Stop calling online scams ‘pig slaughter’, warns Interpol

Workers create legitimate-looking social accounts that they can use to target potential victims, and follow scripts to interact with targets. Managers of scam operations also monitor efforts to launder money once victims have made payments. With billions being made from fraud, those running these scams quickly reinvested some of the ill-gotten gains for incorporate artificial intelligence and make scams more effective.

Mina Chiang, the founder of the anti-human trafficking company Humanity Research Consultancy, says she is not a fan of the name “pig slaughter” not only because of its dehumanizing impact, but also because it “restricts the imagination of the people of the nature of the scam”. factories”.

“These hundreds of compounds with hundreds of thousands of workers don’t just work on romantic investment scams, they also do ‘assignment scams’, ‘sextortion’, ‘sports gambling scams’, ‘scams linked to false authorities, ‘ and much more,” says Chiang, pointing out that the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime has called the behavior “organized fraud.”

“Focusing on just one type of scam would risk missing the bigger picture that scams are organized and industrialized by transnational criminal groups,” adds Chiang, “and that scam tactics are constantly changing, as long as criminals are able to extract money from their victims”.

Interpol’s Nick Court says the organization recognizes that the umbrella of “pig slaughter” includes many types of crime. He notes that there may be many different names for each subcategory of activity, but almost everything falls under the international legal definition of fraud. He also adds that, while not everyone agrees that phrases like “romance baiting” are a perfect substitute for “pig butchering”, it is necessary however to move away from the original name.

In recent decades, the Court says, law enforcement agencies, researchers and those who work with different types of victims have launched similar initiatives to evolve the language used to describe other crimes, such as domestic violence, sexual assault and children online. exploitation In all of these cases, he says, the goal is to reduce stigma and try to create a safer space for people to come and report crimes.

“We know that in a variety of types of crimes, the use of language, the use of words matters a lot,” says the Court.