In today’s digital age, the threat of online scams looms large, with criminals leveraging various platforms such as text messaging, dating apps, social media, and email to execute elaborate fraud schemes. One particularly heinous scam, known as "pig butchering," involves building seemingly trustworthy relationships with unsuspecting individuals, only to deceive them into investing large sums of money, often in cryptocurrency, which they ultimately lose. In an unprecedented move, we are now unveiling our strategy to combat the international criminal syndicates behind these forced-labor scam operations, under the umbrella of our Dangerous Organizations and Individuals (DOI) and safety policies. By sharing our insights, we aim to bolster the defense mechanisms within our industry, working collectively to shield individuals from these criminal threats.
Understanding ‘Pig Butchering’
"Pig butchering" is a sophisticated form of fraud that stands out due to its cunning approach. The scam revolves around establishing online relationships with victims, fostering a false sense of trust over time, and then manipulating them into investing increasingly large amounts of money into fraudulent schemes. These schemes frequently involve cryptocurrencies, which offer a veil of anonymity for the perpetrators. The victims are metaphorically "fattened up" with trust before being "slaughtered" when their investments vanish.
The Architects of ‘Pig Butchering’
During the COVID-19 pandemic, organized crime syndicates operating scam compounds emerged predominantly in the Asia Pacific region, becoming chief orchestrators of "pig butchering" and other scam activities. Despite their base in Asia, these scam centers target victims worldwide. They lure job seekers with seemingly attractive job offers posted on local job boards, forums, and recruitment platforms. Once recruited, individuals are coerced into working as online scammers, often under the threat of physical harm.
The magnitude and complexity of this threat are astounding. The US Institute of Peace estimates that up to 300,000 people are forced into scamming others globally by these criminal groups, resulting in an estimated $64 billion being stolen worldwide each year. Over the past two years, our focus has been on investigating and disrupting the activities of these criminal scam centers, particularly in Southeast Asia. Initially concentrating on scam centers in Cambodia, we have expanded our efforts to keep pace with the growth of these groups in places like Laos, Myanmar, and more recently, the United Arab Emirates. Collaborating with expert NGOs and law enforcement partners in the US and Southeast Asia, we have gained a deeper understanding of these criminal groups’ modus operandi, including their operations in locations such as Sihanoukville in Cambodia, a known hub for scams linked to Chinese organized crime.
How These Scams Operate
Workers in these criminal compounds are coerced into engaging in a range of fraudulent activities, from cryptocurrency and gambling scams to loan and investment schemes like "pig butchering." They create deceptive personas, often posing as attractive singles or representatives of government agencies, public figures, or trusted businesses. Much of the activity is tightly scripted by criminal syndicates to scale their operations. This involves some forced-labor scammers adopting a "spray and pray" approach, casting a wide net online through automated means to contact a large number of people with generic messages, hoping for responses. If successful, another group of scammers steps in, employing more personalized social engineering techniques to build trust and convince victims to part with their money.
These scams can originate on dating apps, text messages, emails, social media, or messaging apps, eventually leading victims to scammer-controlled accounts on crypto apps or fraudulent websites masquerading as investment platforms. Typically, in "pig butchering" schemes, victims may be allowed to withdraw small amounts to build trust. However, once they attempt to retrieve their "investment" or run out of funds to send, the overseas scammers usually vanish with all the money.
Our Strategy to Combat Scam Compounds
Over the past two years, we have established teams and systems dedicated to identifying and targeting these scam hotspots worldwide under our DOI and safety policies. We have also forged critical partnerships both within our company and with key external partners to adopt a comprehensive approach to defending people against the wide array of scams these groups perpetrate online and offline.
Dangerous Organizations and Individuals Policy
To counter these scam compounds globally, we leverage our DOI policies as the most effective and appropriate measures for disrupting organized crime. By utilizing both our internal subject matter expertise and insights from external stakeholders, we continuously investigate and assess criminal organizations involved in these activities for designation. Once designated as DOIs, these entities are banned from our platform and subjected to a range of enforcement tools.
On-Platform Enforcements
Our investigative teams diligently monitor these designated DOIs for attempts to circumvent our enforcement measures. This includes identifying new scam compounds globally and disrupting their operations. In the current year alone, we have dismantled over two million accounts associated with scam centers in Cambodia, Myanmar, Laos, the United Arab Emirates, and the Philippines. We continue to update behavioral and technical signals associated with these hubs to enhance automated detection and thwart malicious infrastructure and repeat offenders.
Collaboration with Law Enforcement and Industry Peers
We recognize that these criminal organizations are persistent and well-resourced, constantly evolving their tactics to evade detection, including by law enforcement. Their operations span borders with minimal deterrence, utilizing numerous internet platforms to ensure no single company or country has a comprehensive view of their operations. This highlights the critical importance of collaboration across industries and nations.
As part of our threat disruption efforts, we collaborate with law enforcement agencies worldwide, sharing our insights into how this criminal industry operates and aiding law enforcement in safeguarding communities from these scams. For example, the Royal Thai Police has been working with us for over two years to disrupt criminal scam centers, sharing information to help investigate and take action against the perpetrators.
We also work to share threat information with industry peers who are focused on preventing criminal syndicates from targeting individuals on our respective platforms. Recently, our team disrupted malicious activity originating from a newly established scam compound in Cambodia, targeting individuals in Japanese and Chinese languages. We initiated this investigation based on information shared by our peers at OpenAI, who detected and disrupted the actors’ efforts to use their tools to generate and translate the scammers’ content. We have also shared threat information about the scam centers we have disrupted, enabling further investigations across the internet.
Additionally, as part of the Tech Against Scams Coalition, we recently co-convened a Summit on Countering Online Criminal Scam Syndicates. This summit brought together international law enforcement, government officials, NGOs, and tech companies to discuss strategies for advancing efforts to tackle this transnational threat. The Coalition includes companies across various sectors, including dating apps, social media, financial institutions, and crypto platforms, such as Coinbase, Ripple, Meta, and Match Group, the parent company of Tinder and Hinge.
Building Product Defenses and Raising Awareness About Scams
In addition to disrupting scam centers, teams across Meta are continually rolling out new product features to protect people on our apps from known scam tactics at scale. For instance, we display warnings in Messenger and Instagram DMs, advising users to be cautious of potentially suspicious interactions or unsolicited contact from unknown individuals, encouraging them to review before accepting message requests. On WhatsApp, users added to a group chat by someone they don’t know will now see a context card providing more information about the group, including who added them, when the group was created, and who created it, offering context for the outreach.
As part of our ongoing efforts to protect people from scammers, we will continue sharing regular updates about our work to counter scams more broadly, including safety tips and product updates rolled out across our apps, with more developments to follow in the coming weeks.
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