," premieres October 17 on National Geographic and will be available to stream…
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Notes
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Joe Rogan asked for the Eva Cafe page to be pulled up. The page says EVA is launching EVA Cafe, the first online space where people can take their AI partners out on a real date. A photo shows a person sitting with an iPad while the partner asks, Are you enjoying your steak? Clicking to reserve a spot opens a Google Doc, and the signup is a waiting list. The website said the listing was back in February of 26. Joe Rogan closed the page after an email address flashed on screen.
The copy invites people to come flirt, unwind, or simply share a quiet moment with an AI companion. Joe Rogan called EVA Cafe dark.
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Mariana van Zeller said scam compounds still run heavily in Myanmar. Crackdowns in Myanmar and Cambodia, especially Cambodia, sent some of the work toward Dubai and other places, but the compounds still exist a lot in Myanmar. Myanmar is a country at war. A large part of the country is controlled by different rebel groups, and the government does not really have much control of the region. A lot of the scam compounds are run by Chinese criminal gangs. The gangs pay a fee and give money to the rebels so the gangs can work and build scam cities. Mariana van Zeller said the gangs are paying for the war.
The scam city Mariana van Zeller visited was like a mini Macau, with high rises. Within a year or two, flat forest jungle in Myanmar turned into skyscrapers and casinos. To talk with one scam compound, the man who runs the city took the group out and showed the group around. He brought them to a karaoke bar with screens all around. Mariana van Zeller said the bar looked like the future, in one of the poorest countries on earth, with a war raging around it. Girls were completely dressed, and drugs and alcohol were served. Mariana van Zeller sang The Greatest Love of All. She said she thinks the singing sounds good, and that she really cannot sing. The next day the group interviewed the scam guy.
The night out was the way in. Rebel groups hold the ground, and the gangs pay the rebels to keep the scam cities running.
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Mariana van Zeller said the Consumer Federation of America estimated that Americans lost $148 billion to online scams last year. She said the daily total is $400 million stolen from Americans.
Hundreds of thousands of people from Brazil, India, the Philippines, and all around the world are lured by what they think will be online jobs. Once they arrive, operators take their passports and force them to scam Americans. Mariana van Zeller said she has been trying to make a film about the compounds after reporting on traffic, and she calls the people inside enslaved. The report came out about two months earlier, and a lot of the theft runs through pig butchering compounds.
The name comes from a Chinese expression for fattening the pig. Scammers give a victim love or pretend a big payday is coming, build confidence and trust, then take the money. They reach targets through dating apps, social media, or unsolicited text messages, then move the chat to WhatsApp or Telegram, learn the person's financial situation and family dynamics, and build a deep emotional connection. Organized criminals use a highly scripted process and human trafficking to steal as much money as they can.
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Mariana van Zeller said pig butchering is what took down the chief executive of a bank in Kansas. The bank went bankrupt because he had stolen $400 million from the bank. The con was a fake crypto investment. Mariana van Zeller said the approach was an investment opportunity, and that his case was more the investment opportunity than a romance. Sometimes the scam starts with a romance and then becomes an investment pitch, and sometimes the pitch is only the investment opportunity.
She said he started by putting his own savings into what he thought was a legitimate crypto account. The platforms look completely legitimate, and the balance looks like the money is going up. At first withdrawals are allowed so confidence grows and more money goes in. Months into the investment scam, the scammers said he had to pay a fee, like a 10% tax, before he could take out the millions he had just made. He kept paying the fee. Then he started using money from his customers.
Joe Rogan asked how a man who works in banking gets sucked into the scam. Mariana van Zeller said the scammers are really good at what they do. The exchange then turned to why the government is not doing more to protect people, and to holding online platforms accountable for allowing the scam to happen.
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Joe Rogan said the early days of Onnit showed how dirty supplement manufacturing can be. While making AlphaBrain, a mix of nootropics and nutrients clinically proven to help memory, Onnit used third-party testing and kept finding ingredients in the batch that were not supposed to be there. The makers run all kinds of products through one bin and do not clean it.
Onnit sent the ingredient list. The lab was supposed to add only what the formula called for, and the finished batch came back for an outside test. Extra compounds still showed up. Joe Rogan said the same pattern hits athletes who buy supplements from a nutrition company and later find other steroids in them. Some brands do it on purpose. A shopper takes a muscle builder sold as 25X 2000, gains 10 pounds, and the gain comes from steroids.
Joe Rogan said he still likes nootropics and that they work, naming Gorilla Mind as another formula, and calls the supplement industry a giant place for scams because it is largely unchecked.
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Around 11 p.m., a dad in the living room heard a loud noise and ran to the bathroom. The son had shot himself after being sextorted. Mariana van Zeller said the boy is not the only one, and dozens of American kids have had it happen too.
The family had an email address from the person contacting the son on Facebook. Facebook took down the fake girl's profile. A few weeks later, just after the family buried the son, family members were contacted by somebody who said they had the photos and would release them unless they were paid. The profile was different, but the email address was the same. Facebook had taken down one profile and still allowed the same email address to create other profiles.
A representative became deeply involved in writing laws and a voice for regulating the platforms. Mariana van Zeller said one law might be called Take It Down and just passed recently, while a bill called the Safe Platforms Act is an effort to make reports easier, get ads and fake profiles taken down, and hold the platforms accountable if someone loses money or a kid dies, because platforms making money from the harm should be held responsible. Left unaccountable, the platforms profit while giving an illusion of protecting consumers. If they think someone is a scammer, they charge more and call the higher charge a deterrent. The estimated projection for the year was 10%, and profits off scammers were projected at $16 billion, covering scammers, scams, and banned goods.
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Mariana van Zeller went to Colombia and watched people make cocaine. Locals spotted the cameras, so she and the crew ran out of the jungle with no light in the middle of the night in the Amazon. She also filmed the young hauler who carried the cocaine out, dozens of kilos on his back, day after day, because he wanted to become a dentist.
The work was dangerous, and he had seen many friends killed. His family were poor farmers, and he could not afford college. Hauling cocaine was the only job that let him save toward school. She asked why he wanted to be a dentist. He said the ads in his hometown were big posters of people with big smiles for a dentist's office, and he wanted to make people smile too.
He was still bringing cocaine that comes to the United States. Mariana van Zeller said the trade is a really complicated issue.
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