Criminals are using text messaging, dating apps, social media, and email to perpetrate a form of financial fraud, most known as 'pig-butchering,' where victims are lured into fraudulent investment schemes. Meta has confirmed it has removed around 2 million scam accounts across its platforms since the beginning of 2024. “This year alone, we’ve taken down over two million accounts linked to scam centers in Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, the United Arab Emirates, and the Philippines,” says Meta.
See: https://redskyalliance.org/xindustry/country-international-a-new-crypto-scammer-trick
“We’re going after the criminal organizations behind ‘pig butchering’ and other schemes, which target people globally through messaging, dating, social media and crypto and other apps to convince them to ‘invest’ under pretenses.” Many of these fake accounts originate in Myanmar, Laos, and Cambodia. "These criminal scam hubs lure 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," according to Meta.
The perpetrators pose as attractive single people, members of government agencies, and large companies sending generic messages to many users (via DM, SMS, or email), hoping that at least some recipients will respond. Those who engage with these messages enter a process of deception that introduces them to fraudulent investment platforms that appear legitimate but display falsified returns and do not allow money to be withdrawn.
This type of fraud can be elaborate and often takes months to execute, patiently creating an online friendship or romantic relationship with a victim, eventually guiding them to invest in elaborate fake cryptocurrency investments. Victims become convinced they’ve found a way to get rich and sometimes give away their entire savings before realizing it was all a scam.
Meta has removed these accounts from its system when working with law enforcement agencies in those countries to share intelligence to disrupt criminal fraud on the social media platforms that it operates. Criminals in the Asia Pacific primarily conduct pig butchering scams and target users worldwide. Meta has addressed this problem on its platforms for over two years. The FBI reports that it has become a massive revenue generator for organized crime groups, and the FBI's 2023 Internet Crime Report found that investment fraud scams saw a 38% increase from $3.31 billion in 2022 to $4.57 billion in 2023.
Meta says it employs a range of measures to detect and stop scams on its platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger before they can bait users and victimize them.
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