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Meta said Thursday that it removed more than 2 million accounts this year that sought to trick internet users around the world into forking over their money in fake investment schemes, part of a rise in criminal activity across the web.
The accounts are linked to so-called pig butchering schemes, in which criminal organizations make up fake personas — often posting as attractive single people or trusted public figures — to win the confidence of users, eventually persuading these contacts to fork over money for nonexistent investments.
“Every day, criminals target people across the world through text messaging, dating apps, social media and email in so-called ‘pig-butchering’ schemes that try to con them into scam investments,” the company said in a press release.
The scam centers running “pig-butchering” schemes took off in Asia during the covid-19 pandemic, often recruiting their workers with “too-good-to-be-true job postings” on local job boards and then forcing them to work as online scammers under the threat of physical abuse, according to Meta’s report.
Meta said it disabled accounts linked to scam centers in Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, the United Arab Emirates and the Philippines.
About 300,000 people have been forced to work for the criminal operations, which had stolen an estimated $64 billion from victims around the world by the end of 2023, according to a report from the U.S. Institute of Peace, an independent research organization created by Congress.
The scam operations often target a large number of people via individual text messages with a “generic appeal” post. If a targeted person responds, another group of scammers attempts to build trust over time and persuade victims to send money and invest.
The scammers often find their victims through dating apps, text messages, email and social media accounts before transitioning the conversations onto crypto apps or scam websites masquerading as investment platforms, according to Meta.
“The target may be allowed to withdraw small amounts to build trust, but once they start asking for their ‘investment’ back or it becomes clear that they do not have more funds to send to the scammer, overseas scammers typically disappear with all the money,” Meta said in a press release.