"Pig butchering" scams, billions of dollars lost–and how Meta is turning a blind eye

Former prosecutor and fraud fighter Erin West knows not only that human trafficking is central to the scams defrauding billions from Americans–but that big American tech is enabling it.

A few weeks ago, a report from Reuters caught my attention with this mind-boggling stat: Meta projected 10% of its 2024 revenue ($16 billion) would come from ads for scams and banned goods, documents seen by Reuters show. And the social media giant internally estimates that its platforms show users 15 billion scam ads a day.

The scam ads range from “$710 tariff relief!” and Elon Musk holding up a sign offering financial advice, to fake crypto investment schemes promoted by hacked accounts of military service members. These ads are part of a constellation of digital fraud schemes, alongside pig butchering romance scams that prey on lonely people’s dreams of finding romance online, and sextortion schemes that blackmail people into forking over money.

These schemes are not only bad AI-powered ads on a big tech platform, but actually a sophisticated human trafficking operation that forces workers, many of them Africans, to do the bidding of transnational criminal syndicates. Promised a better opportunity in Southeast Asia, they arrive in places like Bangkok only to be locked in a compound, told they must scam Americans, and tortured should they protest.

I sat down with Erin West, a former government prosecutor leading investigations into cryptocurrency-enabled crimes, SIM-swapping, and digital financial fraud. Today she advocates for victims of transnational crime through Operation Shamrock, a global nonprofit uniting law enforcement, industry, and everyday citizens to disrupt digital scams.

She lays out the unprecedented wealth transfer that is happening today as a result of this fraud, and explains how big American tech is actually abetting the theft from its own citizens.

Ariella Steinhorn: Can you qualify and quantify the scale of these digital scams?

Erin West: Pig butchering, where targets are sweetened up to give a “romantic prospect” money, is the most lucrative scam. It doesn’t end until they’ve taken all your money, hundreds of thousands of dollars to millions. Extortion and job scams are also big. This costs Americans up to $49 billion a year.

I’ve been doing this work since 2022, and crime is increasing dramatically every year. This year it increased by 40%; it’s hard to imagine another kind of crime increasing more. An entire generation’s money can just be wiped out. It deserves more attention and better handling.

What happens is that these scammers will go after every single phone number that exists and send out a bunch of texts–or befriend people on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok as well. They will attract your attention long enough to start a conversation, which has worked well in large part because we are experiencing an unprecedented loneliness crisis. So some people will respond, craving interaction. Once you have been successfully scammed then you’re on another list, and hit up even more.

A lot of people will say, “I don’t think I would fall for this.” But the reality is that your neighbor did, your cousin did–and a lot of people are just hesitant to report the crime as they’re embarrassed.

AS: This is such a multi-faceted issue: you have the psychological manipulation of retired Americans, the draining of their savings to fake romantic prospects, the trafficking of workers to actually impersonate these romance prospects, the platforms that allow these ads to proliferate. What are you focused on this week, today?

EW: Top of mind for me is anger at Meta, and anger at the phony scam-fighting groups that allow Meta to support their conferences and put Meta up on their main stage. There’s a lot of theatre in the anti-scam world, but not a lot of action.

I’m also very closely following what’s happening on the ground in Myanmar, the theatre that is happening there. The Chinese organized crime and mob bosses running scam compounds didn’t want to pay for more protection, so the militia took electronics and ran them over. The armed militias don’t actually care if you’re running a scam park, but they want to get paid, so that’s where that action came from.

And the unfortunate collateral damage is that the evidence on the electronics has been destroyed.

In general, the militia and police in many of these counties running scam operations that defraud Americans are not in the business of making it stop. So it’s difficult for us to know how the money is moving or where it’s going.

AS: None of this is possible without humans powering the conversations with unwitting Americans. What is the recruitment method to get workers?

EW: Imagine a man in Uganda working at an internet cafe and making $100 per month. He is approached by someone who says, you can make $1,000 a month at a live-work compound in Bangkok. The man tells his brother, you know, I could die poor in Uganda, or try this.

So off he goes to Bangkok. When he arrives, he is ushered through a back-way of getting past immigration. He’s led out into the street and picked up by a Thai-speaking person who takes his passport and phone. They enter a boat across the river, where they come across a massive compound with super high walls and guards armed with AK-47s, with only one gate in and out.

They then tell him: “We bought you, you will scam Americans.” People like him have few choices in that situation, because if they don’t work, they are kicked or hit with an electric baton. How does someone like this man from Uganda avoid being tortured while also not scamming other human beings?

These people work for years, and the only way out is to pay a ransom. There are over a hundred thousand workers in Myanmar at these scam compounds, and over a hundred thousand in Cambodia as well.

AS: Are there any regulatory mechanisms or laws in our arsenal to say, you can’t have ads on your platform that have a clear link back to the enablement of human trafficking?

EW: Companies like Meta are well-protected by Section 230 of the Communications Act, which reduces social media companies’ liability for the content that others post on their platforms.

What would it take to hold them accountable? I’m running out of ideas about how to apply pressure in a way that is helpful. I do know that we don’t get there when Mark Zuckerberg is sitting next to the president at state dinners.

AS: What is the most amount of money you’ve seen stolen from a single American through one of these scams?

EW: $99 million.

AS: So where is the stolen money going?

EW: If you go to locations near the scam compounds in Bangkok and Myanmar, you can see evidence of where the money is going at the airports. The planes are filled with people wearing Dior, Balenciaga, incredible jewelry. People are driving cars worth $500,000 in Phnom Penh and buying up real estate. There is no explanation for how they are purchasing any of this.

But there are only so many houses on the coast of Thailand you can buy, and only so many cars and bags you can buy. No one’s been able to locate the direct line to the Chinese Communist Party, but they’re benefiting in other ways. Access to ports, real estate to accommodate military planes. National security manner, over having Chinese organized crime

We need to dissect the money movement to China, because these people are getting enriched in a wealth transfer that is unprecedented. And in a place like Cambodia where you can buy access to the ruling elite, China has leverage to say: we want access to that port, get rid of Americans and put our warships there.

Americans are asleep at the wheel as they are making geographic inroads. And Africa has long been susceptible to Chinese influence, a fertile landscape for Chinese money to show up and have a foothold.

AS: It’s so interesting that there’s all this talk about American tech “competing” with China on AI. Meanwhile China is stealing millions if not billions of dollars without much action happening, enabled by Meta ads.

Speaking of American tech, I saw that Elon Musk’s Starlink had a role in actually enabling the activity of the scam compounds?

EW: Thailand had a cell tower that was supplying internet access to the compounds in Myanmar, and we confronted them to say–hey you’re an ally, why are you enabling bad actors to steal money from Americans?

They took it down, but installed Starlink instead. It took us reaching out to SpaceX with the help of a Senator in New Hampshire to say the obvious line of, hey American company, why are you enabling bad actors to steal money from Americans?

Ultimately they turned off access to 2,600 receivers, but they didn’t focus on just the compound areas. So everything in Myanmar has seen a blanket ban, hospitals and schools don’t have it. Naturally, the Chinese crime syndicate has a new internet provider back up and running.

AS: What would be your dream scenario for how we could trace the money to the perpetrators?

EW: We have the ability to trace crypto and see where money goes up to a point. But once it’s cashed out, we lose the ability to follow it. There are places now where it’s easy to put in your crypto cash out, breaking the chain.

Chinese money laundering has been happening in a longstanding way, so a lot of American law enforcement won’t even tackle it–it’s hard and they might not be successful.

AS: Do you think Meta is fully aware that these are criminal syndicates and human traffickers spending money on their ads to lure in American victims?

EW: There are few people who know this better than I do, and they all work at Meta.

Before Meta and I stopped talking, they told me “we know who the syndicates are.” They know about the trafficking of workers, because the ads are still all over their platform.

When I was in Kenya, I met with NGOs, and they said, oh Meta is helping us. They met with us to find out what keywords that might show up in a scam ad. But are they telling these NGOs the results of findings, is this NGO seeing ads going down? No.

We now know, because Reuters had access to internal documents, that scam ads are where Meta is getting their revenue. They’ll reduce it to a more palatable level–but they will tolerate it. And that’s because they make a significant portion of their revenue from bad actors.

Thanks for the conversation, learn more about Erin and her work here, and get in touch if you have any stories about romance scams or fraud being allowed to proliferate at big tech companies.