Thank you for taking an interest in my work. I’m an award-winning investigative reporter with over a dozen years of experience producing ambitious, data-driven stories for news outlets including Reuters, The Wall Street Journal and, most recently, ProPublica.
I’ve covered everything from oil markets to rent fraud, healthcare and various abuses in the student loan markets. But no story has captivated my attention as much as the devastating new form of fraud I discovered after moving to Asia in 2020. Known as a pig-butchering scam, it’s a fraud tactic in which scammers carefully groom their targets over many weeks and months and then psychologically manipulate them into depositing vast sums of their savings into fake brokerage apps and websites. The fraud is unbelievably successful – but also very labor-intensive – so the criminals behind it often use human smugglers to staff their fraud gangs with victims of human trafficking.
I published a detailed investigation into the industrial-scale nature of this fraud in 2022, along with a consumer-friendly guide to spotting the tell-tale signs of pig-butchering scams. In 2023, I followed-up with an overview of the money-laundering tactics that underpin them. Because the story demanded more attention, in 2024 I devoted myself to writing a book about it. It’s called The Big Trace and I hope you’ll join me on my reporting journey by singing up for my newsletter.
I was previously a senior reporter at The Wall Street Journal, where I wrote for the paper’s financial investigations team – a special unit within the Journal’s finance section devoted to holding the powerful to account and exposing fraud, waste, abuse in the nation’s financial system and beyond. Prior to arriving at Journal in 2017, I was a full-time investigative reporter at ProPublica and before then a data journalist at Reuters. My work has also been published in The Washington Post, USA Today, Business Insider, Huffington Post, The Center for Public Integrity, The Chronicle of Higher Education and Forbes, among other publications. I’ve also taught journalism at Columbia Journalism School and Hong Kong University, in addition to leading workshops and panels at journalism conferences.
In the coming months, I hope to update this website with helpful resources and information for fraud victims, researchers, law enforcement and anyone else who's concerned about the rise of scam-linked human trafficking. Meanwhile, to find out more about my work, visit my personal website, www.cezarypodkul.com.
