Filipino police free slaves toiling in romance scam operation | Hacker News Reader

Filipino police free slaves toiling in romance scam operation

theregister.com

42 pointsBrajeshwar16 comments

I only recently found out that Andrew Tate was doing romance / pig-butchering scams. I don't pay particular attention Andrew Tate and already disliked him for other reasons - but I thought it was weird that those who are going after him do so on the basis of exploitation of women and as far as I can tell elided his subsequent exploitation of men. Andrew Tate is on video openly admitting to this and the only reason I found out from a recent Coffeezilla video. Where is the rest of the news media on this, why is this left to some YouTuber. Maybe it was there and I just didn't see it.

I didn't understand where Andrew Tate made his money, while exploitation of women can certainly be profitable, romance scams / pig-butchering where he can net $1M from a single man makes much more sense.

It was a combination of those scams, illegal casinos, and selling "courses" on how to get women, which later evolved to the Tate University/Real World™/War Room™ thing he has going on now. That's how he has continued to make money despite his imprisonment and house arrest.

Certainly, I had heard about those, but not the romance scam thing which I think is odd.

Romance scams are crazy profitable and have been for a long time. It seems the new techniques is to combine the romance scam with the binary options scam which trick people by presenting them with a false market where they think they're trading geniuses so they pour all of their money into the trading platform and sometimes all of their families money whereupon the money is stolen.

I enjoyed the movie The Beekeeper purely because of the violence metered onto scammers - I hate those *%$& with every fiber of my being.

I'll frequently get text messages from unknown numbers that I believe are part of this or a similar scam. I just ignore them. It's tempting to get angry at people trying to scam you like this and at the thought that more gullible and vulnerable people might fall for it. It's quite sobering to consider that the person at the other end of the line is literally a slave forced to do this.

There's a deep dive into it via the 'Search Engine' podcast (Has PJ Vogt from 'Reply All' fame). The episode is called "Who's behind these spammy texts that I keep getting"

https://open.spotify.com/episode/72VDFILrotJIhQFnz0OWsV?si=7...

These pig butchering scams play the long game with their victims. It's crazy. The payoffs are huge as well. These are just some of the stories I have heard through various mediums (ie, podcasts, news stories, media segments)

- Kansas bank CEO charged with $50M embezzlement as a result of being a victim to "pig butchery". The bank itself was forced into bankruptcy due to this debacle [1]

- Woman lost $450K in pig butchering scam [2]

- US government often the subject of cybersecurity fraud as well. Pandemic relief programs paid out billions to scammers [3]

- halfway decent segment on pig butchering on "Last Week Tonight" with John Oliver [4]

Researching potential victims is so easy now with the proliferation of online dating apps. Then given how many breaches there are amongst the many services we use, it's even easier to gather more data points that can be used against a victim to drop their defenses (ie, social engineering tactics).

The Nigerian scammers of yesteryear have learned the errors of their ways. Notes taken from the "cat fishers" of the 2010s. The Indian scam call centers have graduated from script based tech support scammers to these romance scams as well since it has a larger audience beyond the elderly. Even preying on their own countrymen.

At this point, I think any relationship that continues online for more than a month and refuses to meet IRL. The relationship should be sus. I wouldn't even trust Zoom/Facetime/Webex /Meets with the accessibility of AI to generate passable entities (this combined with typical low quality streams of these services).

[1] https://foxkansas.com/news/local/kansas-bank-ceo-may-face-ja...

[2] https://www.goodmorningamerica.com/living/video/woman-lost-4...

[3] https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/covi...

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLPpl2ISKTg

Meanwhile Indian scam centers cost Americans billions more every year and John Oliver has not heard or cared yet. Indian scam centers operate with impunity and support of local government in bed with big political bosses. This has been going for much much longer. Like many decades. Americans cry for other countries’ plight but do not care enough to help their own people.

John Oliver recently did a good piece on these scams if you want to understand how they work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLPpl2ISKTg

There is so much omission from this show that it is completely unfair. It just picks on one or two countries. In reality, this problem exists everywhere and it is only raised for certain countries because of geopolitical conveniences. How much news coverage will this particular incident garner? Probably minimal.

Indian scam centers costs American billions more per year and they operate with impunity and support of local governments. This is a much bigger issue affecting Americans. Has John Oliver delivered any outrage over this? Nope, because he is a hypocrite and a coward.

https://www.techjuice.pk/indian-scam-call-centers-made-over-...

the John Oliver segment touches lightly on the issue and at least it brings light on the issue.

I personally liked the podcast episode from Darknet Diaries on this issue - https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/141/

It's not in depth but that is not really Oliver's thing. He has 30 minutes to take an issue most people aren't aware of and bring it to light while somehow giving you enough context to care and ends with a call to action.

Thank God we are finally doing something about this!

This is just 1 operation. It's nice to see them go down, but in reality there are likely hundreds of these operations existing across the globe. Pluck one weed from the lawn, and tomorrow 3 will grow in it's place.

This is a wide spread problem in many country we should not pin it on any particular country like the media wants to do. It is disgusting how even seemingly “woke” media like the late night YouTube guy (whatever his name is) tries to do this.

I don’t know, I see a trend, mainly China. It seems to be one of their exports and makes sense given the cutthroat scam friendly low trust culture in China.

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