354 - Love Bombs and Long Cons: Understanding Pig Butchering Scams

354 – Love Bombs and Long Cons: Understanding Pig Butchering Scams

Erin West joins Dr. Sandie Morgan as they uncover why that random text asking “Can you come for ribs?” might be the opening move in a $5 billion crime operation targeting vulnerable people through sophisticated romance and investment scams known as pig butchering.

Erin West

Erin West is a globally recognized expert in transnational organized crime and the founder and president of Operation Shamrock, a nonprofit uniting law enforcement, industry, and everyday citizens to disrupt pig butchering scams—the world’s fastest-growing form of transnational organized crime. After 26 years as a prosecutor, including eight years on the REACT High-Tech Task Force where she became known for her relentless pursuit of cryptocurrency-enabled criminals, Erin retired to launch this cross-border fight to expose the scam economy and protect both victims and the trafficked workers forced to run these schemes. She is also the host of “Stolen,” a podcast that takes listeners inside the darkest corners of the scamdemic, where love is weaponized and billions are laundered. As a sought-after international speaker and educator, Erin continues to equip audiences worldwide to use their skills and platforms to fight back against these sophisticated criminal enterprises.

Key Points

Pig butchering scams are long cons that can last up to four months, involving four hours of daily texting to build the relationship victims have always wanted before stealing their life savings.
Chinese organized criminals created this crime model by repurposing casino towers in Southeast Asia during COVID, literally translating “pig butchering” as fattening up victims with love bombing before cutting their throats financially.
The scams begin with seemingly innocent outreach through wrong number texts, LinkedIn connections, or social media befriending, then quickly move to encrypted platforms like WhatsApp to conduct criminal activity without oversight.
Hundreds of thousands of people from Africa, Bangladesh, and Pakistan are being trafficked to Southeast Asia under false job promises, then forced to work 16 hours a day running these scams under threat of violence.
Victims of forced criminality face arrest and detention when compounds are raided because they’re treated as criminals rather than trafficking victims, creating a massive repatriation crisis.
The scale of this crime is unprecedented, with victims reporting losses of $4.9 billion in 2024 alone, representing a generation’s worth of stolen wealth from retirement and college savings accounts.
End-to-end encryption, while protective for legitimate users, is weaponized by criminals to conduct relationships and transactions away from law enforcement visibility.
Effective response requires unprecedented cross-sector collaboration between banking, law enforcement, cryptocurrency platforms, diplomacy, victim assistance, and NGOs working together rather than in silos.

Resources

Transcript

[00:00:00] Speaker 3: Welcome to the Ending Human Trafficking Podcast here at Vanguard University’s Global Center for Women and Justice in Orange County, California. I’m Dr. Sandie Morgan, and this is the show where we empower you to study the issue, be a voice, and make a difference in ending human trafficking.

[00:00:23] today. We’ll discover why that random text asking Can you come for ribs? Might be the opening move in a $5 billion crime operation

[00:00:36] I’m joined today by Aaron West, founder and president of Operation Shamrock, and former prosecutor who spent 26 and a half years. Fighting high tech crimes And now here’s our interview.

[00:00:53]

[00:00:54] 354-sandie: welcome to the podcast Erin West. I am so delighted to meet you.

[00:01:02] 354-guest: Thank you so much for having me on the podcast. I’m delighted to be here.

[00:01:05] 354-sandie: It was really interesting.

[00:01:07] Debbie De, who was on episode 3 51, mentioned you and she mentioned you in her context talking about pig butchering, and she had my full attention right away. And then she talked about your nonprofit. At the top of this interview, I wanna frame everything with what you are doing with Operation Shamrock.

[00:01:37] Somehow my imagination took me to Ireland, so, tell us what that is.

[00:01:44] 354-guest: Sure. So I was a prosecutor for 26 and a half years, and the last three years of my career I was deluged with victims of a certain type of crime known as pig butchering. It’s a long con, it is a, romance slash slash investment scam. And what I was seeing was that we had never seen. Anything like this before, we’d never seen a scale like this, and ultimately, my passion for trying to do something about it made me realize that I needed to leave my career, retire from being a prosecutor and open a nonprofit and operation share rock.

[00:02:26] Our mission is to educate about, mobilize against and disrupt transnational organized crime. The, the Chinese organized criminals that are, that are running this horrible crime. and so that’s what we do.

[00:02:41] 354-sandie: So what is a long con?

[00:02:44] 354-guest: Yeah. You know, I think that, and a good example of a short con would be those calls that you get where you are led to believe that, your, your grandchild is in custody somewhere and you need to go put money in an ATM real quick. That’s a, that’s a,

[00:03:01] 354-sandie: oh, I got a text, I got a text yesterday that said, mom, I lost my phone. Text me at this number.

[00:03:12] 354-guest: Yeah,

[00:03:13] 354-sandie: like, ah,

[00:03:15] 354-guest: Ugh. That’s, and the fact that that happened to you yesterday shows how ubiquitous these crimes are. So, so when you ask about a long con, A long con is something where, oh my gosh. And I just got a text right now. That’s, that. Says hello. I’m Sophia from the Indeed Human Resources Team. We recently came across your outstanding resume.

[00:03:39] That’s a job scam and it’s happening. That’s, that’s how frequently this is happening. So the long con is, is when you get one of those texts that says, Hey, I’m making ribs tonight. Can you come over and you say, oh, I think you have the wrong number. And then you start a, what can be up to four months of a relationship with someone that you met in a very random way on the internet?

[00:04:03] These bad actors have tried and true techniques that they use to lure you into believing that you are in a legitimate relationship and it’s the kind of relationship that you’ve always wanted.

[00:04:16] 354-sandie: Hmm. So I’ve done so much work in the youth prevention field, and we always call that like the Romeo Pimp, the Romance Con, those kinds of things.

[00:04:31] And so those kids don’t have any big money. So why is this happening?

[00:04:37] 354-guest: I’ll say that the enemy is so sophisticated that they are attacking every, every demographic. And so they have, we’ve recently found out that Sextortion is coming out of the very same compounds that are doing these long cons, and the enemy is willing to do anything to make. To make money. So the short amount of time it takes to get some money out of, out of younger victims, they’ll do that, but they’ll invest a longer amount of time.

[00:05:12] When they know that you have a retirement account or you have funded college accounts for your kids, they will know that it’s worth the amount of time to do that

[00:05:23] 354-sandie: Okay, so how long would a long con go? Like two weeks, four months. Okay. So we’re talking regular communication. We’re

[00:05:33] 354-guest: We’re talking four hours a day of texting. We are talking, we are talking that they become the relationship that that victim has always wanted. That they are the, the happy, the happily ever after They’re selling a dream, and it takes a minute to sell a dream like that.

[00:05:50] 354-sandie: Mm. So Debbie. First mentioned pig butchering in our episode 3 51 when we were talking about online scams, particularly targeting senior citizens. And I think the stat she shared with us was $4.9 billion in 2024. can you. Really break down what a pig butchering scam looks like, the steps, how do I begin to recognize when that’s what’s happening?

[00:06:27] And how did it get a name like that?

[00:06:29] 354-guest: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, so you’re asking all the right questions. so let, let’s start with that part first. So, I’m gonna take you back to what was happening in Southeast Asia. That’s where this is coming from, in, in COVID Times and Chinese organized criminals. And when I say that, I mean legitimate Chinese organized criminals.

[00:06:48] Members of the triad, thought it would be great to build a bunch of casinos in Cambodia and lure Chinese gamblers down there and make money from gambling. And when, COVID hit and people weren’t moving, they said, well, let’s figure out another way to fill these large buildings that we have and let’s figure out another way to make money.

[00:07:09] So they thought, SHA Z pan, that is the Chinese term for it. It literally translates to pig butchering. And the idea is, let’s fill those towers with, with. Workers and have them fatten up the pig, build these love bomb relationships with victims, and then once the victims are in, let’s cut their throats and let’s

[00:07:35] take

[00:07:35] 354-sandie: Oh my

[00:07:36] 354-guest: they have.

[00:07:37] 354-sandie: That’s

[00:07:37] 354-guest: And so that’s what pig butchering really means. And it is, it is vile in so many ways. For a long time, there was a whole movement to not call it pig butchering because that was, that was cruel to victims.

[00:07:50] But I think that the reason why we need to call it pig butchering is that’s what they call it and it gets attention and it gets attention to what is a crime, the unknown crime that is killing a whole strata of our society.

[00:08:07] And these people aren’t talking about it because they feel shame and embarrassment. So when we think about how a pig butchering scam works, the. It. It begins with an initial reach out. It could be one of those texts we’ve talked about, or it could be someone friending you on LinkedIn connecting with you and saying, I see that you’ve recently moved to Southern California.

[00:08:30] My niece is thinking of moving there. Can you tell me what a good neighborhood is for a young woman or something like that, that gets your attention and, and feels not at all nefarious. And you, you might think, oh, I’d like to be helpful. It could be someone befriending you in your over fifties women’s travel group on Facebook, which happened to me.

[00:08:52] It could be someone on a dating app. and so what it is, is there’s this initial reach out. There’s an initial. Connection. And from there they move that connection to wherever it started, to WhatsApp or to Signal or to Telegram. Somewhere that’s end to end encrypted and over time

[00:09:10] they

[00:09:11] 354-sandie: Stop that for just a second

[00:09:12] 354-guest: You stop me whenever

[00:09:14] you

[00:09:14] 354-sandie: Oh, okay. Because I’m like listening to this as a first timer and I’m thinking, oh, wait a minute. My tech guy told me, end-to-end encryption will protect me. And now you are telling me they choose end-to-end encryption. Go back.

[00:09:31] 354-guest: I am so glad that you stopped me because this is important to me. I think a lot of people in this industry use a lot of buzzwords terms. They talk through stuff and, and it makes it difficult to say, wait, wait, wait. Stop. Let me, let me make sure I understand that piece. So I’m glad you stopped me. So let’s talk about end-to-end encryption.

[00:09:49] End-to-end encryption is great. If you want to keep a secret. It is great if you want to send information to someone else that you don’t want anyone looking at, and that’s what these bad guys want. They want to be able to communicate you with you in a space where there’s no one looking. So, I just saw an example on Airbnb this morning where somebody was talking on Airbnb.

[00:10:16] The guy wanted them to, to speak in WhatsApp. They went to WhatsApp and he started suggesting that they go on a date. So the, the point is WhatsApp is where things happen that people want to conceal. So it can be good for you. If you want to talk to your son and have him send you his checking account number in a, in a concealed way, it can be not good for you.

[00:10:41] When you are getting lured into a fictitious relationship over a four month period.

[00:10:48] 354-sandie: Wow. Okay. So pick up again from the encrypted.

[00:10:54] 354-guest: So then, uh, these texts come in and these texts are, always good morning. How are you? Good. Uh, have a good night. Sleep well always, and just absolutely checking in on every aspect of your day with a genuine interest. I spoke with a victim last week who said,you know, I, I lost $75,000, but I, I would almost pay that for the relationship that I had.

[00:11:19] We are, yeah, I see you reacting to that because it’s, it’s a lot right.

[00:11:23] 354-sandie: Mm-hmm. Wow.

[00:11:25] 354-guest: We are living in a society where people are so desperate for a human connection, that they’re, they’re willing to trade quite a bit for that human connection. What I’ve heard other victims say is, I never felt so heard, understood, listened to

[00:11:41] The enemy is masterful in creating a very human connection that feels very, very real.

[00:11:50] 354-sandie: So. One of the things that, in my conversation with Debbie deem and with others is the link to human trafficking is really nebulous sometimes with this, because we’re, we’re talking about some of the same fraud. techniques, but then they’re not selling the person, they’re scamming the person or fraud. I, wait a minute, Debbie told me not to use the word scam.

[00:12:21] because it’s shame-based. Yeah, right. So I’m still

[00:12:24] 354-guest: We’re we’re learning

[00:12:25] We’re all

[00:12:26] 354-sandie: all learning, but the idea of those casinos that were built, Also created a venue where forced criminality became an issue, and what I understand is luring. So it’s like this is a multi-level crime where they’re luring workers to come to a job where then it.

[00:12:56] Isn’t what they thought it would be, which is very typical in trafficking, and now they are forced to do the scams. And what does that forced criminality look like?

[00:13:10] 354-guest: It is horrifying and

[00:13:14] the worst part

[00:13:14] of this entire business in that if I take you back to Chinese organized crime building, these casino towers in Cambodia.

[00:13:24] COVID

[00:13:25] hits, people aren’t moving. They decide to go to pig butchering. Well, that requires a lot of human workers. And so to do that, they started flooding, meta, with advertisements for, for jobs.

[00:13:39] And at that period of time, and still today, there’s a large unemployment rate in Southeast Asia. Particularly in Africa, and we’ll get to that in a minute. But what’s happening is, they are luring people with the idea of getting a real job. And so the advertisements are very official looking.

[00:14:00] They are interviewing people, they’re making them take a typing test. They have every reason to believe that they are coming. To Bangkok to have a legitimate job in a live work environment where they will be able to send money home, and the level of deception is outrageous. When you think of luring a human being to leave their home and come to.

[00:14:24] A country that is foreign to them. When they arrive at the airport, they’re met, their passports are taken, their phones are taken, and they are driven hours on end. Some are put in boats and moved across rivers. They’re, they’re moved against their will and then they are put into a facility where they go through a guard gate with guards with AK 40 sevens, and now they’re told, no, you’re not here to do data entry.

[00:14:49] You are here to scam your fellow humans. You are here to make people fall in love with you and then steal all of their money and you’ll be doing this 16 hours a day and if you don’t do it, we’ll beat you and we’ll make you beat your peers and we will. I mean, the level of the level of criminality involved in making people do such a horrific task is war crimes level.

[00:15:15] It’s, it’s beyond. It’s hard to stomach what I’ve heard about how they motivate people to do this to their fellow humans. It’s horrific, and the scale of it is. Unbelievable. We have never seen this level of forced criminality. And if I could go to Africa for a second, that’s where they’re really recruiting hard right now because Africans speak English.

[00:15:42] They’re recruiting hard in Kenya, in Uganda, and they, and now we’ve got a whole sociological issue when you traffic. hundreds of thousands of people to a different area of the globe and, and keep them in custody and make them do this work.

[00:15:58] 354-sandie: So are they moving them from Africa to like Cambodia?

[00:16:02] 354-guest: That’s exactly what’s happening. And so what we know is I’m in contact with a Ugandan who’s inside a, uh, in Cambodia, and he tells me the nationalities of the people around him and their Kenyans, Ugandans, their Bangladeshi, they’re Pakistanis, they’re coming from, from countries. Where that country is not going to stand up and fight for them.

[00:16:24] They’re that those countries have enough on their plate without fighting to get to repatriate, people that have been stolen from them. And so it’s very intentional. It’s very, it’s very well thought out. It’s sophisticated and it’s, and most importantly it’s working and it’s working at a scale that we could not even contemplate.

[00:16:44] 354-sandie: Wow. Wow. Okay. So the forced criminality part, when we’re talking about human trafficking, we’ve covered that in this podcast when, particularly juveniles have been. Engaged in delivering drugs or, recruiting for the, gang that’s controlling them. And now when someone is found in a facility that is doing the the scamming.

[00:17:24] And creating this pig butchering scenario. instead of being rescued, they have been reportedly arrested. Talk about that.

[00:17:37] 354-guest: So what happens is, is these victims are. Lured recruited into doing this dirty business. They don’t know this. They, my Ugandan colleague said that he was working for a hundred dollars a month in an internet cafe in Uganda.

[00:17:54] A fellow Ugandan came in and said, would you like to make $1,000 a month? And he his 23 years old and he thought, yeah, I think I could go abroad for six months and make more money than I’ve ever thought about. Yes, I think I would like to do that. And now he is in a compound in Cambodia, unable to get out.

[00:18:13] There’s, I’ve been trying for six weeks to figure out a way to get him out of there, and I’ve, I’ve pulled every thread I can think of, and I do not have a way to get him out of there. But when we think about what happens to them in the rare occasions that they do get released. They are treated as criminals in that country because you don’t have a visa to be in this country.

[00:18:39] You came in here illegally and through no fault of their own, right. So, so they came to, they came to Thailand legally because they thought they were getting a job. They get moved to other countries. the best example of this is, is the Philippines. So the Philippines,Is one of the few countries to actually disrupt some of these scam compounds.

[00:19:03] And when they do that, now they’re left with, okay, we’ve disrupted this compound. We have 650 people. That, when you think of, when you think of like, technically about how this is gonna work, okay, so now we’ve, we’ve got 650 people, where are we gonna put them? What are we going to feed them? How are we gonna make sure they have medicine and whatever they need?

[00:19:24] And then how are we gonna, how are we gonna sort out. Who’s a bad guy and who is a human trafficked victim? And then how are we gonna repatriate them? And it’s a massive, massive problem. And so what happens is everyone gets held as though they are a criminal until we, until they can sort stuff out. So another example is in Thailand where there was a crackdown in February of 2025 where, 5,000 people were released from Myanmar compounds.

[00:19:55] I think it was 7,000. And immediately China came and got their 5,000 people. They ran seven 30 sevens down to China and PI down from China into Thailand and picked up their people. Brazil came and got their people. other countries came and got their people and they were left with 137. Ethiopians and Ethiopia said, we are not coming to get these people.

[00:20:20] We don’t have the money and we’re not doing it. So then you have 137 people who are being held. They, they, they can’t, they’re not legally allowed anywhere right now. Thailand doesn’t want them in their country. Ethiopia won’t come get them. And so what do we do? No matter how we look at this, no matter what happens in the next five years, we’re going to have a huge repatriation problem, and we are going to really see the effects of what happens when you move hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world into Southeast Asia and abuse them for five years or six years or seven.

[00:20:55] Like, we don’t know how this ends. We are in the middle of it, but it, it’s not going to be good.

[00:21:00] 354-sandie: So what is it going to take, and I know you are like, I am a huge proponent of collaboration, but what kind of cross-sector collaboration will it take to address this?

[00:21:18] 354-guest: Yeah, I spend a lot of time thinking about this and I, I know that this doesn’t end until the world stands up against this, and this doesn’t end until we bring together. Banking, law enforcement, crypto diplomacy, victim assistance, and NGOs. And I think what we keep seeing is different parts of those connecting and siloing the information.

[00:21:44] This is not a who done it. We know who’s responsible. We know who’s behind all these, and we know that they are for the most part. Named, named Chinese organized criminals that we’re already familiar with. So in order to do something about that, we need to work together using every tool in our arsenal. So we need American law enforcement to indict these people and work with Interpol to get them extradited into the United States.

[00:22:14] We need diplomacy, we need American diplomats on the ground in Southeast Asia. Really? Forcing their hand and limiting access to American funds, Cambodia. If you continue to allow this dirty business, if you continue to allow your country to be the scam economy that is stealing a generation’s worth of wealth from the United States, we are going to make your life very difficult

[00:22:40] 354-sandie: okay, so, you also mentioned banks and crypto.

[00:22:45] And these are not cross sector collaborators that I’ve worked with. Uh, law enforcement, victim services, state Department, all of that. This is the bread and butter of collaboration and anti-trafficking. How do we engage with banks? And I don’t even know where to begin with crypto.

[00:23:09] 354-guest: So what I will say is that, banks have been coming to the table with regard to this because banks are the ones who are regulated of this whole industry. And so when I think of where the, where the issues are coming from, to me they are, are social media is, is enabling this.

[00:23:30] Our banks need education to help them stop the movement of money and crypto. I, I think, I think crypto has visibility into where this money is going. Everybody has a piece of this. So with banks, I think it’s super important and I’ve been working to educate credit unions, banking about. The gravity of the problem.

[00:23:53] I think in a, in banking, everyone from, the person emptying the trash at night to the person in, in the CEO’s office needs to understand the gravity of how big this problem is. And so, it’s important to help educate them because what’s happening with banks and why banks are relevant is that our victims have to, they have to move the money and to move the money.

[00:24:17] It’s been the bank’s interest generally in helping you move your money as smoothly and as quickly as you’d like it to be. And we need to help them understand that adding friction to that makes sense and that adding friction to that when we are in a scam demic makes sense. And so that’s, that’s how our banking fits in.

[00:24:40] 354-sandie: Okay. And we did a couple of podcasts and, listeners, I’ll find those links and put them in the show notes.

[00:24:49] And we interviewed folks from Validate where they do that kind of forensic accounting to find the bad actors when we hosted a round table on. The financial implications of human trafficking. Aaron, this has been such a challenging conversation. There is so much more we need to learn. How do we follow you?

[00:25:16] 354-guest: Thank you for asking. So I, I have a website. It’s operation shamrock.org. And because it is such a challenging thing to learn, I started my own podcast and my podcast is called Stolen. It’s on Apple Podcasts on Spotify. Anywhere you get your podcasts go to Stolen with Aaron West. And what it does is it breaks this down in a way that.

[00:25:40] It is understandable to my Aunt Terry that everybody needs to understand what is happening out there. And so I talk to survivors of this. I talk to, police officers who engage in, in trying to fix it, and I talk to banking, so it’s a great way to stay up to date with what is happening out there.

[00:25:58] 354-sandie: All right. What a delight to meet you now. I understand Debbie deems, fascination with what you’re doing and commitment to partner.

[00:26:10] And we will too. Thank you so much for coming today.

[00:26:13] 354-guest: Thank you for having me.

[00:26:15] Speaker 3: Thank you so much, Erin. You opened our eyes to pig butchering scams. You made us aware that end-to-end encryption can be weaponized by criminals, not just protective for users. That changes how we think about digital safety. Completely.Listeners, if you loved this conversation, make sure you check out our website@endinghumantrafficking.org for tons of in-depth show notes and other resources. If you’d love to help us grow this podcast, you can start by sharing this episode with someone and connecting with us on Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn.

[00:27:02] And as always, thanks for listening.