Stop Calling Online Scams ‘Pig Butchering,’ Interpol Warns

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

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

“Those hundreds of compounds with hundreds of thousands of workers don’t just work on romance-investment scams, they also do ‘task scams,’ ‘sextortion,’ ‘sport gambling scams,’ ‘fake-authority-related scams,’ and many more,” Chiang says, pointing out the United Nations’ Office on Drugs and Crime has called the behavior “organized fraud.”

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

Interpol’s Nick Court says the organization recognizes that the “pig butchering” umbrella includes multiple types of criminality. He notes that there may be multiple different names for each sub-category of activity, but almost all of it falls under the international legal definition of fraud. He adds, too, that while not everyone agrees that phrases like “romance baiting” are a perfect replacement for “pig butchering,” it is necessary nonetheless to move away from the original name.

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

“We do know that across a range of crime types, the use of language, the use of words matters a great deal,” Court says.