Meta (META, Financial) revealed in its report that in 2024, the company took a significant step against “pig butchering” scams. As reported, over 2 million accounts associated with these scams have been shut down by the company. These tricks, where criminals lure people into investing in fake projects or forex scams and other crypto scams only to vanish with the money, are said to fall among the worst sorts of crimes on the internet. Meta has implemented a preemptive approach for two years, focusing on scam centres in Cambodia, Myanmar, Laos, UAE, and the Philippines. This approach entails account deletions with real-time feedback on scams and the technical footprint, enabling the system to learn and block the activity instantaneously.
Besides the account closures, Meta continues collaborating with other large firms to eliminate all sorts of scams. In January this year, Meta agreed to form a coalition with other organizations, such as Match Group, Coinbase, and others, to fight online financial fraud. This partnership was recently tested when OpenAI informed Meta about a new scam operation in Cambodia.
It poses a massive threat, and researchers believe that scams of such types could have withdrawn more than $75 billion internationally by 2020. The ongoing involvement of Meta in fighting these operations shows that it has become especially relevant to safeguard users from increasingly common and sophisticated scams that occur on social media today.
