“I wrote to five CEOs and four replied,” says Ben Horwitz, a student at Harvard Business School. CEOs don’t usually respond to emails from strangers. He also asked them to get coffee or attend a meeting with students — nothing too important. But Horwitz had a trick: he had created an app that mimicked the writing style of these executives, with typos, no greetings, just a single line of six or eight words. And it worked.

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One morning, you turn on your computer at home and can’t access your work platform. The last WhatsApp message is from the night before. The government’s online portal isn’t working either. It’s clear: your internet is blocked by the authorities. In theory, you only need to restart your VPN — a virtual private network, a program that acts as a tunnel to bypass censorship and can encrypt communications — but your usual VPN suddenly isn’t working: it’s been disabled. You try another one. No luck. The panic sets in as you try one VPN after another. You waste an hour — on other days it’s been longer — but eventually it connects. Among the dozens of WhatsApp messages that download all at once, there’s one with an important message from your family.

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It all starts in front of a screen, in the most innocent way possible. Accepting a friend request on Facebook. Following an influencer. Signing up for a study skills course about investing in cryptocurrencies. Entering a Roblox minigame. These are all gateways into a labyrinth of psychological manipulation that, in just a matter of months, can end with the innocent internet user trapped in a cult-like community, isolated and ruined. This mental and physical kidnapping occurs — and this is the worst part — voluntarily.

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