When Sam Altman launched his controversial "Worldcoin" iris-scanning technology in Thailand, he unwittingly got entangled with a $1.5B Chinese-Cambodian criminal network. Here's how. 1/6 🧵
Altman's Tools for Humanity partnered for its Thai launch with a company linked to Benjamin Mauerberger, a South African front for a global criminal network that scams Americans out of their life savings. (There's no evidence TFH knew of the criminal connections.) 2/6
Mauerberger's criminal network had the protection of former Thai PM Thaksin Shinawatra (for whom he bought a $60M private jet). When Tools for Humanity CEO Alex Blania came to Thailand for the launch of Worldcoin, he took the stage with Thaksin at a high-profile event. 3/6
What Altman and Blania didn't know was that a Singapore front company controlled by Mauerberger was the largest shareholder in TFH's Thai partner, M Vision PCL, an events organizer (paid $5 by TFH for every iris scanned). 4/6
This case exposes a new and more dangerous risk for a project already criticized for its data privacy and ethical issues: the threat of a prominent tech company becoming an unwitting pawn for organized crime seeking to enter the mainstream. 5/6
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