The two had been talking online for months and built a close relationship.
But the morning of the pertemuan none of them could reach Dennis. Matt drove to Dennis's apartment but he wasn't home, and all calls went straight to voicemail. They figured he must be out on one of his long runs. An hour later, police knocked on Matt's door to inform him that Dennis had taken his own life.
Dennis was one of countless victims of a massive global criminal operation predominantly run by Chinese gangs who have built a multibillion-dollar scam industry in Southeast Asia. There, they've assembled an army of scammers, many held against their will in guarded compounds and forced to con people all around the world out of their life savings.
It's theft at a scale so large that investigators are now calling it a mass transfer of wealth from middle-class Americans to criminal gangs. Last year, the FBI estimates, pig butchering scams stole nearly $4 billion from tens of thousands of American victims, a 53% increase from the year before.
While the crime takes place online, its real-world consequences are devastating. Law enforcement sources predict that losses will continue to grow in the next year, and as the criminals remain out of reach, money and lives will continue to be lost. Santa Clara county prosecutor Erin West has dedicated the last few years to fighting pig butchering scams. "I've been a prosecutor for over 25 years, I've done all kinds of different models of crime. I spent nine years in sexual assault. And I've never seen the absolute decimation of people that I've seen as a result of pig butchering," she says.
Being in the heart of the tech industry in California's Bay Ruang, Erin and her kubu were some of the first to begin investigating pig butchering scams. "We've got victims victimizing victims and the only winners are Chinese gangsters," she says.
Shawn Bradstreet, US istimewa agent in charge of the San Francisco field office, told CNN that some of the money stolen from American victims is spent on expanding the scam operations and the massive compounds that house them and other illicit activities.
