New National Geographic Series Explores the Black Market

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: What is it about the underworld that keeps you going back there?

MARIANA VAN ZELLER, CORRESPONDENT, “TRAFFICKED”: I think it’s a bunch of different reasons. I think most people aren’t aware. You know, we have so much out there, so much information about the formal economy. There’s whole television stations, magazines, organizations devoted to analyzing every up-and-down twist and turn, IPO, everything that happens in the formal economy. And yet the informal economy, these black and gray markets, actually make up for almost half of the global economy. And there’s so little information that we have about them. So, in large part, it’s because of that, and also because I’m fascinated by how much — by the operators, by these traffickers and these smugglers, who they are, how they operate, and if there’s anything that we can actually learn from them.

AMANPOUR: Well, I’m going to ask you about that. But, first, I want to ask you, because the initial offering on television is going to be a double bill. It’s scams, and it’s about fentanyl, so two different topics. In scams, I was fascinated to see that you went to two places, Jamaica and also to Tel Aviv. What did you find there similar or different in what they were scamming, how they were scamming, why they were scamming?

VAN ZELLER: It’s so interesting. When we’re talking about Jamaica, we’re talking about a scamming industry that’s worth tens of thousands of dollars. In Israel, however, it’s billions of dollars. And in a way, having spent time with Jamaican scammers, and listening to their stories and understanding why they became scammers and why they do what they do, obviously, I don’t condone any of it, but just listening to them, there is an understanding you cannot but sort of understand where they’re coming from. And they have very powerful stories, which, to me, was super surprising. And when you go to Israel and you hear — and, suddenly, we’re talking about scanning happening in high-rises and downtown Tel Aviv and in office buildings, and I actually went to one of these places with a secret camera. And you realize how different the sort of the scam is. They’re both scamming. But the reason, the cause of the scamming in Israel is much more about greed than it seemed to me in Jamaica, which was a lot more about lack of opportunities.