Since around 2020, when the earliest pig slaughter scams began to appear, more than 200,000 people have been trafficked and held in compounds – mostly in Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos – where they are forced to play the role of an online fraudster . If they refuse, they are often beaten or tortured by criminals who own the fraud complexes usually associated with Chinese organized crime. 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.
Compulsive scammers are forced to send thousands of online messages daily to potential victims around the world. They are tasked with building relationships, often with the lure of friendship or romance, and ultimately convincing their victims to send them money as part of lucrative “investment opportunities”. Individually, victims have lost hundreds of thousands of dollars, while criminal pig slaughter enterprises have collectively defrauded people of an estimated $75 billion in recent years.
“These scams can start on dating apps, text messages, emails, social media or messaging apps, then eventually move to fraudster-controlled accounts on crypto apps or scam websites masquerading as investment platforms,” it says Meta in his report. “In addition to disrupting fraud centers, the teams at Meta are constantly releasing new product features to help protect people in our apps from known fraud tactics at scale.”
Pig slaughter scams lead to financial theft, but they begin either with cold one-on-one communication between scammers and potential victims or contact that originates in social media groups or other public forums. For example, Gary Warner, director of intelligence at cybersecurity firm DarkTower, says he tracks thousands of Facebook groups dedicated to luring people into cryptocurrency investment scams, as well as groups purporting to be community dating resources where scammers lurk. .
Online fraud moderation is a difficult and long-standing problem for Big Tech. As is the case with many types of inauthentic content, some pig-slaughtering activities can bypass tech companies’ standards—even when they perform a large number of account removals—because the content isn’t clear enough to meet the criteria for removal.
“So much of what’s on the platform is clearly a prelude to pig slaughter, but Meta says it ‘doesn’t violate community standards,'” Warner says.
