13 hours Ago By Kevin Collier
Some major tech companies including Meta are taking steps to combat “pig butchering” scams, which trick Americans out of billions of dollars each year through fake online friendships and romances. Pig butchering scams are elaborate and often take months to unfold. Scammers will patiently strike up an online friendship or romantic relationship with a victim, eventually guiding them to invest in elaborate fake cryptocurrency ventures.
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 on Thursday announced it has taken its first major steps into addressing the scams, including dedicating staff to identify where scammers operate, sharing that information with international law enforcement, and taking down more than 2 million accounts this year. Pig butchering scammers use a wide range of apps, including meeting victims on dating apps and guiding them to chat on Telegram, which is relatively unmoderated and reluctant to work with international law enforcement.
But some scammers meet targets on Facebook and Instagram or chat with them on WhatsApp. Telegram did not respond to a request for comment. Since its owner’s arrest in France in August, it has changed its terms of service to say that it will sometimes cooperate with law enforcement.
Scam reports have risen steadily in recent years. In September, the FBI announced that victims had filed reports of losing a record amount - nearly $4 billion - in crypto investment scams, a category that primarily refers to pig butchering. Given that many victims don’t report to the FBI, the actual losses are likely much higher.
Meta will begin automatically flagging potential scam messages when strangers message people over Facebook Messenger or Instagram DMs, or add them to a WhatsApp group, it said. The announcement reflects how more tech companies are recognizing the severity of pig butchering scams. Meta recently took down a ring of accounts that appeared to come from a compound in Cambodia after being alerted to it through OpenAI, which found that the scammers had been trying to use ChatGPT to translate their messages to victims.
They were also using ChatGPT to generate social media posts, an OpenAI spokesperson said. Earlier this year, Meta, Tinder and Hinge owner Match Group, and several cryptocurrency companies announced a coalition to make their first major joint effort to tackle the problem. Calling themselves the Tech Against Scams coalition, the companies pledged to share scammer information with each other and better educate users.
Jeff Lunglhofer, the chief information officer of the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, told NBC News that while it was unclear how long it would take to make a serious dent in pig butchering and other scams, sharing information with other tech companies was a necessary step. “Many of the initial outreaches are on platforms like Instagram,” he said. “You very quickly get taken to the Telegrams and kind of get moved around a little bit so that they’re hard to track.
But we understand that working with those folks and collaborating with them and sharing information is really the only way we’re going to holistically address this as an industry.” Some scam fighters find tech companies' efforts to fight pig butchering too little and too late, however. Jake Sims, a co-founder of Operation Shamrock, a global coalition working to fight scams and the criminal networks that underpin them, said that proactively warning users about potential scams and periodically taking down accounts fail to cover the extent of criminal activity taking place.
“Given the scale of the problem, this sort of reactive response is not proportional to the crime,” Sims told NBC News. “After three years of Meta’s awareness of this problem on their platforms, the situation is getting worse, not better,” he said..
