Though carrying off pig butchering scams takes a lot of communication and relationship building with victims over time, researchers say that crime syndicates in China developed scripts and playbooks that allowed them to offload the work at scale onto inexperienced scammers or even forced laborers who are victims of human trafficking.
“We can already see the damage and the human cost both to scam victims and to forced laborers,” says Michael Roberts, founder of Rexxfield Cyber Investigations, who has been working with victims of pig butchering attacks. “That’s why we need to start educating people about this threat so we can disrupt the cycle and reduce the demand for these kidnappings and forced labor.”
The concept is similar to that of ransomware attacks and digital extortion in which law enforcement encourages victims not to pay hackers’ ransom demands so they will be disincentivized to keep trying.
The Chinese government cracked down on cryptocurrency scams beginning in 2021, but criminals have been able to move their pig butchering operations to Southeast Asian countries including Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Governments around the world have increasingly been warning about the threat. In 2021, the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center received more than 4,300 submissions related to pig butchering scams, totaling more than $429 million in losses. And at the end of November, the US Department of Justice announced that it had seized seven domain names used in pig butchering scams in 2022.
“In this scheme, fraudsters, posing as highly successful traders in cryptocurrency, entice victims to make purported investments in cryptocurrency providing fictitious returns to encourage additional investments,” the FBI said in an October alert.
Government officials and researchers emphasize that public education is a key component of helping people avoid becoming the victim of a pig butchering scheme. If people know the telltale signs and understand the concepts underlying the scams, they are less likely to be ensnared. The challenge, they say, is reaching the wider public and getting people who learn about pig butchering to pass on the information to others in their families and social circles.
As with romance scams and other highly personal and exploitative attacks, researchers say that pig butchering scams take an enormous psychological toll on victims in addition to their financial toll. And the use of forced labor to carry out pig butchering schemes adds yet another layer of trauma and creates even more urgency to addressing the threat.
“Some of the stories you hear from victims—it eats you up,” says Ronnie Tokazowski, a longtime business email compromise and pig butchering researcher and principal threat advisor at the cybersecurity firm Cofense. “It eats you up really freaking bad.”
