Stop Calling Online Scams ‘Pig Butchering,’ Interpol Warns

Operators established legitimate-looking social media accounts that could be used to target potential victims and follow scripts to interact with targets. Once the victim pays, the scammers also monitor the money laundering. As scams raked in billions of dollars, those who perpetrated them were quick to reinvest some of their ill-gotten gains into Combined with artificial intelligence to make fraud more effective.

Mina Jiang, founder of anti-trafficking firm Humanity Research Consultancy, said she dislikes the name “Pig Killing” not only because of its dehumanizing impact but also because it “limits people’s imagination of the nature of the scam factory” .

“These hundreds of compounds with hundreds of thousands of workers are not only engaged in love investment fraud, but also ‘mission fraud,’ ‘sex blackmail,’ ‘sports gambling fraud,’ ‘fake authority-related fraud,’ and, Chiang said, the United Nations Drug The United Nations Office on Crime and Crime calls this behavior “organized fraud”.

“Focusing on just one type of fraud risks missing the larger picture that transnational criminal groups are organizing and industrializing fraud,” Chiang added. “As long as criminals are able to extract money from their funds, fraud tactics will continue to change.” victim.

Interpol’s Nick Court said the organization recognized that the pig-killing umbrella included many types of crime. He noted that each activity subcategory may have several different names, but nearly all activities fall within the international legal definition of fraud. He also added that while not everyone agreed that a phrase like “romance bait” was a perfect replacement for “hog slaughter,” there was still a need to ditch the original name.

The court said that over the past few decades, law enforcement agencies, researchers and those who work with various types of victims have launched similar initiatives to develop language used to describe other crimes, such as domestic violence, sexual assault and cyber crimes. Child sex crimes. In all of these cases, he said, the goal is to reduce stigma and try to create a safer space for people to come forward and report crime.

“We do know that language use is important across a range of crime types,” Court said.