Ever since people started exchanging goods and services, there has been a risk of one party scamming the other. And there has always been a risk of a third party scamming both the seller and the buyer. In recent years, fraud has taken on new forms and become more powerful than ever, and fraudsters take full advantage of every weak spot in every system and use any new technology they can find. ‘Pig butchering’ scams are every bit as dark/disturbing as the name implies. Common in Southeast Asia and spreading rapidly to the rest of the world, pig butcherers prey on people’s trust and goodwill as well as loneliness and vulnerability to win friendship and/or love online–only later to defraud victims of untold amounts of money–predominantly in cryptocurrency–leaving deep emotional as well as financial wounds in their wake.

Pig butchering, according to the FBI, refers to a time-tested, heavily scripted and contact-intensive process to ‘fatten up the prey before slaughter.’ It can be highly coordinated and sophisticated, often combining romance scams with an investment spin.

More than $10 billion in losses from online scams were reported to the FBI in 2022, the highest annual loss in the last five years, according to a new report from the bureau. The more than $3 billion jump in reports of online fraud from 2021 to 2022 was driven by a near-tripling in reports of cryptocurrency investment fraud, the FBI said in its annual Internet Crime Report.

How Pig Butchering Works

Pig butchering crimes follow a familiar pattern. A random and innocuous text message is seemingly sent in error by a well-meaning person (a ‘pig butcherer’ in disguise) to the victim. Continued communication cultivates trust with the victim, and the victim’s private data is eventually revealed and collected–but money is never mentioned.

Sometime later, the scammer mentions a cryptocurrency investment opportunity, and the victim is persuaded to participate–with seemingly successful results at first. Supposedly legitimate trading platforms and cryptocurrency wallets are employed, depicting successful investments and currency is made available for conversion/withdrawals in some cases to affirm trust with the victim.

Months later, after the victim has ‘invested’ hundreds or thousands—in some cases, millions—of dollars in cryptocurrency exchanges, the pig butcherer vanishes with the money.

Pig butchering is a fast-growing criminal enterprise and victims can come from all demographics and genders. It’s believed that pig butchering crimes are also underreported—many victims feel ashamed/embarrassed to report the crime.

Pig butchering crimes are monstrous, and the depraved criminality doesn’t stop there. Pig butchering is often carried out by victims of human trafficking. Many victims were pursuing seemingly legitimate job opportunities away from home, only to have their passports seized by criminal gangs/networks. Victims are later forced into servitude as pig butcherers themselves, physically confined with an array of phones and other electronic devices to assist the criminal acts.

How Decision Intelligence Can Support Investigations

Pig butchering is a relatively new scam, and law enforcement agencies (LEAs) are scrambling to establish a foothold for combatting it. Pig butcherers typically vanish without a meaningful digital trace, using unregistered IPs and pre-paid phones, leaving behind only fake names, photos, social media profiles and accounts.

However, closer analysis of the attack data can reveal broader patterns of attack activity – modus operandi – that can help bring these criminal networks/sponsors into the light.

Intelligence gathering begins with the collection and fusing of relevant data sources, including online data, ISP (Internet Service Provider) data, crypto exchange/wallet data and more. The analysis of unstructured data, such as images, videos, audio or even scanned documents, can play a particularly crucial role, surfacing valuable intelligence from external data sources.

A decision intelligence platform provides a centralized and collaborative environment for collecting and fusing this data, while providing the big data analytics capabilities needed to cross-reference and correlate data from multiple attacks, to identify broader trends and generate a holistic profile and entities of the alleged attackers/networks

Machine learning (ML) – an integral part of a good decision intelligence platform – makes it possible to surface deeper insights, well beyond what an investigator might ascertain via traditional methods. The availability of big data allows ML to develop at a great scale and improve significantly over a very short time. ML algorithms can spot patterns that seem unrelated or go unnoticed by a human. By exploring and studying numerous cases of fraudulent behavior, ML algorithms identify and remember the stealthiest fraudulent patterns.

IP addresses and signal intelligence from call data records (CDRs) aren’t typically valuable for intelligence gathering when investigating individual pig butchering attacks. But authorities can leverage decision intelligence to identify common key phrases or methods of approaching victims, for example. Within a decision intelligence platform, cryptocurrency analysis tools can also be employed for blockchain analysis. This empowers an analyst/investigator to begin investigating attackers and correlate the timelines and characteristics of similar attacks.

Pig butcherers ultimately succeed by coaxing victims into revealing personal data so ‘trust’ can be established. But the attackers themselves leave data behind too, and a decision intelligence platform is essential to make sense of this data and enable the authorities to connect the dots.

This is the crucial first step in establishing patterns of criminal activity and surfacing criminal networks, bringing the coordinated perpetrators of pig butchering to justice and ultimately driving the crime rate down over time.