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Stop Calling Online Scams ‘Pig Butchering,’ Interpol Warns
Experts say the catchall term for online fraud furthers harm against victims and could dissuade people from reporting attempts to bilk them out of their money.
The rise of so-called pig butchering investment scams over the past few years largely caught the world unawares, capitalizing on conditions surrounding pandemic lockdowns and global economic instability to fool people into giving away their money to attackers. “‘Pig butchering’ is a phrase which would appear to have been created by the gangs to talk about their victims and how they deal with them,” Nick Court, an assistant director in Interpol’s financial crime and anti-corruption program, tells WIRED. Mina Chiang, the founder of anti-human-trafficking firm Humanity Research Consultancy, says she is not a fan of the “pig butchering” name not only because of its dehumanizing impact but also because it “restricts people’s imagination of the nature of the scam factories.”
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