Erin West joins Dr. Sandie Morgan as they uncover why that random text asking “Can you come for ribs?” might be the opening move in a $5 billion crime operation targeting vulnerable people through sophisticated romance and investment scams known as pig butchering.

Erin West

Erin West is a globally recognized expert in transnational organized crime and the founder and president of Operation Shamrock, a nonprofit uniting law enforcement, industry, and everyday citizens to disrupt pig butchering scams—the world’s fastest-growing form of transnational organized crime. After 26 years as a prosecutor, including eight years on the REACT High-Tech Task Force where she became known for her relentless pursuit of cryptocurrency-enabled criminals, Erin retired to launch this cross-border fight to expose the scam economy and protect both victims and the trafficked workers forced to run these schemes. She is also the host of “Stolen,” a podcast that takes listeners inside the darkest corners of the scamdemic, where love is weaponized and billions are laundered. As a sought-after international speaker and educator, Erin continues to equip audiences worldwide to use their skills and platforms to fight back against these sophisticated criminal enterprises.

Key Points

• Pig butchering scams are long cons that can last up to four months, involving four hours of daily texting to build the relationship victims have always wanted before stealing their life savings.


• Chinese organized criminals created this crime model by repurposing casino towers in Southeast Asia during COVID, literally translating “pig butchering” as fattening up victims with love bombing before cutting their throats financially.


• The scams begin with seemingly innocent outreach through wrong number texts, LinkedIn connections, or social media befriending, then quickly move to encrypted platforms like WhatsApp to conduct criminal activity without oversight.


• Hundreds of thousands of people from Africa, Bangladesh, and Pakistan are being trafficked to Southeast Asia under false job promises, then forced to work 16 hours a day running these scams under threat of violence.


• Victims of forced criminality face arrest and detention when compounds are raided because they’re treated as criminals rather than trafficking victims, creating a massive repatriation crisis.


• The scale of this crime is unprecedented, with victims reporting losses of $4.9 billion in 2024 alone, representing a generation’s worth of stolen wealth from retirement and college savings accounts.


• End-to-end encryption, while protective for legitimate users, is weaponized by criminals to conduct relationships and transactions away from law enforcement visibility.


• Effective response requires unprecedented cross-sector collaboration between banking, law enforcement, cryptocurrency platforms, diplomacy, victim assistance, and NGOs working together rather than in silos.

Resources

• 351 – Hidden Crimes: Fraud and its Impact on Vulnerable Communities


• Operation Shamrock


• Stolen Podcast

Transcript

[00:00:00 ] Sandie Morgan: Welcome to the Ending Human Trafficking Podcast here at Vanguard University’s Global Center for Women and Justice in Orange County, California. I’m Dr. Sandie Morgan, and this is the show where we empower you to study the issue, be a voice, and make a difference in ending human trafficking.

[00:00:23 ] Today, we’ll discover why that random text asking “Can you come for ribs?” might be the opening move in a $5 billion crime operation

[00:00:36 ] I’m joined today by Erin West, founder and president of Operation Shamrock, and former prosecutor who spent 26 and a half years. Fighting high tech crimes. And now here’s our interview.

[00:00:53 ]

[00:00:54 ] Sandie Morgan: Welcome to the podcast Erin West. I am so delighted to meet you.

[00:01:02 ] Erin West: Thank you so much for having me on the podcast. I’m delighted to be here.

[00:01:05 ] Sandie Morgan: It was really interesting.

[00:01:07 ] Debbie Deem, who was on episode 351, mentioned you and she mentioned you in her context talking about pig butchering, and she had my full attention right away. And then she talked about your nonprofit. So, at the top of this interview, I wanna frame everything with what you are doing with Operation Shamrock.

[00:01:37 ] Somehow my imagination took me to Ireland, so, tell us what that is.

[00:01:44 ] Erin West: Sure. So I was a prosecutor for 26 and a half years, and the last three years of my career I was deluged with victims of a certain type of crime known as pig butchering. It’s a long con, it is a romance slash investment scam. And what I was seeing was that we had never seen anything like this before, we’d never seen a scale like this, and ultimately, my passion for trying to do something about it made me realize that I needed to leave my career, retire from being a prosecutor and open a nonprofit.

[00:02:26 ] At Operation Shamrock, our mission is to educate about, mobilize against and disrupt transnational organized crime. The, the Chinese organized criminals that are, that are running this horrible crime. And so that’s what we do.

[00:02:41 ] Sandie Morgan: So what is a long con?

[00:02:44 ] Erin West: Yeah. You know, I think that, and a good example of a short con would be those calls that you get where you are led to believe that, your, your grandchild is in custody somewhere and you need to go put money in an ATM real quick. That’s a, that’s a deceptive trick.

[00:03:01 ] Sandie Morgan: oh, I got a text, I got a text yesterday that said, mom, I lost my phone. Text me at this number.

[00:03:12 ] Erin West: Yeah,

[00:03:13 ] Sandie Morgan: like, ah,

[00:03:15 ] Erin West: Ugh. That’s, and the fact that that happened to you yesterday shows how ubiquitous these crimes are. So, so when you ask about a long con, a long con is something where, oh my gosh. And I just got a text right now. That says hello. I’m Sophia from the Indeed Human Resources Team. We recently came across your outstanding resume.

[00:03:39 ] That’s a job scam and it’s happening. That’s, that’s how frequently this is happening. So the long con is, is when you get one of those texts that says, Hey, I’m making ribs tonight. Can you come over and you say, oh, I think you have the wrong number. And then you start a, what can be up to four months of a relationship with someone that you met in a very random way on the internet.

[00:04:03 ] These bad actors have tried and true techniques that they use to lure you into believing that you are in a legitimate relationship and it’s the kind of relationship that you’ve always wanted.

[00:04:16 ] Sandie Morgan: Hmm. So I’ve done so much work in the youth prevention field, and we always call that like the Romeo Pimp, the Romance Con, those kinds of things.

[00:04:31 ] And so those kids don’t have any big money. So why is this happening?

[00:04:37 ] Erin West: I’ll say that the enemy is so sophisticated that they are attacking every, every demographic. And so they have, we’ve recently found out that sextortion is coming out of the very same compounds that are doing these long cons, and the enemy is willing to do anything to make, to make money. So the short amount of time it takes to get some money out of, out of younger victims, they’ll do that, but they’ll invest a longer amount of time when they know that you have a retirement account or you have funded college accounts for your kids, they will know that it’s worth the amount of time to do that

[00:05:23 ] Sandie Morgan: Okay, so how long would a long con go? Like weeks, four months. Okay. So we’re talking regular communication.

[00:05:33 ] Erin West: We’re talking four hours a day of texting. We are talking, we are talking that they become the relationship that that victim has always wanted. That they are the, the happy, the happily ever after. They’re selling a dream, and it takes a minute to sell a dream like that.

[00:05:50 ] Sandie Morgan: Mm. So Debbie first mentioned pig butchering in our episode 351 when we were talking about online scams, particularly targeting senior citizens. And I think the stat she shared with us was $4.9 billion in 2024. Can you really break down what a pig butchering scam looks like, the steps, how do I begin to recognize when that’s what’s happening?

[00:06:27 ] And how did it get a name like that?

[00:06:29 ] Erin West: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, so you’re asking all the right questions. So let, let’s start with that part first. So, I’m gonna take you back to what was happening in Southeast Asia. That’s where this is coming from, in, in COVID Times and Chinese organized criminals. And when I say that, I mean legitimate Chinese organized criminals.

[00:06:48 ] Members of the triad, thought it would be great to build a bunch of casinos in Cambodia and lure Chinese gamblers down there and make money from gambling. And when, COVID hit and people weren’t moving, they said, well, let’s figure out another way to fill these large buildings that we have and let’s figure out another way to make money.

[00:07:09 ] So they thought, Sha Zhu Pan, that is the C