Erin West gave the keynote for the 2025 Techno Security & Digital Forensics East conference on cyber scams. How bad is it? Well, according to the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), in 2024 the reported losses were US$16.6B. That’s up 33% from 2023. Keep in mind that this is what has been reported. Many occurrences don’t get reported because people are ashamed at being taken advantage and having their trust abused.
Ms. West leads an organization, Operation Shamrock, dedicated to fighting these cyber scams. Most of these scams are “long cons” designed to build trust between a scammer and the victim. We are talking potentially months to worm into the confidence and trust of the victim. This trust enables the scammer to potentially steal all of the wealth from the victim, who often realizes when it is too late that they have lost everything to a scammer. These scammers aren’t interested in a quick score. They want it all. The technique is called “pig butchering.” A description of that technique and other information can be found in the FAQ.
This problem is only getting worse. Led by organized crime, the operations running these scams are huge, sophisticated, and they’ve worked out the psychology to prey on their victims, who are across the age spectrum. Loneliness is a powerful emotion to take advantage of and these scammers are masters of it. If you’re not already familiar with this information, I urge you to spend some time going through and understanding how the scams work, the warning signs, etc. Anyone and everyone can be the target of such a scam. The more we understand how it works, the more we can protect ourselves, those we care about, and our communities.