Mariana van Zeller

The conversation opens on Mariana van Zeller's new programme about romance scams, which took her to Africa to confront the people who had been scamming her. Rogan admits her work gives him anxiety. Before she has made her main argument, he describes a show he once watched about a lonely man who flew to Europe twice to meet a woman he had been talking to. Each time an emergency kept her away, and he gave away what Rogan recalls as hundreds of thousands of dollars and emptied his account while his daughter tried and failed to get him to listen. One of them, unattributed in the transcript, ties the problem to the loneliness epidemic, calling it a huge issue in this world.

Rogan frames the crime as especially cruel because it targets the most vulnerable, unlike scamming a fraudster, which he calls scamming a scammer. Van Zeller agrees but pushes back on the usual assumption behind such stories: that victims must be a more gullible, naive or foolish type of person. She says this view is wrong. She made the film largely because, when she told friends and family about victims she had reported on, the reply was always some version of how could they do that.

Because I think what these scammers are so good at doing is that they prey on emotions that we all share. You know, love and trust and sometimes greed as well.

She is frank that skill varies among scammers. She did not get "the best scammer out there". She says there are "100% better ones" and that the one who targeted a victim named Leslie was definitely better than hers.

Leslie's story is van Zeller's main evidence that these scams are more nuanced than the obvious question ("Did you really think you were talking to John Bon Jovi?") suggests. Leslie was brand new to Instagram. She liked and commented on an account with what looked like a verification checkmark. She had been a fan since she was 14 and had posters of him around her room. The account messaged her straight away with normal fan talk: her favourite songs and when she started listening. Over weeks and then months it turned into attention to her own life, and it remembered details from early conversations.

Van Zeller links Leslie's vulnerability to her circumstances. She describes her as leading a very lonely life, sort of estranged from her husband, with nobody who seemed interested in her or understood her. Even if he was not Bon Jovi, "it was somebody who cared".

How the escalation went, as van Zeller describes it: about seven months in, Leslie said she wanted to see him in concert but couldn't afford the tickets. He offered a meet-and-greet, which van Zeller notes celebrities really do hold, at a discount of about $100 through his "management" during a Louisiana tour stop. He sent AI-generated videos that van Zeller calls "a little robotic" but says "could be real", with greetings like "My sunshine, my love." He explained his interest by saying he was surrounded by "yes people" and valued connecting with "normal" people outside the bubble.

And at this point, I'm sorry, but it is believable.

Van Zeller argues that the hardest part comes after a victim is committed. Once the relationship has made their life better, it is very difficult to accept that it might not be real. She compares this to gambling: a losing gambler thinks today might be the lucky day, and the more they lose, the more they bet to win it back. She adds a physiological element: "every time you're love bombed, there's a dopamine rush there."

There reality of my life is so sad compared to this that maybe I prefer to just go on. So there are actually a lot of romance scam victims that continue having these relationships even after they realize the person wasn't who they said they were.

When Rogan compares this to talking to a robot that loves you, she raises AI companionship, which is sometimes presented as a possible benefit of AI. Both are uneasy about it. She says "It can also be very bad", and Rogan says "It creeps me out." She mentions coffee shops in New York where people use iPads to talk with AI companions. Rogan calls New York "one of the loneliest places", citing a friend who knows nobody in his roughly 40-storey building. On screen, the pair look up EVA AI's "EVA Cafe", billed as a place to take AI partners on a real date. Rogan's producer notes that the website gave the date as February of '26. Both react with repeated "so dark" comments.

Rogan then brings up Ex Machina and says he would probably fall in love with the android too: "We're super stupid." Van Zeller, true to her earlier argument, corrects the word: "I don't know if stupid is the word, but I would say we're vulnerable." Rogan adds "Especially men," which leads into the gender question.

Van Zeller says most people who appear in the film are women, and that this does not reflect who gets scammed. Many men spoke to her team but would not go on camera.

But actually men are as likely to falling victim to these scams as women, but they just have a lot more shame around it.

Rogan suggests people sympathise with women who get scammed but mock men. Van Zeller disagrees: "I wish people felt bad for women." She says this was not true for Leslie or for many victims she speaks to. Victims lose their money and are heartbroken, and then the first thing they hear from friends is how stupid they could be. She argues that scammers rely on this humiliation.

It's what I call is there's a sort of double victimization, right?

They use the silence to their advantage.

The two compare everyday scam messages: random texts from unknown numbers saying they haven't seen you in ages, odd invitations like one about lobster rolls, job offers and loan approvals. Van Zeller says such messages always seem to come from an Android phone and offers that as one way to check. She explains that the project started with her saying yes to every scam that came her way, and that the first few weeks were filmed that way.

The most revealing of those calls was with an Indian call centre posing as Apple support. The caller claimed her computer had a bug and told her to install software that would give him access to it, including whatever she typed into a payment page. She went as far as she could without giving a card number, more than an hour into the call. Then she told him she was a journalist, said she didn't want to get him in trouble, and asked to just talk. She says this approach did not always work, but this caller stayed on the line for a long time.

The caller said he was forced to do the work. Van Zeller doubts it: "In his case, he said he was forced, but I think he was doing it for the money." When she asked whether he felt bad, he said Americans all have more money, and he described his own threshold for who counts as rich.

If you have less than $1,000, I'm not going to steal from you. But if you have more, that means you're rich.

Rogan puts this in global terms with a figure he hedges himself. He used to think the threshold was $34,000, but now thinks earning $50,000 puts you in the top 1% of the world. Van Zeller adds that 10% of the world's population lives under the poverty line, "700 and something million people". Neither figure is sourced in the conversation.

Van Zeller separates the willing call-centre worker from people who are kidnapped and forced to work in scam centres under threat of death and torture. She draws on a story for the previous season of her show Trafficked. For it, she visited a city full of scam compounds, interviewed one of its main figures and spoke with many victims. She describes people being beaten, tortured and forced to work.

She gives two cases. One man jumped from about the sixth floor of his building, believing death was better than staying, and broke both his hips and his legs. When she met him he was in a wheelchair, and it was unclear whether he would walk again. The other was a woman used as the "model" for video calls. Even two years ago, according to van Zeller, the compound used AI that overlaid another face on hers, and they needed a woman for the mannerisms and possibly the voice. If she moved slightly, the overlay distorted, and her boss beat her. Van Zeller also says the woman was raped by her boss and his friends.

On where this happens, van Zeller names Myanmar and Cambodia as the two main centres. She says crackdowns in both countries, especially Cambodia, are pushing operations to other places such as Dubai, but that many still exist in Myanmar. She explains Myanmar's role by its war: large areas are held by rebel groups, and the government has little control there. She says many compounds are run by Chinese criminal gangs who pay fees to the rebels, in effect funding the war, in return for being allowed to operate and build scam cities.

The city she visited looked to her like "a mini Macau". She says it went from flat jungle to high-rises, skyscrapers and casinos within a year or two. Before talking to her, the man who runs the city insisted on showing her crew around. He took them to a karaoke bar with screens all around that "looked like the future", serving drugs and alcohol, in one of the poorest countries on earth while a war went on around it. They had to stay, and she sang Whitney Houston, she thinks "the greatest love of all". She calls it one of those unforgettable nights.

Most of the evidence here is first-hand reporting and anecdote: Leslie's case, one tech-support call and a few compound survivors. Van Zeller's claim that men are as likely as women to be victims is not backed by any figures in this section. She also says her film's on-camera sample leans female because men declined to appear. She treats her own scammer as below average and questions the call-centre worker's claim that he was forced. The global income and poverty figures are given loosely, and Rogan openly revises his own number.

Van Zeller describes an interview she did the day after arriving in a city that had been built for business, gambling and tourism. The man she interviewed agreed to talk because he wanted to show the place off. He was trying to sell it as a gambling and tourist paradise. The city had go-kart tracks, pools with slides and a water park. Van Zeller argues that no tourist would choose to go there: there is a war, the area is poor, and it is very hard to reach. Her own team had to be smuggled into the country from Thailand.

In her account, the tourist amenities are a front for the real source of money, which is scams. Her host tried to clean up that image and show her crew that nothing wrong was going on. Posters around the city carried messages that, as she points out, suggest something was wrong precisely because they had to be put up at all.

no scams are allowed. We don't torture people.

Van Zeller says cities like this can go up within months on flat terrain. Labor is easy to find because many people in the country are unemployed. A lot of the money comes from Chinese criminal gangs. At the site she visited, the operator was a company called Yatai International. Its head, a Chinese man who lived in Myanmar and ran the compound, was eventually picked up by authorities in Thailand and was serving a prison sentence. The man she interviewed was his number two. He claimed his boss had been jailed for speaking openly about corruption, and van Zeller says that was not the case. She puts the amounts involved in the billions of dollars but says she cannot remember the exact figure.

To show how typical such stories are, the host reads from an article about scam-compound victims and villains. It describes a man named Lee who said he went looking for work as a security guard in China. He was tricked and apparently kidnapped, taken to Cambodia, and sold into one of the country's fortified scam compounds, where workers labor around the clock to take money from people online. When he resisted, he was beaten and tortured and passed from one scam operator to another. He claimed his captors finally began draining large quantities of his blood, seven times in half a year. From his hospital bed he pointed at an infusion bag to show the size of each extraction. Journalists began calling him a "blood slave."

The conversation does not settle why his blood was taken. Asked whether it was for doping or transfusions, the speakers guess that the captors were "probably" selling it, and one adds "I would imagine." The article goes on to say that Chinese social media filled with outrage and sympathy, and that government officials in China and Cambodia took notice "for a moment."

Looking at a photo of a compound, van Zeller describes whole buildings dedicated to scams. They are surrounded by barbed wire and guarded, the windows usually have bars so people cannot escape, and many workers share dormitories. She says it looks like a military compound and that the workers cannot leave. Asked whether they are slaves, she answers "Oh, absolutely slaves." She puts their number at hundreds of thousands, recruited from countries including Brazil, India and the Philippines. They are lured with what they believe are online jobs, their passports are taken when they arrive, and they are forced to scam Americans. Van Zeller says this was one of the most outrageous things she found in her reporting on trafficking, and that she has been trying to make a film about it.

She makes a two-part case for why Americans should care. She rejects the idea that foreign victims matter less, since these people are enslaved. She adds that the people running the scams are targeting Americans.

Van Zeller cites the Consumer Federation of America's latest report, which she thinks came out about two months earlier. At first she says Americans "apparently" lost money, then corrects herself: the report estimated that Americans lost $148 billion to online scams last year. By her own math, that is $400 million a day. She says much of it comes through what are called pig butchering compounds.