Meta Shutters Two Million Scam Accounts in Two-Year Crackdown – Source: www.infosecurity-magazine.com

Meta has shut down two million accounts linked to prolific digital scam campaigns emanating from South-East Asia and the Middle East.

The social media giant has now detailed its two-year initiative to crack down on pig butchering and other fraud types linked to scam centers in Asia.

“In the past two years, we have stood up teams and systems to help identify and go after these scam hotspots globally under our DOI [Dangerous Organizations and Individuals] and safety policies,” the firm said in a blog post which shared details of the crack down for the first time.

“In addition, we’ve set up critical partnerships across our company and with key external partners to ensure that we are taking a holistic approach to defending people against the wide range of scams these groups are attempting online and offline.”

It shared the following initiatives:

• Entities designated as DOIs are immediately banned from the platform
• Investigative teams monitor DOIs for attempts to circumvent enforcement, including setting up new scam compounds
• Collaborating with industries, countries and law enforcers in its fraud-fighting mission
• Working with industry peers, such as the Tech Against Scams Coalition, which recently convened a Summit on Countering Online Criminal Scam Syndicates
• Rolling out new anti-scam features, such as warning messages in Instagram DMs and Messenger

Read more on pig butchering: Chinese Duo Indicted for Laundering $73m in Pig Butchering Case

A Multibillion-Dollar Problem

Meta warned that most pig butchering scams start on dating apps, text and messaging apps, email or social media, and then move to scammer-controlled accounts on crypto apps or scam websites masquerading as investment platforms. 

It cited figures claiming that as many as 300,000 victims may have been coerced into working in scam compounds in countries like Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos and the UAE, with $64bn stolen in 2023.

“We assess that much of the scam centers’ activity is tightly scripted by criminal syndicates to scale their operations,” it added.

“It includes some forced-labor scammers focusing on casting a wide net online (often through automated means) to ‘spray and pray’ by reaching out to a large number of people via text message or online with a relatively generic appeal in hopes that some of them will respond. If they do, another group of scammers focus on more tailored social engineering attempts to build trust and convince the potential targets to send money and invest.”

Over two-fifths (43%) of crypto “inflows” to illicit accounts in 2024 have gone to wallets that only became active this year, “suggesting a surge in new scams,” blockchain analysis company Chainalysis said in August. The next highest year, 2022, saw only 30% of scam inflows go to wallets newly active that year.