Forced Online Scams on the Rise in Europe, Africa, Middle East, and Latin America
Online fraud businesses have pulled in hundreds of thousands of unwilling participants in Southeast Asia over the last few years in a criminal method known as pig butchering.
Throughout Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos, 200,000 or more people have become unwilling participants in online frauds that steal money, identities, and personal information. They are forced into labor for scammers at the threat of their safety, lives, or family, and in some cases, they are treated as indentured servants in the business. They are required to make calls, send out messages, and interact with potential victims at the orders of their employers.
The majority of those who run these operations are criminals who speak Chinese and are an offshoot of the Chinese Belt initiatives. This is an infrastructure project from the Chinese government that seeks to spread its culture and influence around the world and that is rapidly changing the transportation of goods and services for Chinese territories and their allies.
The Cost of Pig Butchering Operations
These operations often result in the imprisonment of those involved, and they cause egregious financial and emotional harm to those who are scammed. These operations were previously relegated primarily to Southeast Asian countries, but now pig butchering work has spread to parts of West Africa, as well as Latin America, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East.
For last year, the FBI reported that $4 billion in funds were stolen by these frauds in the United States alone, and global losses are estimated at around $75 billion. While the Chinese government has been working recently to hinder and stop scammers in their region, the damaging, illegal activity is spreading around the world quickly and is cropping up in places where it has never been seen before.
Because there is so much money-making potential for the scammers in this business, when governments crack down on them, the criminals are likely to pivot and move elsewhere or try something different rather than just give up their lucrative schemes. There is no indication that the criminal activity of pig butchering is slowing down, much less stopping, because of the efforts of law enforcement around the globe.