Over the weekend, Internet giant Google took legal action against two Chinese software developers that used the company’s products and services for a large-scale fraud over the past four years.
The pair, Yungfeng Sun and Hongnam Cheung who also used the aliases Alphonse Sun, and Zhang Hongnim/Stanford Fischer respectively, are alleged to have used at least 87 fraudulent crypto currency apps distributed on Google’s Play App Store, to target over 100,000 users.
Although Google “neither adopts nor endorses the use of this term”, the developers are alleged to have engaged in a scam called “pig butchering”. The name comes from scammers referring to victims as pigs that are to be fattened up before slaughter.
This is an online investment fraud that uses crypto currencies and other products, promising high returns for victims, who are hit with fees and payments demands when they ask to withdraw their staked money, which is not returned to them.
Victims worldwide suffered losses “from thousands, up to $75,000”.
Sun is said to be a Shenzhen resident, and Cheung a Hong Konger, with both being accused of developing the fraudulent Google Play apps.
The apps in question had names like TionRT, Starlight, SkypeWallet, and OTCAI, and were marketed on social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok. Google’s YouTube video sharing site was also used, with actors hired to play officials of scam companies such as Skype Coin, with the same person using different names in different clips.
Affiliate marketing campaigns, which turned out to be bogus by themselves, were also used to push the scams and lure more users.
Since the scammers used multiple Google products such as Workspace, developer accounts, Gmail and YouTube, it was possible to link and track their activities.
Although Defendants attempted to obfuscate their connection to the apps by using a variety of different developer accounts and other infrastructure to register subsets of the apps, non-content business records maintained by Google and other publicly available information link the apps together, including by, among other things, overlapping links between registration email addresses and IP addresses used to host websites associated with the apps and their privacy policies
Google is seeking yet to be specified damages from Sun and Cheung, along with legal costs.
Pig butchering scams appear to be extremely lucrative for large networks of fraudsters, a recent study by researchers John Griffin and Kevin Mei at the University of Texas in Austin suggests.
Griffin and Mel traced cryptocurrency flows and found that the criminals moved at least US$75.3 billion in suspicious deposits, through Tether and exchanges such as Binance, Huobi, and OKX.
The criminals running the pig butchering networks use slave labour for sending the scam messages, with thousands of victims being lured to countries such as Cambodia and Myanmar with bogus offers of high paying jobs. They are then trapped and forced to take part in the scams, sometimes under duress with violence and torture.
