Major tech companies like Meta are taking action against pig butchering scams, which defraud Americans of billions of dollars year by creating phony online romances and friendships.
Scams involving the butchering of pigs are complex and frequently take months to develop. In order to eventually persuade a victim to invest in complex fictitious cryptocurrency companies, scammers would carefully establish an online friendship or love relationship. Before understanding it was all a hoax, victims sometimes give away all of their savings because they believe they have discovered a means to get wealthy.
On Thursday, Meta said it had taken the first significant efforts to combat the scams, including removing over 2 million accounts this year, assigning employees to find the whereabouts of scammers, and sharing that information with foreign law authorities.
Scammers that engage in pig butchering utilize a variety of apps, such as dating apps to meet victims and Telegram, which is comparatively unmoderated and reluctant to cooperate with international law enforcement. However, some scammers talk with their victims on WhatsApp or meet them on Facebook and Instagram.
A request for comment from Telegram was not answered. It has modified its terms of service to state that it will occasionally collaborate with law authorities since its owner was arrested in France in August.
In recent years, there has been a steady increase in scam reports. The FBI revealed in September that victims had reported losing a record amount of money—nearly $4 billion—in cryptocurrency investment scams, which are essentially the same as butchering pigs. The true losses are probably even greater since so many victims choose not to report to the FBI.
According to the statement, when strangers add members to a WhatsApp group or send them direct messages on Instagram or Facebook Messenger, Meta will start automatically detecting possible scam messages.
More tech businesses are realizing the seriousness of pig butchering scams, as seen by the announcement.
After receiving a tip from OpenAI, which discovered that the scammers had been attempting to use ChatGPT to translate their messages to victims, Meta recently removed a ring of accounts that seemed to originate from a compound in Cambodia. According to an OpenAI representative, they were also using ChatGPT to create social media messages.
Match Group, the owner of Tinder and Hinge, Meta, and a number of bitcoin startups said earlier this year that they would form a coalition in their first significant concerted attempt to address the issue. The companies, who dubbed themselves the Tech Against Scams group, promised to better alert users and exchange scammer information.
Although it was unknown how long it would take to seriously curb pig slaughtering and other scams, Jeff Lunglhofer, the chief information officer of bitcoin exchange Coinbase, told NBC News that sharing information with other digital businesses was an essential first step.
According to him, a large number of the early outreach efforts are on social media sites like Instagram. You are led to the Telegrams pretty rapidly, and you are shifted about a bit, making it difficult to follow them. However, we are aware that the only way for our sector to address this comprehensively is to work with those people, collaborate with them, and share knowledge.
However, some scammers believe that tech companies’ attempts to combat pig slaughter come too little, too late.
Proactively alerting users to possible scams and regularly removing accounts don’t adequately address the scope of illegal activity occurring, according to Jake Sims, a co-founder of Operation Shamrock, an international alliance dedicated to combating frauds and the criminal networks that support them.
Sims told NBC News that this kind of reactive approach is out of proportion to the crime given the scope of the issue.
He claimed that despite Meta’s awareness of this issue on their platforms for three years, things are just getting worse.
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