From around 2020, when the earliest pig slaughter scams occurred. started to appearmore than 200,000 people have been trafficked, mainly in Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos, and confined in institutions where they are forced to act as online fraudsters. If they refuse, the criminals who own the fraudulent facilities are usually associated with organized crime in China. beat or torture them. People are trafficked from more than 60 countries around the world, often because they see an online ad promising an incredible job.
Forced scammers are forced to send thousands of online messages every day to potential victims around the world. They are tasked with building relationships, often by luring friendship or romance, and ultimately convincing their victims to send money as part of a lucrative “investment opportunity.” While individual victims have lost hundreds of thousands of dollars, criminal pig slaughtering enterprises collectively defraud people. 75 billion dollars In recent years.
“These scams start on dating apps, text messages, emails, social media, or messaging apps and end up in scammer-managed accounts on crypto apps or scam websites masquerading as investment platforms. ,” Mehta wrote in the report. “In addition to disrupting fraud centers, teams across Meta are continually rolling out new product features to protect users using our apps from known fraud methods at scale. ”
Pig butchering scams are aimed at financial theft and begin with cold one-on-one communication between scammers and potential victims, or contact through social media groups or other collaborative forums. For example, Gary Warner, director of intelligence at cybersecurity firm Dark Tower, says there are thousands of Facebook groups dedicated to luring people into crypto investment scams and community dating resources where scammers lurk. He said he was tracking a group calling itself
Monitoring online fraudsters has been a perennial challenge for big tech companies. As is the case with many types of inauthentic content, some pig-butchering operations, even those with large numbers of account deletions, are not blatant enough to meet tech companies’ standards for deletion. May be avoided.
“Much of what is on the platform is clearly a precursor to pig slaughter, but Meta says it ‘does not violate community standards,'” Warner said.
