Bad people who prey on those looking for love, or hoping to make a quick buck, have been around since biblical times. But in recent years, the rise of three newer technologies—social media, online dating platforms, and crypto—have supplied these predators with powerful new tools to expand their reach. The result has been a recent flood of heartbreaking stories about online romance scams and "pig butchering," a term used by Chinese crooks to describe slowly gaining the trust of someone before fleecing them in an investment swindle.
The good news is that some of the biggest companies whose platforms are exploited for these scams are fighting back. On Tuesday, an usual coalition of tech and crypto companies joined with Match—the dating giant that runs apps like Tinder—to announce Tech Against Scams, an initiative to share information and resources in order to combat romance scams and pig butchering. The coalition includes Meta, the parent company of Facebook and WhatsApp, as well as the crypto firms Coinbase, Kraken, Ripple, and Gemini.
