How pig butchering scammers are getting away with it

“Pig-butchering” scams are increasing, and some experts think the US government isn’t doing enough to protect consumers.

These scams, where bad actors build a rapport with their victims over weeks or months before stealing their money, have received national attention.

The FBI reported that, as of July, it had notified 6,475 victims of cryptocurrency investment fraud, and helped victims save an estimated $400 million that would’ve ended up in the hands of scammers. Despite such efforts, scammers used pig butchering to steal roughly $5.6 billion from US victims in 2023 alone, the agency stated.

In response to questions from IT Brew, the FBI pointed to publicly available information on Operation Level Up, an initiative to help identify and notify victims of cryptocurrency scams, as well as different internet crime reports.

On a global scale, experts maintain the US government is not doing enough to stop the scammers before individual consumers are targeted and taken advantage of.

Erin West, founder and president of Operation Shamrock, a global nonprofit that aims to disrupt pig butchering efforts by bringing law enforcement, industry, and the public together, told IT Brew current leadership in the US government made campaign promises to protect civilians against foreign adversaries, “and yet this is the biggest instance of foreign adversaries coming after Americans and nobody’s looking at it.”

Additionally, a former government intelligence official, speaking anonymously because identification could hamper their negotiations to help pig butchering victims, acknowledged that pig butchering is “going through the roof” and remains a huge cybersecurity problem, adding that there is currently nobody in the government who is in charge of fraud policy.

In other words, while government agencies like the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice can investigate fraud and help victims, there remains no current position for shaping fraud policy at the executive level.

“It seems to me, all the evidence points to the government actively avoiding being put in charge of this for whatever reason,” the source said.

Whose fault is it anyway? The former government official said oftentimes victims of pig butchering schemes will blame themselves for falling for the fraud, and then the bank for allowing them to give money to the scammers.

Jorij Abraham, managing director of the Global Anti-Scam Alliance, however, said that pig butchering is a problem that no single government can fix, largely because “any smart scammer never scams in his own country.”

“The scammer is always stemming from a country where the law enforcement agencies of those two countries are not working together well, or [there’s] political tensions, so they know they’re safe,” Abraham said. “They’re not a priority for that law enforcement…and sometimes the local law enforcement is also corrupt, so [the actors] just pay local law enforcement and they just continue their business.”

The Hill has eyes. West said some in Congress are “very interested” in investigating pig butchering, despite the executive branch’s current silence about this type of fraud and the Securities and Exchange Commission’s interest in rolling back the cryptocurrency enforcement unit.

In July, Representatives John Moolenaar and Raja Krishnamoorthi from the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party sent a letter to Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai to gather more information about the scam-detection capabilities of Google Chrome and other ways the company is looking to push bad actors out.

“We are particularly concerned about pig butchering and tech support scams that originate through malicious ads or deceptive pop-ups within web browsers, which lead users to fraudulent websites or phone numbers,” the letter reads.

What’s that got to do with us? Organizations need to be on the lookout about the scam, too, with AI company Abnormal warning scammers have turned some attention towards businesses, targeting employees who might have financial access. These scammers are relying on some of the same tactics as consumer-facing pig butchering to gain trust.

Tactics for organizational-focused pig butchering schemes include researching employees and org charts through public resources as well as impersonating executives, vendors, or partners.

Abnormal wrote, “Once attackers build enough trust, they direct targets to fraudulent investment platforms, often designed to mimic real financial services. These platforms are polished on the surface but contain structural red flags that security teams and finance stakeholders can spot with the right checks in place.”

According to the company, red flags for these fraudulent investment platforms include lack of support access, no third-party validation, and more.