Meta Deletes 2 Million Fake Social Media Accounts

Uploaded on 2024-11-27 in TECHNOLOGY-Key Areas-Social Media, FREE TO VIEW

Criminals are using text messaging, dating apps, social media and email to perpetrate a form of financial fraud, most commonly known as 'pig-butchering', where victims are lured into fraudulent investment schemes.

Now, Meta has confirmed it has removed around 2 million scam accounts across its platforms since the beginning of 2024. “This year alone, we’ve taken down over two million accounts linked to scam centres in Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, the United Arab Emirates and the Philippines,” says Meta.

“We’re going after the criminal organisations behind ‘pig butchering’ and other schemes, which target people globally through messaging, dating, social media and crypto and other apps to convince them to ‘invest’ under false pretenses.”

Many of these fake accounts orginate in Myanmar, Laos, and Cambodia. "These criminal scam hubs lure often unsuspecting job seekers with too-good-to-be-true job postings on local job boards, forums and recruitment platforms to then force them to work as online scammers, often under the threat of physical abuse," according to Meta .

The perpetrators pose as attractive single people, members of government agencies and large companies sending generic messages to a large number of users (via DM, SMS, or email), hoping that at least some of the recipients will respond. Those who engage with these messages enter a process of deception that introduces them to fraudulent investment platforms that appear legitimate but display falsified returns and do not allow money to be withdrawn.

This type of fraud can be elaborate and often take months to execute, patiently creating an online friendship or romantic relationship with a victim, eventually guiding them to invest in elaborate fake crypto currency investments. Victims become convinced they’ve found a way to get rich and sometimes give away their entire savings before realising it was all a scam.

Meta has removed these accounts from its system when working with law enforcement agencies in those countries to share intelligence to disrupt the criminal fraud on the social media platforms that it operates.

The criminals in the Asia Pacific primarily conduct pig butchering scams but also target users worldwide and Meta
has been addressing this problem on its platforms for more than two years. The FBI reports that it has become a massive revenue generator for organised crime groups and the FBI's 2023 Internet Crime Report has found that investment fraud scams saw a 38% increase from $3.31 billion in 2022 to $4.57 billion in 2023.

Meta says it employs a range of measures to try to detect and stop these scams on its platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger, before they have the opportunity to bait users and victimise them.

facebook | ic3 | Bleeping Computer | NBC | Forbes

Image: Oleksandr P

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