Meta and Coinbase join Match to fight pig slaughter and romance scams

Bad people who prey on those seeking love, or hoping to make a quick buck, have been around since biblical times. But in recent years, the rise of three new technologies – social media, online dating platforms and cryptocurrencies – has given these predators powerful new tools to expand their reach. The result has been a recent spate of harrowing stories about online romance scams and “pig slaughter,” a term used by Chinese scammers to describe slowly gaining someone’s trust before ripping them off in an investment scam.

The good news is that some of the larger companies whose platforms are being exploited for these scams are fighting back. On Tuesday, a customary coalition of tech and crypto companies joined Match, the dating giant that operates apps like Tinder, to announce Tech Against Scams, an initiative to share information and resources to combat romance scams and scams of pigs. Meta, the parent company of, is part of the coalition Facebook and WhatsApp, as well as crypto companies CoinbaseKraken, Ripple and Gemini.

“We hope this coalition will serve as a force multiplier for security teams at technology companies to share threat intelligence and trends to enable more impactful disruptions of scam networks around the world,” said Guy Rosen, Chief Information Security Officer of Meta.

In an interview with Fortune, Match’s vice president of Trust and Safety, Yoel Roth, explained that the current wave of scams is primarily run by criminal gangs in Southeast Asia. These bands often rely on victims of human trafficking to reach potential victims in other countries and induce them to exchange text messages. In these conversations the scammer poses as a love interest or a friendly source of investment advice with the aim of persuading the recipient to send cryptocurrency to the criminal gang. Once they have extracted as much money as possible, the sender vanishes.

According to Roth, who held a similar role of trust and confidence in Twitter, scammer gangs have become adept at migrating to other online platforms, be it a social media site or a dating app, if they are detected and kicked off a site. According to him, by forming a coalition, companies will no longer work in silos. Instead, they will be able to exchange information that speeds up the process discovery of scammers and share the tools each of them has created to fight them. Roth’s hope is that by combining resources, the group will be able to quickly capture criminals, regardless of “where in the killing chain” they are discovered.

Coinbase Chief Security Officer Philip Martin says Tech Against Scams was partly inspired by similar initiatives launched in an earlier era, when Facebook and Google they worked together to identify bad actors on their sites. He added that while the new coalition includes Coinbase’s cryptocurrency rivals, there are “no competition concerns” when it comes to sharing information that could identify and thwart scammers.

Tech Against Scams is the first coalition of its kind to include a diverse group of technology and crypto companies, and it plans to grow. Martin and Roth said the group is already talking to several other companies, including some very familiar to consumers, that are being used by scammers for romance and pig slaughter scams.

Currently, major names are missing from the coalition: giant cryptocurrency exchange Binance and stablecoin issuer Tether, whose tokens represent a major part of the illicit pig slaughter economy. Martin would not say whether he or other members of Tech Against Scams have been in talks with the two companies, but said the coalition is open to anyone who shares its goals.

Both Martin and Roth sought to present a realistic view of their attempts to combat romance scams and pig slaughter, as each noted that the improvements they make will be incremental and will not completely solve the problem. “The reality is that these scams have been around since the beginning of time,” Martin said.

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