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00:00:01
Crypto Investment Scams: How it started. How it's going, with Cezary Podkul ,Reporter at ProPublica
442 Plays11 months ago
In this fascinating episode of Scam Rangers we discuss the atmosphere that allowed the evolution of financial grooming, AKA Pig Butchering scams, as well as how these scams have evolved over time and the trajectory in which they are going. Despite a number of arrests and crackdowns, the picture is not pretty.
Additional Resources mentioned in the podcast:
CloudSEK report about the task scams:
Humanity Research Consultancy report on cyber-scamming and forced labor:
And all the links to my stories from 2021 & today that are related to the issues we discussed:
Pig-butchering scams and human trafficking articles by Cezary Podkul:
https://www.propublica.org/article/casinos-cambodia-myanmar-laos-southeast-asia-fraud-cybercrime
https://www.propublica.org/article/pig-butchering-scams-raided-cambodia-apple-trafficking
https://www.propublica.org/article/human-traffickers-force-victims-into-cyberscamming
This podcast is hosted by Ayelet Biger-Levin who spent the last 15 years building technology to help financial institutions authenticate their customers and identify fraud. She believes that when it comes to scams, the story starts well before the transaction. She has created this podcast to talk about the human side of scams, and to learn from people who have decided to dedicate their lives to speaking up on behalf of scam victims and who take action to solve this problem. Be sure to follow her on LinkedIn and reach out to learn about her additional activities in this space. https://www.linkedin.com/in/ayelet-biger-levin/
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Transcript
Introduction to Scam Dynamics
00:00:00
Speaker
I had so many of them mentioned to me, oh gosh, I felt like I was talking to more than one person, just the person they were talking with, it's like their tone changed, their demeanor, the way they were interacting with them just felt like they were talking to different people. And the answer was, well yeah, you were, you were, because what happens is once the initial intake is done, that initial interview, that conversation that they do with you,
00:00:22
Speaker
to basically try to figure out how much money you have. Are you willing to invest? Do you strike them as someone who might be fooled into depositing money into these fake brokerages? A lot of times those initial chats are initiated by these frontline workers, and then once the person engages, that conversation gets taken over by the hire-up.
00:00:42
Speaker
In episode two of Scam Rangers, we talked to Aaron West, prosecutor at Santa Clara County, California, about stories of victims of pig butchering scams or financial grooming. Scams that start with someone reaching out via chat, WhatsApp or SMS with someone who pretends that they're reaching out by mistake and then slowly starting a conversation which turns into
00:01:08
Speaker
a relationship convincing individuals to invest in crypto.
New Insights on Pig Butchering Scams
00:01:12
Speaker
In the second episode of Scam Rangers, we talked to Matthew Friedman, an expert on human trafficking, about the scammers who are often trafficked into scam compounds in Southeast Asia in order to execute these scams. Today's guest will give us a different perspective of pig butchering scams and an update on their evolution.
00:01:34
Speaker
This episode is brought to you by Scam Ranger. Scam Ranger enables you to empower your customers to protect themselves against online scams. Go to scamranger.ai to learn more. Scam Rangers, a podcast about the human side of fraud and the people who are on a mission to protect us.
00:01:58
Speaker
I am your host, Ayere Figar Levine, and I'm passionate about driving awareness and solving this problem. In this fascinating episode of Scam Rangers, I had a conversation with Hazari Podkul, a Hong Kong-based American investigative reporter at ProPublica, which is a nonprofit investigative newsroom which focuses on deep-dive, long-form investigative journalism.
00:02:27
Speaker
In 2022, Cesari was one of the first reporters to publish in-depth articles about the victims of financial grooming or pig butchering scams. The first three episodes of Scam Rangers are actually influenced by the information from his articles. And today we will talk to him about the atmosphere that enabled this massive operation of scam compounds in Southeast Asia. And also talk about how this scam operation had evolved since to become more global
00:02:56
Speaker
more believable and more efficient, finding new ways to manipulate victims.
Evolution with Technology and Cryptocurrencies
00:03:02
Speaker
So hi, Cesari. Welcome to the podcast. So great to have you here. Hi, Ellen. Thanks for having me. Great. So I really wanted to hear a little bit about your background. How did you get into investigating pig butchering scams and everything around that? What brought you to learn about this and how did you start? About?
00:03:25
Speaker
Two years ago now, I was working on some stories related to unemployment insurance fraud and how that had exploded during the pandemic. There were a lot of people who had their identities stolen by identity thieves and then they were used to file fake claims for unemployment insurance and state unemployment insurance system lost billions of dollars rather than added up in aggregate. So it was a big deal back then. And then
00:03:51
Speaker
That got me curious about identity theft and why was it so easy to steal people's identity. What had happened to make it such that my identity or identity had been leaked multiple times and was sort of an easy answer, which was that actually companies were leaving lots and lots of data online, unsecured.
00:04:09
Speaker
And very, it was very easy for cyber criminals very often just to find unsecured SQL databases online and just grab them and then just start, you know, doing password stuffing and other types of, you know, credential attacks and other things. So I was in the midst of investigating that when one of the sources I was talking to for that story, who was based here in the region. I'm in Hong Kong and he was in Vietnam. He had actually just come back from the US. He had finished jail.
00:04:35
Speaker
term in the U.S. for stealing Americans' identities. He was prosecuted. His name is human nog. He became a white hat hacker and discovered this problem and was trying to solve it. And in the midst of talking about identity theft and how easy it became to steal Americans' identities because of all this data sitting around the line, he told me that he was seeing something else in the region, which is really troubling. And that was really the first moment when I heard of these scam compounds that are scattered across the region.
00:05:05
Speaker
where people are being forced to scam and are perpetrating this thing known as a pig-but-treating scam, which I hadn't heard about either. So it was really through that sort of very organically, you work on one story, you kind of get another idea, you work on another story, you get another idea. That's sort of the way I found my way into it about two years ago.
00:05:23
Speaker
So we're talking about over a year ago now where you started investigating this topic and you started publishing articles on ProPublica, I think three or four articles that discussed this type of scam where individuals in Southeast Asia are targeting victims all over the world and forming this relationship that lasts a couple of weeks, maybe up to a month or so, and then entice them to invest in crypto
00:05:52
Speaker
and essentially get them to invest all their money up to the latest dime and then ask for taxes before they can cash out, known as pig butchering scams, financial grooming scams, crypto. We talked a lot about this type of scam in actually an episode two of Scam Rangers with Aaron West, a prosecutor in Santa Clara County. And we also talked about
00:06:17
Speaker
the human trafficking involved in this. In episode three, when we talked to Matt Friedman, who's also based out of Hong Kong, a lot of information we brought in these two episodes actually was influenced by your articles. So I'm really excited to close the loop today and get more insight from you on this topic. So
00:06:36
Speaker
Tell me what you learned. How did this all get started? How did pig butchering financial grooming become a thing based on the research that you've done? How did the ecosystem allow this type of scam to evolve?
Casinos and Money Laundering in Southeast Asia
00:06:51
Speaker
Yeah, there's a lot to dig into there. In terms of the ecosystem itself, competence scams like these, where you convince someone to do something that they wouldn't otherwise do by grooming them, you know, those have been around for a long time. What's different here is how they've been transformed and powered by
00:07:13
Speaker
combination of technology, you know, messaging apps that allow people to target anyone anywhere on WhatsApp or Telegram or whatever other messaging platform that allows us to connect across borders. So you can now do those sorts of scams instead of just locally in your country, you can target foreigners. So that's one thing that kind of supercharged us.
00:07:33
Speaker
Another thing that really supercharged this is the growth of cryptocurrencies, which enabled cyber criminals to very quickly move money across borders seamlessly, low transaction costs peer to peer. And so they can not only target people with their messages to try to convince them to invest in a fake brokerage that they just created online, but then if that person
00:07:54
Speaker
starts transferring their life savings into a wallet and then starts, you know, depositing it into a scam wallet they gave this person without knowing that they're not actually making money with each transaction. They're actually losing money with each transaction. It's very easy for them to just grab that money and keep moving it and move it and move it and move it through the blockchain and then cash it out somewhere for fiat currency and another exchange somewhere. So the cryptocurrency piece of it was a major element as well that really enabled to go global.
00:08:22
Speaker
And I think the third thing that really powered it, and I know this from just some of the more recent research I've done, is really, you know, we've had this explosion of construction in the gambling during Southeast Asia, and I think that definitely contributed to the parallel growth of the illicit economies in the region.
00:08:41
Speaker
because the casinos that grow up here in this region, they're not regular casinos. They do a lot of money laundering, not just for cyber criminal enterprises, but also for drug trafficking and other illicit trades that happen in the region, like wildlife trade. There's just a lot of that happening in the region. And these casinos have kind of grown up as this shadow banking system for these cyber criminal groups. They have these casinos that then emptied out during the pandemic. They had all this real estate.
00:09:07
Speaker
that was waiting to be used. So it was kind of the means, the motive, and the opportunity, and that all kind of really just came together during the pandemic when all of us were sort of glued to our iPhones and our Android phones, social distancing, kind of feeling lonely, and a lot of these romance scams that took off. And it was just really the cross-section of all of these disparate elements that came together that made this become a global threat.
00:09:27
Speaker
Okay, so let's unpack that a little bit. That's a lot together. First of all, you talked about these casinos being constructed and acting as shadow banks for the organized crime. So how did, first of all, are casinos allowed in most countries in Southeast Asia? Is that gambling is legal? What is going on there? Let's start with that.
00:09:50
Speaker
So gambling is illegal in China with the exception of the Macau Gambling Hub. So with the exception of Macau, you can't build and operate casinos in China. Once you go outside of China across the region, there's a lot of countries that have not only allowed casinos to be built in the last few years, but also just encourage that as a form of foreign direct investment. So we saw Cambodia, for example, doing a lot to lure Chinese investors to build
00:10:17
Speaker
casinos in cities such as Sienikville, which is this coastal city in Cambodia where tons and tons of casinos, you know, we're talking about dozens and dozens of casinos were built since 2016.
00:10:29
Speaker
A lot of that construction, not just in Cambodia and also in the Philippines, but in other countries, a lot of that happened post 2014. And that's a key year because that's when in China there was the beginning of the crackdown on illicit gambling and that put a lot of pressure on junket operators in Macau. So we kind of started moving elsewhere in the region. A lot of the organized crime groups that had taken root there started looking for other places where they could go business.
00:10:52
Speaker
do business outside of Macau. So they needed a place to go. And at the time when they were looking around thinking, where are we going to go? We can't be in Macau. We had the Philippines welcoming casinos and online gambling. And then once that happened, China put pressure on the Philippines to crack down on these legal gambling operations that were targeting Chinese citizens. China didn't want these offshore gambling operations targeting Chinese citizens. The only place where they wanted gambling to be happening was Macau. And they didn't want people being targeted with online casinos and betting
00:11:22
Speaker
money and then having money leave China via legal gambling operations. So China put pressure on the Philippines to crack down on that. They looked elsewhere. Cambodia was sort of open for business, so they moved down there and then started building more casinos and opening more of these online gambling operations there. And then same thing, China put pressure on Cambodia, cracked down on that.
00:11:43
Speaker
Cambodia did limit online gambling in 2019. There was a huge exodus, a lot of people left. Again, they started looking elsewhere, and then Myanmar, they started building more of them. So it's kind of this game of whack-a-mole, one after another. And meanwhile, you also had some
00:11:56
Speaker
already established gambling hubs like for example in the Golden Triangle area in Laos already had Kings Romans there and that's you know the well-known area there's just a lot of criminal activity there it's been well documented and tied to that area so just a lot of these places really popped up one after another
00:12:14
Speaker
and have been mushrooming ever since. As of the last article I wrote earlier this month looking at the nexus between these casinos in the gambling sector here in Southeast Asia and money laundering, the researchers over at the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime have conducted over 340 physical casinos in Southeast Asia. The thing that's interesting here is that a lot of times they're located in very remote areas and these are not places you would think about going to have like
00:12:43
Speaker
the weekend with friends in Las Vegas where you catch a show, you may have a photo restaurant, there's tons of stuff to do. I mean, they're in very remote places and they're not places where people would think about this as the place to gamble. So why do these casinos, some of them still have a lot of activity and if you look at some of their telegram channels, you see people with tons and tons of money, like where is this money coming from?
00:13:05
Speaker
And the answer appears to be that they enable a lot of money laundering for various illicit activities, and they're very helpful conduit for all these criminal groups in the region.
00:13:15
Speaker
The Chinese government doesn't want any of this and they're cracking down on the casinos. They don't want their citizens to be engaged in this type of activity. What's happening in Cambodia? Why is it allowed there?
Human Trafficking and Scam Operations
00:13:28
Speaker
Why is it allowed in other countries in the area? What do they see? I can think about the angle of the foreign investment and building and construction and all the
00:13:39
Speaker
kind of, quote unquote, positive things that are coming out. But if these casinos are involved in criminal activity, even before we get into financial grooming, big butchering scams, how are they allowing it? What's going on there?
00:13:53
Speaker
I think the answer is really it's seen as a boost to the local economy of foreign direct investment. The fact that it happens to be an illicit economy is sort of very often, at least in Cambodia, seen as a secondary concern, I think. The main reason for welcoming the casino sector and online gambling really was it was going to promote foreign direct investment. It was going to turn Sienikville into like the next Macau or the next Las Vegas. And it was also going to bring in tech and all kinds of other investments.
00:14:22
Speaker
It was really seen as a platform for development, so that was sort of the thinking in Cambodia. In Myanmar, I think the groups that started building casinos there were originally facing some opposition from the government, but then the 2021 coup happened, the Myanmar military took over, and with the civil war that's been raging there for the last two years, really
00:14:46
Speaker
The fact that this is bringing in a lot of illicit activity has actually in some ways been helpful to them because some of the border guard forces that are aligned with them are allowing these casinos and allowing these criminal groups that control them to operate there. All this construction is happening to build new casinos for a few years and then the pandemic hits in late 2019, early 2020, things are shut down. What happens to all these casinos and all the
00:15:16
Speaker
construction there. They didn't have any customers when there were the travel restrictions in place, the gambling floors emptied out the customers that they were expecting weren't there. The workers, you know, a lot of the workers that were going to be there, you know, just everything kind of emptied out. Same thing for these offices that were going to house these online gambling operations where you can just imagine
00:15:37
Speaker
You know, obviously sort of office settings where you have, you know, left, you know, computers set up or people would sit there and run online gambling operations that real estate basically needed to be repurposed and it needed to be repurposed at the worst possible time, right? Because.
00:15:53
Speaker
You had this confluence of events that I mentioned earlier happening where people are stuck at home. So all of these people around the world are able to be reached via these messaging apps that we can use across borders. A lot of people are becoming familiar with crypto. They can transfer tokens easily.
00:16:11
Speaker
are dabbling in it. And then these gambling operations, which are expecting this huge inflow of tourists or online gamblers, you know, and workers who work at these online gambling outfits, they just, that wasn't happening. That thesis obviously got hugely interrupted by the pandemic and all the travel restrictions, border restrictions. And so, you know, they needed something else to do and they got, that's how kind of they found their way to online scamming and pig butchering scams, which already were happening in China
00:16:40
Speaker
as of, you know, before 2019. There's an article like this was in Xinhua in December 2019, the phrase pig butchering scam was introduced as one of the most popular phrases that year, I think it was for 2019. So it was already a well-known phrase that phrase pig butchering was well known in China that that tactic had already spread into it. And so that's, that's what enabled this terrible experiment in cybercrime really to take off was just sort of the opportunity to do it.
Global Expansion and Techniques of Scams
00:17:06
Speaker
and then having all this empty real estate that they could repurpose. And that's also what led to the outgrowth of then human trafficking because with the borders closed and not being able to attract workers, you know, that kind of lead to the legal channels and going crossing borders legally, they needed some way to staff up these operations. And so they turned to human smugglers and fake job posts that would promise you a well-paying job if you come work here and put pet or CNF bill or any of these other gambling hubs across the region. And of course, when you showed up
00:17:36
Speaker
But the job is, you know, from the previous episodes you recorded on this, you know, people are then then find out that it's not the job they expected. It's a scam job. So you said something really interesting. This term was already widespread and one of the most commonly known new terms in China in 2019. Yet we only started hearing about it in 22.
00:18:00
Speaker
How did that happen? How did it take so long for us to learn about this widespread event and bring it up to our knowledge here? We only started hearing about this, you know, I would say early 2022. And when I say we, I mean law enforcement and we know that many victims of this type of scam are in the US as well as other countries across the world.
00:18:25
Speaker
So yeah, it was already well known there. The reason we only found out about it later was because the criminal syndicates that were practicing this scam in China decided to pivot and start targeting foreigners during the pandemic. Again, because they had the opportunity to repurpose all these empty offices and gambling facilities across the region.
00:18:46
Speaker
When we started this podcast in December of 2022, we talked about mostly Chinese scammers, be it witting or unwitting, some were lured into it with the fake jobs, like you said, but mostly Chinese that were brought into Cambodia, into Laos, into Myanmar, and then some of them, the ones that were unwitting were
00:19:08
Speaker
Forced to work 14 16 hours a day beaten up and very very hard stories about this But it was mostly them and mostly targeting people originally from China in other countries Such as the US or other places. So tell me a little bit about how this evolved one from a scammer perspective the people actually Execute the scams or they are they still Chinese? Let's start with that question and then I'll ask you another question about the
00:19:39
Speaker
actually the mode of operation of the scam and how that evolved? Yeah, it's a great question. So in terms of the people actually perpetrating the scam, you have to kind of differentiate between the bosses and the lower level workers, a term that's used inside of these scam compounds is the dogs.
00:19:57
Speaker
the dog pushers who are pushing up the scams. So the frontline workers in this, the people actually at the computers who are doing the initial chats, so the people who are doing the customer intake, if you will, in that kind of grotesque equation, they're now being recruited from around the world, really. I've interviewed people from as far away as Brazil who have been trafficking to some of these scam compounds. I think the human research consultancy put out a report earlier this year where they listed all the different countries.
00:20:26
Speaker
Great map. And I think they'd like more than 20 countries on their people from India, Bangladesh, more countries in Africa that we've been hearing about, like Ethiopia, Kenya, pretty much every country in Southeast Asia that we know of Russia. So really, you know, it's gone global in terms of the recruiting. Some of that recruiting now is no longer
00:20:45
Speaker
just about human trafficking. Some people are now coming there willingly because for whatever reason, they decide that this is something they want to do. Maybe they don't have a lot of opportunities. And then the recruiting is now a wider net. We're talking about many countries across the world in Africa, in Latin America, across Asia, as far as far away as Brazil and Russia and elsewhere.
00:21:06
Speaker
We heard of some recruits from the United States, not a large number. You hear scattered stories here and there of people from the United States being lured into these operations. That's, I think, from what I've been hearing is a smaller number, but there have been people from as far away as the U.S. as well. But in terms of the most common places now, you're hearing Asia, Africa and the subcontinent, places like that, some from Latin America as well.
00:21:35
Speaker
And also there was a disturbing story just a few days ago about one of these, a scam operation busted in Peru that had people from Malaysia who had been trafficked there.
00:21:45
Speaker
And so the other disturbing trend that we're seeing is that these scam compounds are no longer just operating in Southeast Asia. This illegal business, obviously a criminal business model, is being tested elsewhere. So it's no longer just Southeast Asia, and I think that's one of the more alarming trends. But in terms of the people who are running it, at least here in Southeast Asia, by and large from over here, it's still very much Chinese criminal groups that are operating these syndicates who are luring the workers, who are
00:22:14
Speaker
very often they're the ones doing the actual pig butchering because one of the things I heard early on when I was talking to pig butchering scam victims was I had so many of them mentioned to me, oh gosh, I felt like I was talking to more than one person, just the person they were talking with, it's like their tone changed, their demeanor, the way they were interacting with them just felt like I
00:22:33
Speaker
They told me they felt like they were talking to different people. And the answer was, well, yeah, you were. You were because of what happens is once the initial intake is done, that initial interview, that conversation that they do with you.
00:22:44
Speaker
Basically, try to figure out how much money you have. Are you willing to invest? Do you strike them as someone who might be fooled into depositing money into these fake brokerages? Do you have a car? Do you have a house? What are your assets? How much can they take you for? Those initial conversations that are very innocent and innocuous, a lot of times those initial chats are initiated by these
00:23:05
Speaker
frontline workers. And then once the person engages, once you decide, you know what, I'm going to give it a try. I have nothing to lose. That conversation gets taken over by the higher up, the bosses take over. And they're the ones who are very expert at having these conversations with people. And all they do is psychologically manipulate people all day long into depositing their life savings with these fake apps, fake brokerages.
00:23:30
Speaker
But that's the reason this is such an effective scan. It's because of that psychological manipulation. And that manipulation is being done by people who are very good at it because that's all they do all day. The reason they're so skilled at it is because they see nothing wrong with it. They just see it as a way of making money. And they psychologically manipulate people into parting with large sums of their life savings.
00:23:56
Speaker
If you suddenly get an unknown or an unsolicited, hi, this is a wrong number, whatever, and then a picture from a pretty Asian woman, then it's likely a pig butchering scam. But what I'm hearing from you now is by recruiting people from other nationalities, they can actually do a lot more. They can go and they can have a video call in many languages because they do have
00:24:19
Speaker
that line of people that can speak in other languages, target people from their own cultures, even if they're forced to do that, and actually have conversations to make it seem even more real, not even getting into deep fakes and AI and all that, but really just using these people in those languages, they can reach out not just to Chinese nationals in foreign countries, but to anyone.
00:24:49
Speaker
Yeah, it allows them to cast a very wide net, and that's a good point. It kind of underscores how the tactic has changed over time. By early on, I mean, gosh, only like two years ago, early on, right? But often you were hearing these stories from some of the first people who were
00:25:08
Speaker
falling victim to these pick-but-train scams, you were hearing about how the person they were talking to would always refuse to get on camera, and that was one telltale sign that you were talking with a scammer. That's no longer true. Just because you're talking to someone and they're willing to get on camera with you and have a conversation with you doesn't mean that you're not going to get scammed. Now they're recruiting people who are willing to basically be models and kind of
00:25:33
Speaker
do this for a living, just, hey, let's talk and I'm just going to talk to people all day and I'm real and see how much money they can deposit into these scamming operations. So the, you know, I really, you know, there's one key takeaway that anyone listening will have from this conversation is, you know, these tactics, these scams are evolving as we speak. And that's why law enforcement has to do more to stay one step ahead of them to really keep track of everything that they're doing, the way these tactics are morphing. So
00:26:02
Speaker
You talked about two years ago, and I know that according to the global anti-scam organization, about 40 countries were targeted about this time last year. What are we seeing now in terms of the targeting of victims?
00:26:18
Speaker
So I checked with the global anti-scan organization on this statistic as well. And I think it was last I checked with them was over 100, over 100 countries. And then when I ranked the list alphabetically, I think it went from Algeria to Zimbabwe. So A to Z really, we're talking A to Z over 100 countries.
00:26:36
Speaker
with the United States still being, the U.S. still being by far the largest target. So it's definitely a global threat. We saw that in the Interpol. Notice that when out over the summer, where Interpol warned that this is a global threat and that's more entrenched than we thought before. It's really scamming being done on an industrial scale. And because it's being done on an industrial scale from these scam compounds across not just now in Southeast Asia, but it's starting up in other countries,
00:27:05
Speaker
That's why you're seeing such a big global footprint, these scams. I don't think it's a stretch to say it's unlike anything else we've ever seen before in terms of its global reach. I mean, countries are being targeted and how many different languages. It's pretty much, I mean, the population that they're trying to reach is really anyone with a smartphone
Job Scams and Financial Traps
00:27:25
Speaker
anywhere. And that's really scary.
00:27:28
Speaker
And in terms of the modes of operation, I'm really familiar with two types of reach outs. One is via WhatsApp or Skype or Telegram or something like that where they reach out kind of wrong number.
00:27:40
Speaker
and start a conversation. Oh, is this John? No. Oh, I'm sorry. Where are you from? And then they start a conversation that turns into this relationship, not necessarily a romantic one, but a friendship. And then they start with the grooming and everything that you talked about. And
00:27:58
Speaker
and show off flashy lifestyle and convince someone to invest in crypto. The other one is those crypto investment groups where you suddenly are invited to join a group chat and they have this guru who is like the best and mostly there's someone who introduces the guru and then the gurus give signals went to trade and people start showing their gains and then you feel like you want to join and I basically I
00:28:21
Speaker
i had a friend i had to talk out of this and he's like but everyone's making money there and i'm i said no they're all bots nobody's making money or they're all people who are it's just you who's the victim here are there any other uh types of of kind of initiation that we've seen into this scam that are different than those two
00:28:46
Speaker
Yeah, so one obviously is also the fake profiles that they set up on LinkedIn or Facebook or other social media platforms and they will use that to lure victims that way. They'll go like a photo you posted, start a conversation, or just message you privately on LinkedIn or Facebook or whatever. So we've seen that attack route as well. The other one that I'm seeing here that
00:29:13
Speaker
might come your way for those of you listening in the United States, I might as well warn you now, is we're seeing a lot more of a verve inundated here in Hong Kong with these messages about
00:29:22
Speaker
These fake recruitment messages were basically the recruiting into these job scams So I get these messages here when I got the other day. This is You know someone saying hello. I'm from maximum equipment company We are urgently looking for candidates to work in our partner companies for full-time part-time freelance work And you know are you interested in more details? And if you say yes, they send you details about this job and it's like doing these simple little tasks online and
00:29:48
Speaker
like this video, click on that, you know, or whatever it is. It's super simple. You can do it at home, flexible schedule and the way it works. Oh, you got this too. So you're totally there. Yeah. I got yesterday. I got, uh, hi, are you doing right now? I'm Milla Russell from BBDO advertising media marketing services. We're looking for full-time, part-time employees in the United States. Can I share more information with you? And then basically she told me that, uh, they're asking for people to influence, um,
00:30:18
Speaker
ratings of hotels. And I said, wait, so you want us to, the job is to write fake reviews. So it was the conversation. I didn't continue it for too long, but just from that reach out, like we're looking for people in the United States. The pay is too high. The hours are too low. Something is off there. Yeah. If you do engage the, the end game is basically to try to get you, it's a pig butchering scam. Just, it's a different version of it.
00:30:45
Speaker
There's an Indian cybersecurity firm that just did an excellent report on this. They were looking at this task scam, basically then covered this huge operation where basically the syndicate was basically creating these fake employment websites. It looked like legitimate companies websites, except with like a slightly different URL. So you feel like, oh, I'm going to work for a legitimate company.
00:31:07
Speaker
And you sign up, you have to do these simple online tasks. And the first time you do it, you get a payout. So you earn some decent amount of money. It's not too little, but it's not insignificant either. It's enough for you to feel like, OK, maybe this is worth it. Maybe I should do it again. And then if you do it again, then there's a bonus special promotion where you'll earn even more money than you did before, twice or twice as much or more. And the pot keeps growing. It doubles and doubles and keeps growing.
00:31:36
Speaker
And so you're encouraged to keep working except to keep working and to keep the pot growing, you got to start putting money in. So now instead of just you do the tasks and you earn money, now you got to do the tasks and you got to put in more money. And here's a thing that just starts to be more and more and more of these tasks. And pretty soon you realize you're on this endless conveyor belt. The tasks never end and it keeps asking you to put more money in. And at some point if you doubt whether it's a scam, you know, they might
00:32:03
Speaker
put you in the chat group with other people who are like, no, I made so much money. It's real, that kind of thing. So it's a really scary damn tactic. But it's really because you have the initial payout and you have the social manipulation and the grooming, because they condition you to thinking it's real. But definitely, if you have a random stranger kind of messaging you out of the blue offering, saying, I saw your resume on a job hunt website, or sometimes they tell you it's on Glassdoor or something, and can I send you more information?
00:32:33
Speaker
The only reason you should engage is if you want some entertainment value to try to figure out if you get a laugh out of it, but definitely don't think that it's real.
Conclusion and Call for Story Ideas
00:32:43
Speaker
And the company that did the report, it's Cloud SDK. It's this cybersecurity firm in India that did a really solid research report on this. So that's what I was reading. And I thought, I really liked the way they explained it because I kind of, I was getting all these messages and I was like, I know this is a scam, but I don't know exactly how this works. Yeah, I thought it's,
00:33:00
Speaker
I thought it's an advanced e-scam where you need to pay or buy a computer or, you know, something on their order on the website and they'll reimburse you or something like that. But I did not imagine that this is another hatchet into
00:33:16
Speaker
Another pathway into the pig butchering scam and it's it is scary because They already get you to build this commitment and they already get you to Get money and invest so they put you in that dopamine cycle without you noticing exactly because he got some money So it's got to be real because the first time I did it I got paid so you're conditioned to think you're gonna get paid again because he got paid Initially, so that's where I see the similarity with the pig butchering because with the pig butchering scam is
00:33:45
Speaker
Initially, people think it's real because they can withdraw some money. When they make some withdrawal requests early on from these fake brokerages, the scammers allow you to withdraw a small amount, or sometimes multiple times, or sometimes if they think they're reeling in a big fish, they'll change their tactics. I've heard of some people being able to withdraw pretty sizable amounts as exceptions of the rule to keep investing, to keep thinking it's real.
00:34:12
Speaker
that similarity is there. They kind of let you get some money out of it at first so that you think it's real. And then they convince you to keep putting some money, keep putting money in so that you, um, so that you keep doing it and keep losing more and more. Wow. So what are you going to write about next?
00:34:29
Speaker
I'm always looking for suggestions, so if anyone has any idea, then what we should be writing about or we should be covering, whether it's honestly, whether it's online scams fraud or otherwise, you know, the public will always miss me for the leaders and taking leader suggestions on interesting story ideas and angles, and so if you have a good story, we are at least effective at that point.
00:34:51
Speaker
Sounds great. Well, thank you so much for sharing your knowledge and definitely we'll share everything in the show notes, everything that you shared with me in terms of resources and articles. And keep up the road work. Thank you for bringing all this information to us so we can be careful. Absolutely. Thanks so much for having me. My pleasure.
00:35:16
Speaker
This episode is brought to you by ScamRanger. ScamRanger enables you to empower your customers to protect themselves against online scams. Go to scamranger.ai to learn more.