BANGKOK – Human “pig butchering” scams have stolen billions of dollars from Americans rendering them financially devastated, heartbroken from fake love, and in worst cases suicidal, according to a new US Institute of Peace (USIP) report on Chinese-dominated transnational crime based in Southeast Asia.

In a terrible twist, many of the estimated 300,000 lying, sweet-talking scammers – overwhelmingly from developing countries – also suffer because they are allegedly imprisoned and brutalized by the Chinese-run gangs.

The armed gangs lure or kidnap them to Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos and “deploy torture to engage victims in forced criminality,” the USIP report said.

“At the moment, there is no record of any currently trapped Americans in these compounds but there have been a small number,” USIP visiting expert Jacob Sims said in an interview.

“A couple of years ago, an American was in a compound [in Cambodia] – and treated as a criminal once he got out, by the Cambodian government – and eventually found his way back to America.

“And there was another who was repatriated to Thailand and then back to America from a compound on the Thai-Myanmar border.

“That one was I think more recently, maybe three months ago, something like that,” Sims said.

“He was released during a mass release of many, like close to a thousand people, that were being held. Some of them ended up getting released and some of them ended up getting deported,” back home to China.

“He was quietly sort of brought back to Thailand and comes back to the US,” he said.

“It is actually highly probable that there are Americans or British people working willingly in these compounds, but the incentives don’t work out to hold Americans [against their will] because the US government is then going to be more likely to take an aggressive response against the compounds,” Sims said.

“There are lots of law enforcement representatives from all over the world who have gone down to that area,” where compounds are clustered on the Myanmar side of the border with Thailand, said USIP Burma (Myanmar) country director Jason Tower in an interview.

“The 30-some-odd compounds which are there, are all trafficking people and keeping people enslaved,” Tower said.

Beijing is among the governments trying to crack down on the gangs that originated years ago when illegal online Chinese gambling sites discovered devious ways to move money via the internet.

“China’s government and law enforcement, after failing to take this problem seriously for years, are now using the presence of Chinese-led crime groups in other countries to justify striking increases in the presence of China’s authoritarian police around the globe,” said the 68-page report.

“The United States and China [are] the two most strongly affected victims of the online scamming industry,” it said.

Deceitful, scripted attempts at romance resulting in stolen funds through online scams and counterfeit financial applications and websites, are known in China as “sha zhu pan” – pig butchering.

Individual Americans and other international victims who fall in love with their scammers and pay money into faux investments, often suffer severe emotional and financial trauma from the manipulative cons.

“This scamming industry could soon rival fentanyl as one of the top dangers that Chinese criminal networks pose to the United States,” the Washington-based USIP report said.

“I am on the ground, listening to what victims are actually experiencing in the United States,” said Erin West, an international cross-agency Rapid Enforcement Allied Computer Team (REACT) prosecutor and Santa Clara County, California, deputy district attorney.

“In the United States, and in many other countries around the world…this particular scam doesn’t end until they [victims] have lost every last penny they have,” she said.

“That is the nature of the pig butchering scam. And I talk about it as consuming our victims from snout to tail.

“During the courtship period when the romance scam is beginning, they are using that time to determine exactly how much our victims have, and where the assets are located,” she said.

West made the remarks during a Transnational Crime in Southeast Asia panel releasing the USIP’s May report at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Thailand in June.

When the delusional one-sided romances blossom into dreams of big profits to be made through cryptocurrency investments, the cyber gigolo knows “exactly how much is still out there that they can get these people to invest,” she said.

These fake relationships begin with a cold contact by an unknown person who tries to meet cute with the patsy online and patiently, over several months, cultivate them until victims agree to invest an initial US$5,000 or so in cryptocurrency.

Their money is sent to an online crypto account which the scammers control. Soon the love-struck victims are told to be bold, and go for much bigger profits by depositing more and more.

When victims try to withdraw their investment, the scammers tell the now-panicking dupes they must first pay a 25% tax bill “from new funds.”

“They’re mortgaging their homes, they’re taking high-interest loans, and borrowing from everyone they know,” West said.

Then the scammers disappear into cyberspace.

Today, thousands of criminals are posting counterfeit profiles of non-existent, good-looking, romantic people on Meta, Facebook, LinkedIn, Tinder, Whats App, Telegram, and other online social media to fool victims.

Thieves display photographs of a wealthy lifestyle by manufacturing pictures to match their sham personalities.

Pig butchering call centers are based mostly in Southeast Asia, but also have smaller operations in the US and elsewhere, investigators said.

Eager job hunters, mostly from Asia, are often tricked into traveling to Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos through websites and chat groups describing great jobs available in hotels, casinos and other venues.

Those three relatively impoverished countries, clustered around Thailand, are ideal because widespread corruption enables the gangs to operate.

“Thailand offers the enclaves reliable energy, stable telecommunications, and easy access to a major financial center,” USIP said.

When new, unsuspecting employees arrive, they are captured, brutalized, and forced to work in guarded, hidden buildings using the gang’s computers and encrypted telecommunications, USIP said.

Indians, Malaysians, and other English-speaking people are prized as pig butchers because their language skills enable them to ensnare emotionally vulnerable victims in the US and Europe.

Americans are estimated to have lost $3.5 billion to “China-origin criminal networks” running the scams from Southeast Asia during 2023, USIP said.

Worldwide, up to $64 billion was stolen from millions of people last year, they said.

Sean Gallagher, a senior researcher at Sophos, a cybersecurity firm, said he investigated pig butchering in 2023 by pretending to be a potential sucker.

A Hong Kong-based scammer posing as a 40-year-old woman told Gallagher to download and use secretly infected software to upload his signed identification documents and make deposits into an account investing in gold.

In Gallagher’s second test, “a Cambodia-based Chinese organized crime operation” tried to lure him into a cryptocurrency scam, Sophos reported.

Sophos discovered two apps available on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store in 2023 to be “malicious applications” used by fraudsters involved in romance scams, prompting Apple and Google to remove them.

One of the bad apps was “Ace Pro” which disguised itself in the app store as “a QR code-checking application.”

The other fake app was “MBM_BitScan” which offered “a real-time data tracker for cryptocurrencies” and “a fake crypto trading interface,” Sophos reported.

“Pig butchering scams have also demonstrated vulnerabilities in the US financial system with one case bringing down an entire bank in the state of Kansas and the victim now facing criminal charges,” USIP said.

Richard S Ehrlich is a Bangkok-based American foreign correspondent reporting from Asia since 1978, and winner of Columbia University’s Foreign Correspondents’ Award. Excerpts from his two new nonfiction books, “Rituals. Killers. Wars. & Sex. — Tibet, India, Nepal, Laos, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka & New York” and “Apocalyptic Tribes, Smugglers & Freaks” are available here.