Meta provided insight this week into the company’s efforts in taking down more than 2 million accounts that were connected to pig butchering scams on their owned platforms, Facebook and Instagram.
Pig butchering scams are big business, with hundreds of millions of dollars involved every year. The numbers are not precise because some researchers see these scams as a special kind of romance scam, while others classify them as investment fraud, muddying the numbers based on which group is counting what type of loss. Still, the general idea is that scammers use elaborate storylines to fatten up victims into believing they are in a romantic or otherwise close personal relationship. Once the victim places enough trust in the scammer, they bring the victim into a cryptocurrency investment scheme.
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Source: Malwarebytes Labs
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