Meta deactivated more than 150,000 accounts and Thai police arrested 21 people in a broad international crackdown on Southeast Asian criminal scam hubs that targeted people around the world, the social media company said on Wednesday.
The operation was led by the Royal Thai Police’s Cyber Scam Center, along with the FBI and the US Department of Justice’s Scam Center Strike Force, with Meta investigators acting on intelligence shared in real time by law enforcement.
In addition to enforcement action, Meta announced a number of new protection tools, including alerts on Facebook for suspicious friend requests and a WhatsApp warning system to flag potentially fraudulent device pairing attempts.
One of Meta’s tools aims to detect when a potential Facebook friend shows signs of falsifying details about their profile, such as an account that operates from a country other than the one indicated in the profile. The tool provides users with details about the account, highlighting potential issues such as a lack of mutual friends or that the account was recently created, and offers options to block it or report it for inauthentic activity.
Meta’s WhatsApp alert system aims to detect scammers who try to get users to connect their WhatsApp numbers to a device that is not theirs, thus gaining access to their accounts. A pop-up window will appear warning about pairing the device and suggesting that the activity could be a scam. The company also said it expanded its scam detection for Facebook Messenger, offering users to submit chats as unsolicited job offers for an AI review to determine their authenticity.
Online scam rings – many of them operating from compounds in Cambodia, Myanmar and Laos – have become increasingly sophisticated in recent years, running what authorities describe as large-scale criminal business operations designed to evade detection.
Scammers working these fraud complexes lure Internet users into fake romantic relationships and cryptocurrency investments, and have expanded their operations into multiple languages to steal billions of dollars from victims around the world.
The latest crackdown also involved the UK’s National Crime Agency, as well as agencies from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Japan, Singapore, the Philippines and Indonesia.
A pilot action in December resulted in the removal of 59,000 accounts, pages and groups from Meta platforms and six arrest warrants. Last week’s follow-up trade more than doubled that tally.
“This operation is a testament to how sharing information and coordinating our efforts can make real progress in disrupting this criminal activity at its source,” said Chris Sonderby, vice president and deputy general counsel at Meta.
Thai police officer Jirabhop Bhuridej, deputy commissioner general of the Royal Thai Police, said the crackdown “sends a clear message to criminals” that authorities will continue to pursue online scam syndicates that operate across borders.
