💔Pig Butchering & The Hit Netflix show ‘Love is Blind’ 💔

This week with the John Oliver feature on pig butchering: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLPpl2ISKTg , the Jim Browning documentary with an inside view into the scam: and the fantastic research by Chainalysis which followed the flow of crypto funds from victims of pig butchering to a specific compound: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vu-Y1h9rTUs , this important topic is at the forefront of people’s minds. https://www.chainalysis.com/blog/pig-butchering-human-trafficking/

However for those new to this scam typology they may ask how someone could be “fooled” into sending a stranger tens, thousands or even millions of pounds, especially when they have never met them. Becky Holmes , author of ‘Keano Reeves is NOT in love with you’, speaks really eloquently and compassionately about how strategic these scammers are to pull you into their narrative and how we should move away from the victim blaming terminology of people “falling for” these types of scams because it could happen to anyone — but especially those who are vulnerable, lonely or simply unaware that these types of scams exit.

One recent example illustrates this with a Texas bank’s CEO who was conned by romance scammers into embezzling $50m from his bank and who, along with the heartbreak from the scam, now faces up to 30 years in prison.

The literal playbooks that these scammers use are meticulously crafted to make their victim’s fall in love with them. There’s love bombing, flattery, connection building, emotional support and simply the dependability of someone being on the other side of a message — and this is how someone can be convinced to send large sums of money to someone they have never met.

After all, just 4 days after being in the pods on Netflix’s tv show ‘Love is Blind’, you have declarations of love, offers of marriage and participants claiming that they have found their soul mate. For those unfamiliar with the format of the show — it’s a blind dating show in which women and men sit independently in ‘pods’ and can not see each other but only speak through a wall. Yet despite having never seen each other, after 4 days of chatting many of them fall in love and continue forward to wedding which happens just 4 weeks later! Perhaps surprisingly this method of dating works and there’s been marriages and even babies from them show.

As I was settling into series 6 this week the format struck me as a strong illustration for why the romance scammers are able to be successful — it really is possible to build a strong connection with someone you’ve never actually seen before and to believe you’re in love. But whilst those on the Netflix show are in there to genuinely find their person, sadly the pig butcherers are there to exploit the other person’s feelings for their criminal purposes.

What’s the size of the problem?

In the Chainalysis research, the total payments into two linked addresses was just under $100m and had been sent in from both those who had been duped romantically by the scammers but also from the families of those in the compounds perpetrating the scam — who very often are the victims of human trafficking and who’s families are paying ransom’s to try and free them. I wrote about this horrific human trafficking element in my piece last year which looked at the ‘crime behind the crime’

Pig Butchering and Scam Centres: The crime behind the crime

and a recent witness account from someone who was held in a Cambodian compound details the threats of beatings and electric shocks if he didn’t scam people: https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/crypto-scam-human-trafficking-1.7105454 .

However whilst that $100m figure is already too large, the total amount which is linked to pig butchering could be as high as $4.6billion and Chainalysis’ research also found that romance scams had increased 85 fold since 2020!

What steps are being taken?

Binance recently reported that a collaboration with law enforcement saw a $112m seizure linked to pig butchering activty and the incredible Erin West is about to kick #OperationShamrock off which will undoubtedly rocket boost public private collaboration to tackle this issue.

On the arrest front, in November of last year I detailed work of the Nigerian police to arrest 20 individuals linked to a romance scam syndicate and a $228m bust of an Australian romance scam: https://tara-annison.medium.com/pig-butchering-recent-arrests-and-the-role-of-the-dog-pusher-c07599753b16 And in very good news authorities from China, Thailand and Myanmar recently coordinated the release and transfer of 1,200 people who had been trapped in scam compounds across Myanmar.

With headlines now focussing on romance scams here’s hoping that we see fewer victims losing money, more criminals arrested and more people freed from the scam compounds.

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.