Meta says it has removed 2 million accounts linked to pig butchering scams

Meta has taken down more than 2 million accounts this year connected to pig butchering scams conducted from Southeast Asia and the United Arab Emirates, the company said Thursday. 

In its latest security report, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp highlighted its efforts to combat the scams and its collaboration with law enforcement and other technology companies. 

Typically, the scams start on messaging platforms like WhatsApp and Telegram, or on dating sites, where a fraudster attempts to gain the trust of a victim by chatting with them. Eventually, the conversation will shift to investments, and the scammer will try to convince the victim to put their money into a sham cryptocurrency platform. Often after investing their life savings, the rug is pulled out from the victims and they are left with nothing. 

Behind these scams are transnational criminal groups who are raking in billions by setting up compounds throughout Southeast Asia, especially in Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos and the Philippines — and more recently further afield in the UAE. They rely on the forced labor of trafficked workers to pepper people worldwide with messages. 

Hear more: Escape from Bamban: One man’s scam farm nightmare in the Philippines 

According to Meta, the company has sought to identify actors on their platforms connected to these criminal groups and has taken down millions of accounts specifically linked to scam compounds. 

In line with its policies on Dangerous Individual and Organizations (DOI), Meta said it is attempting to crack down on organized crime accounts. Its efforts to target pig butchering scams began two years ago.

“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,” they said. “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.” 

Since then, technology companies have begun to work together to share intelligence and strategies to cut down on organized cyber fraud. In May, a partnership between the cryptocurrency companies Coinbase, Kraken, Ripple and Gemini, online dating company Match Group, Meta and the nonprofit Global Anti-Scam Organization was announced. 

The collaboration, called Tech Against Scams, is “a primary convening body” involving intelligence sharing to address cyber fraud. 

In one case highlighted in Meta’s report, the company disrupted activity appearing to stem from a compound in Cambodia targeting people in Japan and China after they were tipped off by OpenAI, which had detected that its tools were being used by the fraudsters to generate content for scamming. 

Despite these collaborations, investment scams have shown no signs of abating as organized criminal groups have expanded operations throughout the region. In a recent report, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime warned that scammers are turning to more high-tech tools, like deepfake software and generative AI, to defraud people. 

“It is now increasingly clear that a potentially irreversible displacement and spillover has taken place in which organized crime [groups] are able to pick, choose, and move value and jurisdictions as needed, with the resulting situation rapidly outpacing the capacity of governments to contain it,” the U.N. said.