‘Pig slaughter’ scam: The link between modern slavery, torture and online crime

The Netflix documentary “The Tinder Swindler” tells the story of a scammer who tricks women he meets on dating apps into “loaning” him large sums of money. It depicts the devastating financial damage and psychological trauma that online romance scams cause to their victims. However, scams are not only perpetrated by individuals, but can also be orchestrated by organized crime groups operating on an industrial scale.

This new type of scam is often referred to as “pig slaughter,” a term that supposedly describes the victim being fattened for slaughter, like a pig. As we argued in a recent paper, the term dehumanizes the victim and reveals something about the scammer’s own psychology: it reflects the scammers’ perception of themselves as “hunters,” which helps them justify their actions.

This type of scam is allegedly the work of Chinese organized crime groups known as triads. Victims are usually contacted via messaging apps or dating sites, and the scammers spend months trying to lure and gain their trust. They then give the impression that the victim’s family has a financial background and convince them to invest on cryptocurrency trading sites.

These websites are also run by scammers who edit them to make the initial profits appear small, allowing the victim to withdraw their profits and convince them of the legitimacy of the scam. The victim is then encouraged to invest a larger amount. When the criminals find out that the victim has invested a large amount, they “sneak out” by making a large loss, giving them an excuse to steal the victim’s funds.

What makes this type of scam different is that the perpetrators are often themselves victims of recruitment fraud. Financially disadvantaged people are sent from all over the world to Southeast Asia, typically Cambodia and Myanmar, with the promise of work in casinos. They are then locked up in large facilities and forced to scam people, sometimes for up to 17 hours a day.

A 2023 report by the Humanity Research Consultancy, a social enterprise that investigates modern slavery, offered a glimpse into the conditions in these places: Traffickers regularly torture their victims to ensure their obedience, including by electrocuting them, burying them alive, and smashing their fingers with hammers. Women are often forced into sex work in on-site brothels or modeling via video chat with potential victims.

Evidence is emerging to suggest these facilities operate further afield: a BBC investigation in August 2024 found a pig slaughter facility operating in Douglas on the Isle of Man, where a hotel and former bank offices were used as premises by around 100 Chinese nationals to defraud Chinese victims of more than £4 million.

The use of the term “pig slaughter” in this context highlights a broader process of dehumanization: by considering themselves intellectually superior, the con artists are able to assume the role of hunter and assuage their guilt while harming those they see as inferior.

A 2018 UK study and a 2023 joint Nigerian-UK study found that some Nigerian songs similarly blame and dehumanize victims of online fraud. For example, the song “Dejavu,” released in 2023, includes the lyric “Laptop addict, I’m still dropping bombs,” which translates to “Laptop addict, I’m still bombing (hunting) unscrupulous customers (victims).”

Psychological research on dehumanization shows that seeing yourself as superior makes you more likely to harm those you see as inferior. This includes violence, discrimination, and exploitative acts in the context of genocide, incel ideology, and prejudice against racial minorities, drug users, and victims of bullying. In the context of online fraud, dehumanization weakens empathy and acts as a shield for perpetrators to avoid self-blame.

Similarly, hunting and killing “pigs” might be likened to a recreational activity in which the pigs symbolize something subhuman. According to the late Canadian-American psychologist Albert Bandura’s work on dehumanization, abusing someone who has not been dehumanized is more painful for the perpetrator and often leads to misery and self-blame.

Passive and active dehumanization are expressed differently. Active dehumanization involves overtly harmful actions, such as dehumanizing victims or degrading their intellectual capacities or comparing them to animals like pigs or impalas. Passive dehumanization, on the other hand, comes from indifference or neglect.

While in online fraud, criminals actively dehumanize their victims, the broader discussion of “pig slaughter” in academia, news coverage, and elsewhere often perpetuates passive dehumanization. Whether intentional or unconscious, both forms result from a willful disregard, or a failure to recognize the humanity of others.

Researchers and journalists can help rehumanize victims of online fraud. In this case, rehumanization involves acknowledging the individuality inherent in being human. One example is the redefinition of the term “child pornography” as “child sexual abuse material” (CSAM), a term that does not trivialize the crime but rehumanizes the victims.

The question is, what should we call “pig slaughter”? Criminologist Cassandra Cross has suggested the term “cryptrom”, but another, more straightforward term that could describe this criminal activity is “financial grooming”.

We need more empathetic and accurate portrayals of people who are victims of online fraud, taking into account the social, cultural and political context surrounding them.

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