Meta said the scam centers are ‘extremely persistent and well-resourced criminal organizations’ working to evade detection.
Meta said on Nov. 21 that it has removed more than two million accounts this year linked to centers involved in scams, including so-called pig-butchering schemes and other malicious operations.
The scam centers were found to be operating from Laos, Burma (also known as Myanmar), Cambodia, the United Arab Emirates, and the Philippines, with the schemes targeting people globally, the tech giant stated in a blog post.
“For over two years, our teams have been focused on investigating and disrupting the activities of the criminal scam centers in Southeast Asia,” Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, stated. “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.”
Meta said that the scam hubs lured locals in with fake job postings and then forced them to engage in online scamming, such as pig-butchering schemes, often while under the threat of physical abuse.
“The criminal compounds force their workers to engage in a wide range of malicious activity, from cryptocurrency, gambling, loan and investment scams (e.g., ‘pig butchering’) to government and other impersonation scams,” Meta stated. “We know that these are extremely persistent and well-resourced criminal organizations working to evolve their tactics and evade detection, including by law enforcement.”
A pig butchering scheme is an investment fraud where scammers build personal relationships with victims online before convincing them to invest in a fraudulent cryptocurrency scheme.
Scammers often target their victims through dating apps and other social media sites. They will make up deceptive personas, often presenting themselves as attractive single people, to attract potential victims.
The victim “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 stated.
In one instance, Meta said it received information from OpenAI about a scam compound in Cambodia that attempted to generate and translate content using ChatGPT, prompting Meta to disrupt the malicious activity on its websites.
The U.S. Institute of Peace, an independent institution established by Congress, estimated in a May 2024 report that up to 300,000 people have been forced into working as online scammers in the Mekong region of Asia.
“As of the end of 2023, a conservative estimate of the annual value of funds stolen worldwide by these syndicates approached $64 billion,” the report states.
Maj. Gen. Teeradej Thumsutee, commander of the investigation division of the Royal Thai Police’s Metropolitan Police Bureau, said Thailand’s authorities had been working with Meta for over two years in efforts to dismantle criminal scam centers.
Thumsutee said, “We’ve been able to share information so they can investigate and take action against the bad guys and help us hold the criminal syndicates behind these scam centers accountable.”
The FBI said in its 2023 annual report that it received over 69,000 complaints about financial fraud last year involving the use of cryptocurrency, with losses estimated to be more than $5.6 billion.