Meta has furnished some new insights into its efforts to continue to protect users from scams while also sharing some tips on what to look out for to avoid scam activity, specifically the issue of "pig butchering," which has become a bigger problem over recent years.

What's "pig butchering" you ask?

According to Meta:

It's one of the most egregious and sophisticated fraud scams, but in the case of 'pig butchering,' it's all about building trusted personal relationships online with someone only to manipulate them to deposit more and more money into an investment scheme, often using cryptocurrency, and ultimately lose that money.

Of course, a large chunk of it is romance scams, swindling lonely souls by promising love and adventure, and then absorbing their bank accounts once they get their trust.

Pretty atrocious, especially because it's preying on vulnerable people and, in the end, deepens their loneliness by screwing them over. And so, Meta is acting to stop it, having removed more than two million accounts associated with scam centers-that are largely Asian-ground throughout this year.

"For over two years, our teams have been focused on investigating and disrupting the activities of the criminal scam centers in Southeast Asia.". Although our initial focus was on scam centers in Cambodia, we have since sought to keep abreast of the expansion and proliferation of these groups as they began to appear in places like Laos, Myanmar, and more recently the United Arab Emirates. From the very start, we were proactively engaging with expert NGOs and law-enforcement partners in the US and Southeast Asia to get a better understanding of these criminal groups' modus operandi, including in places like Sihanoukville in Cambodia, which is said to be a hotbed for Chinese organized crime-linked scams.

Meta says that it is actively working with law enforcement in order to help catch out and punish these groups, and it is also sharing information with industry peers in order to expand its detection systems.

But users can also protect themselves by being aware of what to watch for, and on that front, Meta has provided seven tips:.
These measures and notes will guard you against scam activity, but the baseline security you need is two-factor authentication while you must always be suspect of any links that you click. Since checking the detail of email addresses and clarifying the URLs by hovering on links may become easy ways for detecting errors or inconsistencies that point to scams, your vigilance will keep you from falling victim to them.

Handy tips that everyone should know if they are active online.