Since roughly 2020, when the earliest pig butchering scams started to emerge, more than 200,000 people have been trafficked and held in compounds—most in Myanmar, Cambodia, or Laos—where they are forced to play the role of an online scammer. If they refuse, the criminals who own the scam compounds, which are typically connected to Chinese organized crime, often beat or torture them. People have been trafficked from more than 60 countries around the world—often after seeing online ads promising them jobs that are too good to be true.
The forced scammers are compelled to send thousands of online messages to potential victims around the world on a daily basis. They are tasked with building relationships, often with the lure of friendship or romance, and eventually convince their victims to send them money as part of lucrative “investment opportunities.” Individually, victims have lost hundreds of thousands of dollars, while the pig butchering criminal enterprises have collectively conned people out of around $75 billion in recent years.
“These scams can start on dating apps, text message, email, social media or messaging apps, then ultimately move to scammer-controlled accounts on crypto apps or scam websites masquerading as investment platforms,” Meta writes in its report. “In addition to disrupting scam centers, teams across Meta are constantly rolling out new product features to help protect people on our apps from known scam tactics at scale.”
Pig butchering scams are driving toward financial theft, but they start with either one-to-one cold communication between scammers and potential victims or contact that originates from social media groups or other communal forums. For example, Gary Warner, director of intelligence at the cybersecurity firm DarkTower, says that he tracks thousands of Facebook groups dedicated to luring people into cryptocurrency investment scams as well as groups that purport to be community dating resources where scammers are lurking.
Online moderation of scammers is a difficult and longstanding issue for big tech. As is the case with many types of inauthentic content, some pig butchering activity can skirt tech company standards—even when they are doing a large number of account takedowns—because the content isn’t explicit enough to meet the criteria for removal.
“So much of what is on platform is clearly the prelude to pig butchering, but Meta says it ‘doesn’t violate community standards,’” Warner says.
