- Facebook has removed more than two million accounts from its platform
- The accounts were engaged in so-called “pig butchering” scams
- The majority of the victims were in Asian markets
In an effort to crack down on organized crime on its platform, Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta has taken down more than two million scam accounts.
The company revealed the news in a blog post, outlining how the bulk of these accounts were used in so-called “pig butchering” scams.
Pig butchering is a type of scam in which the scammer “stuffs the pig” and prepares it for “slaughter”. In this context, stuffing the pig means tricking the victim into giving away as much money as possible, for as long as possible, before the scam is revealed and the gig is up.
Asia-Pacific hotbed
Such scams are usually done via social engineering, on platforms such as Facebook. The scammers would create fake accounts of (mostly) young, attractive females, and engage in seemingly benign conversation with potential victims. At some point, the scammers would introduce an amazing investment opportunity or platform which, in reality, is not real and is maintained by the crooks.
They would invite the victim to “invest” together, in preparation of a new life spent together. The victim would give money through an app, and would be shown that investment growing over time. At this point, however, the money is already gone, and is nothing more than numbers on a screen. The scammer would try to keep the ruse going for as long as possible, getting the victim to spend as much as they can.
When, at some point, the victim tries to withdraw the money (or realizes something is amiss), they will see that it’s not possible.
In some cases, the fraudsters would take it a bit further, impersonating “tech support” from the “investment platform”, and telling the victim to pay a withdrawal fee, or something similar – a final attempt at extracting as much value from the victim as they can.
Meta says that the majority of the scam centers were located in Asia-Pacific, particularly Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, and more recently, the UAE. The victims, however, are scattered all over the globe. The campaign to crack down on these scams is a joint effort, which included many major cryptocurrency exchanges, tech companies such as OpenAI, and law enforcement organizations.
“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,” the company’s blog psot noted.
“We hope that sharing our insights will help inform our industry’s defenses so we can collectively help protect people from criminal scammers.”