‘Pig butchering’ fraud: the link between modern slavery, torture and online crime

Netflix documentary The Tinder Swindler tells the story of a fraudster who convinces women he met on a dating app to “loan” him large sums of money. It shows the devastating financial damage and psychological trauma online romance fraud can inflict on its victims. But it’s not just carried out by individuals – sometimes it’s orchestrated by organised crime groups that operate on an industrial scale.

One newer type of such fraud is often called “pig butchering”.As we argued in our recent paper, this term dehumanises victims and reveals something of the psychology of the fraudsters themselves, reflecting how they perceive themselves as “hunters”, which helps them justify their actions.

This type of fraud is attributed to Chinese organised crime groups called triads. Typically, victims are contacted on messaging apps and dating websites, where fraudsters try to gain a prospective victim’s trust by grooming them, often over several months. They then introduce the notion that their family member has a financial background before convincing the victim to invest money in cryptocurrency trading websites.

These websites are also operated by the fraudsters, who edit them to show small initial gains, allowing victims to withdraw these gains to convince them of the scheme’s legitimacy. The victims are then advised to invest larger amounts. When the offender sees that the victim has invested a significant sum, they “rug pull” by showing huge losses, providing them with cover to steal their victim’s funds.

What makes this type of fraud different is that the offenders are often themselves victims of recruitment fraud. Financially vulnerable people are promised work in casinos and sent to south-east Asia, typically Cambodia and Myanmar, from all over the world. They are then locked in large compounds and may be forced to defraud people for 17 hours a day.

A 2023 report by the Humanity Research Consultancy, a social enterprise investigating modern slavery, offered a glimpse into the conditions in these places. To ensure compliance, the traffickers regularly torture their victims, with methods like electrocution, burying captives alive or smashing their fingers with hammers. Women are often forced into sex work in the compound’s brothels and to act as models during video chats with prospective victims.

There is emerging evidence suggesting that these compounds are also operating further afield. An August 2024 investigation by the BBC found a pig-butchering compound operating in Douglas on the Isle of Man, where a hotel and former bank offices were used as premises by nearly 100 Chinese nationals to defraud more than £4 million from victims in China.

The use of the term “pig butchering” in this context shines the spotlight on a broader process of dehumanisation. Thinking of themselves as intellectually superior enables fraudsters, in the role they give themselves as hunters, to alleviate guilt while harming people they perceive as inferior.

A 2018 UK study and a 2023 joint Nigeria and UK study found that some Nigerian songs blame and dehumanise online fraud victims in a similar way. For example the song Dejavu, released in 2023, has the lyrics “addicted to my lappy o I still dey bomb maye eh”, meaning “addicted to my laptop I’m still bombing (hunting) for senseless clients (victims)”.

Psychological research into dehumanisation shows that thinking of yourself as superior makes it easier to harm people labelled as inferior. This includes acts of violence, discrimination and exploitation in contexts such as genocide, incel ideology, and prejudice against racial minorities, drug users, and bullying victims. In the context of online fraud, dehumanisation diminishes empathy, serving as a shield that enables perpetrators to avoid self-condemnation.

Similarly, hunting and killing a “pig” might be likened to a recreational activity, with the pig symbolising something less than human. According to late Canadian-American psychologist Albert Bandura’s work on dehumanisation, mistreating a person who has not been dehumanised can be more distressing for the perpetrator, and often results in misery and self-condemnation.

Passive and active dehumanisation differ in expression. Active dehumanisation involves explicitly harmful actions, such as diminishing victims’ humanity and intellectual capacity, likening them to animals like pigs or impalas (a type of antelope). Passive dehumanisation, on the other hand, stems from apathy or neglect.

In online fraud, criminals actively dehumanise victims, while broader discussions of “pig butchering” such as in academia and in news reports, often perpetuate passive dehumanisation. Both forms, whether intentional or subconscious, result from either deliberate disregard or a failure to recognise the humanity of others.

Researchers and journalists can help to rehumanise victims of online fraud. In this context, rehumanising involves attributing the individuality inherent in being human. An example of this is how the term “child pornography” has been reframed as “child sexual abuse material” (CSAM), a term which rehumanises victims by not trivialising the crime.

The question is what should we call “pig butchering”? The criminologist Cassandra Cross proposes the term “cryptorom”, while another simpler term that could describe the offence is “financial grooming”.

We need a more empathetic and accurate portrayal of people affected by online fraud that considers the social, cultural and political contexts that surround victims.

Jack Mark Whittaker, PhD Candidate, Criminology (Cybercrime), University of Surrey and Suleman Lazarus, Visiting Fellow, Mannheim Centre for Criminology, London School of Economics and Political Science

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.