Transcription
A 28-year-old software developer from Atlanta wakes up alone in a hotel room 1,975 mi from home. The room is just completely trashed, and he has no memory of the night before. Scrambling for a phone that is no longer there, he notices empty bottles on the nightstand, sheets pulled off the bed, and panic starts to set in. He swipes the clothes on the floor to check for his wallet, his bag, even his expensive workwatch, all gone. The more his eyes dart across the room looking around, the more painful his headache becomes. This wasn't a normal hangover. There's a metal taste in his mouth and his stomach is starting to cramp. Marcus can hardly think straight and just wants to go home. But at least my passport is still secure, he thinks. But then he sees it. The door of the hotel's safe, wide open, and empty. Anxiety turns to dread. They took everything.
But just a few days ago, everything was fine. So what had happened? His memory was blank. Besides the faintest hint of perfume and cigarette smoke. He closed his eyes and could hear the echo of clicking high heels on a marble floor. A woman's voice speaking rapid Spanish down the phone. And then from that, a word sounded through the pain in his head. It was a name, Camila.
[Music]
A week ago, Marcus sat in his apartment staring at his phone in total silence. He'd been messaging an American woman for 2 weeks. It felt like real conversations, not just small talk. She'd actually engaged with his story. She asked about his work and seemed genuinely interested in him. For the first time in months, he felt like maybe he was getting somewhere, like maybe he'd finally broken through that invisible wall that seemed to exist between him and the opposite gender. After a couple of beers, he asked, a simple dinner invitation. Nothing pushy. She read this message and then there was no reply. A typical thing for him. Typical. He just had that feeling again that he couldn't shake. This woman was another in a sequence of rejection. His heart grew colder and his perspective dimmer and darker.
Later that night, he found himself in a familiar territory. He'd been searching Medicine for months, partly because he'd heard good things from people he knew, but also because of the content that had been piped into his feed. Non-stop videos of these guys filming themselves on GoPros, partying with beautiful women in exotic places where you could just be with a beautiful, wholesome woman, drinking cheap beers on an exotic beach, speaking some broken Spanish, and really just enjoying life. And all it seemed to take was a plane flight. Marcus understood that he was in a vulnerable state, but he just couldn't stop himself. How could you? How could you even resist the temptation of this? He'd started off just watching simple dating content or discussions on how romance in the Western world had changed. But after getting recommended content showing how much different dating abroad was, and the seemingly infinite upside you get as a young American bachelor with some cash, he grew more and more desperate. And now he just needed one little push. Maybe it was that last chat he had with the woman. Or perhaps the powerful influencers telling him how western women take everything from men and give nothing back. He found his thoughts changing. Earlier that very same day, he found himself snapping at another bland girl, spilling coffee in his arm, the same as all the rest useless now to get him. He didn't know what was happening to his mind, but he felt profanities echo around it in women's presence. Sinking another drink, his finger hovered over the confirm button for his flight, and he clicked.
In just a few hours, he lands in Medigene. The heat slaps him in the face, and he knows he's somewhere completely different. And he wasn't the only one. There are about eight to nine single men also with him from America in Q near him. All likely going for the same reason. But he did know that over a million people visit this popular Colombian city every year. It's a tourist hot spot. He'd read about the world-class museums, the vibrant night life, and the stunning architecture. The weather was perfect all year round. The food's exceptional. There's amazing coffee and everything costs a fraction of what you'd pay back home. But if we're being real, that wasn't the top of his mind right now. Marcus had more romantic plans.
Romance tourism to cities like Medigin is a movement that spans continents and crosses borders. It's an entire industry of people foregoing relationships at home to take on something bolder and more fruitful abroad. Some actively embrace terms like Passport Bros, pushed by influencers with massive followings who've turned this lifestyle into a business. The R Passport Pro subreddit has grown to over 80,000 members in just a few years, creating an international network where countries are ranked on maps and experiences shared for how great they are for men like Marcus. While Colombia has dominated the headlines, a few countries rank at the top of the best locations for passport bros from Thailand and Vietnam to the Philippines and Brazil and even Eastern Europe. Some men actually go to this community and showcase their success to get advice or actually provide some value to other men looking to do the same thing. But not everyone is lucky. And then there's the opportunists making a commodity out of hundreds of people like Marcus and turning romance tourism into an industry that serves them and not the vulnerable men they purport to care about. What Marcus didn't realize was that his arrival was predictable. It hadn't gone unnoticed by those who'd learned to profit from young vulnerable men. The digital pipeline that had delivered him here was just one side of an equation he didn't yet understand. But the course was set.
One of the first things he did when he gets to Medigene was download Tinder. And suddenly like that he was start to get all these matches matches with women he could never get back at home. And this is when he matched with a beautiful looking woman named Camila on Tinder and she suggested meeting at Hotel Dan Coloulton. She mentioned this had the best view in El Pablato main place for expats in Medigin adding you'll love it. But unbeknownst to Marcus that one simple message would change everything.
Camila watched Marcus' face light up when he saw her. He was nervous and couldn't believe how attractive she was. But for Camila, this was just another tourist. Another rooftop bar and another performance. She was just 24, but she'd been doing this for at least 2 years now. She studied nursing during the day. That part was always true when she told them. But in the evening, she worked a different kind of shift. She wasn't necessarily a prostitute, at least not exactly. She told herself that distinction mattered. She was more like a tour guide. Camila put Marcus at ease, told him how excited she was to show him her city, and it wasn't entirely fake. He seemed kind, courteous, genuinely interested in what she had to say. And after a few drinks, she could see his confidence returning. In another life, maybe this could have all been real. But tonight was different for Camila. She never lets those thoughts get to her for too long, as she's been discussing a new technique with her friends the night before, something industrially efficient. Her friend Isabella had been using this for months. She'd shown Kima the small vial of white powder, explaining how just a tiny amount could render a man completely compliant. With that, you can kill 10 people, but it's better in powder form. You rub it on their chest. Isabella explained, "The substance came from the bolacella tree, drunken binge, that grew wild throughout Colombia. It produces beautiful white bell-shaped flowers that hang like lamps. In the west, it's better known as dura or the angel's trumpet. But Camilanure by a street name, devil's breath. Most call it scapoleine. It's tasteless, odless, and you can hide it on a business card and just blow it in someone's face. And the results of this can be described as zombification. Within minutes, victims enter a state of zombie-like compliance. They'll hand over their valuables willingly, follow instructions without question, even withdrawing their money from ATMs with their captives standing right beside them. 50 mg of it can kill you, but deaths are pretty rare. Victims usually just stay compliant longer. Some reports still feeling the effects of the high 15 days. When victims do eventually wake up, sometimes 24 hours later, they remember absolutely nothing. It literally blocks the neurotransmitters in the brain responsible for recording memory. The US State Department reports unofficial estimates of 50,000 scapolamine incidences per year in Colombia. More than 130 every single day. According to the national police, a scapoleamine attack occurs every 10 hours in Bogota. With police admitting the vast majority of incidences are men poisoned by women from small street gangs called micro cartels.
Camila studied Marcus across the table as he talked about his work, his hopes for the trip, but he just had no idea what was coming or that there was an entire industry preying on people like him. Was this coldly calculated? At this point, yes. She felt glimpses of something else. Pity, maybe even guilt. But once again, she knew how to dole those doubts. After all, she hadn't planned for her life to turn out this way. And Marcus had come here looking for exactly this, right? Two different parts at the same table. And she wasn't really caring about what he was saying. It was just time to move. So she excused herself to the bathroom, dip the end of a cigarette into the powder, then returned with a smile. "Want to step outside for some air?" 15 minutes passed and she watched the change happen exactly as Isabella had described. Marcus looked up at her, confused for half a second, then with that glazed expression she'd been told to expect. "Let's go somewhere quiet," she said. He nodded like a child and just followed her.
Now, by this point, Marcus clearly found himself in an extremely dangerous position. As they got into the cab, he was sucked in and you could even say lured in by a powerful travel industry built around dating abroad. But behind the soft lighting, the palm trees, and the smiling local woman and influencer videos is a huge growing business, one that turns male loneliness into views, subscriptions, and paid coaching funnels. Romance tourism has always been popular, but love is one of the most easily corrupted emotions. One of the main things you can manipulate men with. And it's manifested itself as an industry of mixed and often dark intent. Women abroad, like Camila, are depicted as respectful to men in a way that those at home aren't. They're receptive. But some just depict them as just easy to pick up. Some have actually been accused of using the same women in their videos or paying them to join as a part of their marketing game. The same influencers who claim women in other countries respect men more or often the same ones who are seen with multiple women on each arm. They're picking up women in the street, showing how easy it is to hook up. Most of all, they just make you look so effortless. If you have a western passport, you'll get the hottest women. You just stop them in the street, chat to them, and that's all you need to do. Even just doing this in English, not speaking their native language. Just be confident, and it will all fall into place. Oh, and maybe pick up their course for $1,000 a month just to be sure you get all of their tips.
The dangers of this just can't be ignored. Many warn followers to take a picture of a girl's ID before bringing them home. Some joke about getting scoped, drugged, and robbed like it was just part of the adventure. For some, it's part of the thrill. You'd think people like Camila would be more aware of these stories than Marcus, but the influencers tell these stories as if they were some funny holiday event. There's not a doubt about it. Colombian women are the most beautiful women in the world. But they're also the most dangerous. You never know when they might slip in your drink. You never know. You might wake up without your phone, your iPad, your car's missing, $5,000 in cash. You go you go scope me. I got scoped here. I have two years ago. That's the coolest part. I don't know what happened. I woke up and I woke up with all my [ __ ].
The darkest truth is that some romance tourists like Marcus never actually come home. People in Marcus' position following the advice of men who apparently care about their love lives have suffered horrible endings while in the pursuits of respectful women. Take the tragic story of Punyuan, a 27-year-old logistics consultant from California who didn't return to his Airbnb after going on a Tinder date in 2022. He'd taken a Snapchat photo of his date. A slim brown-haired woman in a white jacket. The next morning, he didn't return to the Airbnb and his friends raised an alarm. It turned out that his credit card was used multiple times in odd late night transactions. 12 hours later, his body was then discovered behind a trash bin 5 miles away from the bar. The family of a young man from Orange County is struggling with their grief and at the same time trying to find out how and why he was killed while on vacation in Colombia. Then there was Tao Xong, a 50-year-old Minnesota comedian who called his family in December 2023 saying he needed $2,000 because he'd been kidnapped. The family then sent the money through PayPal immediately, but it wasn't enough. The next morning, his body was found at the bottom of a ravine near the Robbo district. He'd been tied, tortured, stabbed, and then thrown 260 ft down a cliff. Other survivors described the same pattern. A 28-year-old businessman, also a victim of Scapoleamine in Colombia, told reporters, quote, "I matched with a girl on Tinder. Just another girl, I thought just another date. She took my iPad, my phone, my wallet, my credit cards, my ID, everything but my laptop."
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Like others before him, Marcus had been sold the dream of finding true love and delivered as prey. Now, as he was led out of the cab and to his hotel room by Camila, he found himself at the mercy of forces above what he didn't foresee. You see, Camila had actually tried only fans as an escape route when she was younger. But this was way more effective. She was so close to finishing her nursing degree, but without tuition money, she'd have to drop out. Like so many countries targeted by romance tourists, most of the Colombian population is below the poverty line. Not many weeks ago, she created her first dating profile and joined a different kind of pipeline. A network of women targeting gringoes. Not always Americans, but any foreigner with hard currency who was naive enough to really believe they'd found true love.
So, here's what's really happening while you're watching these glossy perfect influencer videos showing Colombia and other dangerous countries in a similar way. Local networks are working and studying these men who deliver these dreams. They want you to believe in an image so that they can milk you. The system for exploiting men on the ground in places like Colombia has evolved around the same time as the male loneliness epidemic, the one that these influencers get paid from. While online opportunities cultivated men like Marcus for months, local networks had learned to position themselves at the end of that pipeline, ready to extract their own value. In Colombia, some women work alone, others with gangs. Journalists in Medigene have even uncovered gang bosses like the so-called queen of scopoleamine, a serial killer who killed between five to six men. Although according to her court testimony, there were a considerable amount of others. Now, of course, Colombian authorities are aware of this problem, but they're overwhelmed. In a city with more than 25,000 reported robberies annually, only a fraction ever lead to arrests, and most of the time, nobody's talking to the police. They're completely corrupt.
But that's not the point. Why are these men coming here in the first place? What is pushing them here? Is dating that bad in the West now that we need to find other poor countries where we can finally feel validated and actually find true love? What this shows is what's lacking in men today in the West that they feel so compelled to go to dangerous countries like these to find love. All because the people they interact with in their own countries seems to always reject them or just be people they can't have any real connection with. Because this isn't just happening in Medigin, but it's also now starting to happen in many other cities around the world, targeting these Western tourists from Manila to Bangkok. So, cracking down too hard on the very image of warm hospitality is a complicated business.
Even Camila, who's stuck in this web, just like Marcus, as she's had to grow up in a country ravaged by drug cartels and obviously in a third world bad situation. She realized she would make a year's wage in a night if she performed the fantasy people like Marcus had built before stepping off the plane. And of course, it's just business for these people, executing a usual strategy, walking Marcus to numerous ATMs to get money out for what she told him repeatedly was more drinks, walking back to his hotel room, plastering him with more drinks to keep him compliant, as she systematically ransacked his room. She then coerced him into opening his safe to access his passport, and rummaged through his belongings for anything with any semblance of resale value, while Marcus spent most of the time slurring and flopping around on the floor between being sick. Then after locking him away helplessly in a wrecked room, she left to pay some of her bosses as you can't do many of these things without others noticing and demanding their cut.
But the fact that this is even an industry in the first place is really an indictment to how bad dating must be in the West. If people are going to obviously dangerous countries to do this sort of thing and it's so common that there's now an entire criminal economy around this stuff shows there must be some issue at home if so many guys are falling into this trap. The modern dating crisis and the growing loneliness epidemic are quietly leading to more and more of these cases. Faced with rejection, social isolation, and a collapsing sense of purpose in the West, many men are just fleeing to these countries where dating feels more traditional, connection more accessible, and finally gaining a sense of love. Spurred on by influence is creating this echo chamber and this illusion that it's just impossible to find love in the West anymore. And in doing so, this is creating a global issue that's only getting so much worse.
In Brazil, the US consulate in Rio recently issued a warning about drugging dating scams targeting tourists. Criminals seduce foreign men, slip sedatives into their drinks, then lose them and rob them in hotel rooms. We also see this in Bangkok and Bali. The same devil breath style scams where victims are stumbling around like zombies being completely controlled, their cards maxed out, and sometimes even overdose deaths. Menagin is just the most visible example with eight Americans vanished at once in late 2023, bringing the total to 29 deaths in recent years. It's so bad that even Tinder now has to place warnings on the app. On Facebook, we can see a private scopamine victims group that has more than 5,000 members sharing stories and lookouts. Thousands more are warning about this on the Passport Bros Reddit itself. And while most survive, living with this kind of experience would be difficult for anyone, especially those most lonely and unloved.
And now staring at the ceiling of his own flats rather than a hotel room, Marcus is learning the hardest lesson of all. Sometimes when you think you're the customer, you're actually the product just being sold.