Every day, criminals target people across the world through text messaging, dating apps, social media and email in so-called ‘pig-butchering’ and other schemes that try to con them into scam investments. Today, for the first time, we are sharing our approach to countering the cross-border criminal organizations behind forced-labor scam compounds under our Dangerous Organizations and Individuals (DOI) and safety policies. We hope that sharing our insights will help inform our industry’s defenses so we can collectively help protect people from criminal scammers.
What is ‘Pig Butchering’?
One of the most egregious and sophisticated fraud scams, ‘pig butchering’ is all about building trusted personal relationships online with someone only to manipulate them to deposit more and more money into an investment scheme, often using cryptocurrency, and ultimately lose that money.
Who’s Behind ‘Pig Butchering’?
During the COVID-19 pandemic, scam compounds run by organized crime emerged in the Asia Pacific region as one of the major sources of ‘pig butchering’ and other scam activity. And while they are mostly based in Asia, scam centers target people across the globe. These criminal scam hubs lure often unsuspecting job seekers with too-good-to-be-true job postings on local job boards, forums and recruitment platforms to then force them to work as online scammers, often under the threat of physical abuse.
The scale and sophistication of this threat is unprecedented, with the US Institute of Peace estimating that up to 300,000 people are forced into scamming others around the world by these criminal groups, with about $64 billion dollars stolen worldwide annually as of the end of 2023.
For over two years, our teams have been focused on investigating and disrupting the activities of the criminal scam centers in Southeast Asia. While our initial focus was on scam centers in Cambodia, we have since worked to keep pace with the expansion of these groups as they began to appear in places like Laos, Myanmar and more recently the United Arab Emirates. At the outset, we actively engaged with expert NGOs and law enforcement partners in the US and Southeast Asia to better understand the modus operandi of these criminal groups, including in places like Sihanoukville in Cambodia, which is reported to be a hotbed for Chinese organized crime-linked scams.
How These Scams Work
The criminal compounds force their workers to engage in a wide range of malicious activity, from cryptocurrency, gambling, loan and investment scams (e.g., ‘pig butchering’) to government and other impersonation scams. Across many internet and telecom services, they make up deceptive personas, often masquerading as attractive single people or pretending to represent government agencies or trusted public figures and businesses.
We assess that much of the scam centers’ activity is tightly scripted by criminal syndicates to scale their operations. It includes some forced-labor scammers focusing on casting a wide net online (often through automated means) to ‘spray and pray’ by reaching out to a large number of people via text message or online with a relatively generic appeal in hopes that some of them will respond. If they do, another group of scammers focus on more tailored social engineering attempts to build trust and convince the potential targets to send money and invest.
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.
Typical of ‘pig butchering’ schemes, the target may be allowed to withdraw small amounts to build trust, but once they start asking for their ‘investment’ back or it becomes clear that they do not have more funds to send to the scammer, overseas scammers typically disappear with all the money.
Our Approach to Countering Scam Compounds
In the past two years, we have stood up teams and systems to help identify and go after these scam hotspots globally under our DOI and safety policies. In addition, we’ve set up critical partnerships across our company and with key external partners to ensure that we are taking a holistic approach to defending people against the wide range of scams these groups are attempting online and offline. Here are some details:
Dangerous Organizations and Individuals Policy
To counter these scam compounds globally, we rely on our DOI policies as the most effective and appropriate set of measures for disrupting organized crime. Using both our internal subject matter expertise and insights from external stakeholders, we are continuously investigating and assessing criminal organizations involved in this activity for designation. Once designated as DOIs, the entities are banned from our platform and subject to a wide range of enforcement tools.
On-Platform Enforcements
Our investigative teams monitor these designated DOIs for attempts to circumvent our enforcement. This includes looking for new scam compounds globally and continuously disrupting their operations. This year alone, we’ve taken down over two million accounts associated with scam centers in Cambodia, Myanmar, Laos, the United Arab Emirates and the Philippines. We also continue to update behavioral and technical signals associated with these hubs to help us scale automated detection and block malicious infrastructure and recidivist attempts.
Working with Others to Counter and Deter This Threat
We know that these are extremely persistent and well-resourced criminal organizations working to evolve their tactics and evade detection, including by law enforcement. We’ve seen them operate across borders with little deterrence and across many internet platforms in an attempt to ensure that any one company or country has only a narrow view into the full picture of scam operations. This makes collaboration within industries and countries even more critical.
Law Enforcement
As part of our threat disruption efforts, we are working with law enforcement agencies around the globe to share our insights into how this criminal industry operates and help law enforcement protect communities from these scams.
“The Royal Thai Police has been working with Meta on disrupting criminal scam centers for over two years. We’ve been able to share information so they can investigate and take action against the bad guys and help us hold the criminal syndicates behind these scam centers accountable.”
— Police Major General Teeradej Thumsutee, Commander of the Investigation Division of the Metropolitan Police Bureau, Royal Thai Police
Industry Peers
When possible, we’re working to share threat information with our industry peers who are focused on preventing criminal syndicates from targeting people on our respective platforms. As an example, recently, our team disrupted malicious activity that appeared to originate from a newly stood up scam compound in Cambodia attempting to target people in Japanese and Chinese languages. We began investigating this activity based on information shared with us by our peers at OpenAI, who detected and disrupted the actors’ efforts to use their tools to generate and translate the scammers’ content. We also shared threat information about the scam centers we have disrupted to enable further investigations across the internet.
In addition, last week, as part of the Tech Against Scams Coalition, we co-convened a Summit on Countering Online Criminal Scam Syndicates. It included international law enforcement, government officials, NGOs and tech companies that came together to discuss ways to make further progress in tackling this transnational threat. The Coalition includes companies across dating apps, social media apps, financial institutions and crypto platforms, like 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 constantly rolling out new product features to help protect people on our apps from known scam tactics at scale. For example, we will show you a warning in Messenger and Instagram DMs reminding you to be aware of potentially suspicious interactions or cold outreach from people you don’t know, so you can slow down and review before accepting a message request. On WhatsApp, if you’re added to a group chat by someone you don’t know, you’ll now see a context card giving you more information about the group. It’ll show who added you, how recently the group was created and who created it so you have context on this outreach.
As part of our continuous updates on Meta’s work to protect people from scammers, we’ll 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 to follow in the coming weeks.
