Since around 2020, when the first pig slaughter scams occurred began to emergeMore than 200,000 people have been trafficked and held in compounds (mainly in Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos) where they are forced to play the role of online scammers. If they refuse, the criminals who own the scam complexes, which are usually 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 jobs that are too good to be true.
Forced scammers are forced to send thousands of online messages to potential victims around the world daily. They are tasked with building relationships, often with the lure of friendship or romance, and eventually persuading their victims to send them money as part of lucrative “investment opportunities.” Individually, victims have lost hundreds of thousands of dollars, while criminal pig slaughtering enterprises have collectively defrauded people around the world. $75 billion in recent years.
“These scams can start on dating apps, text messages, email, social media or messaging apps and ultimately move on to accounts controlled by scammers on crypto apps or fraudulent websites posing as investment platforms. “, writes Meta in his report. “In addition to disrupting scam hubs, Meta teams are constantly rolling out new product features to help protect people on our apps from known scam tactics at scale.”
Hog slaughter scams lead to financial theft, but they begin with cold one-on-one communication between scammers and potential victims or with contact originating from social media groups or other community forums. For example, Gary Warner, chief intelligence officer 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.
Moderating online scammers is a difficult and long-standing problem for big tech companies. As with many types of inauthentic content, some hog-killing activities can bypass tech companies’ standards (even when they perform a large number of account deletions) because the content is not explicit enough to meet the standards. elimination criteria.
“Much of what’s on the platform is clearly a prelude to pig slaughter, but Meta says it ‘does not violate community standards,'” Warner says.