A scammer's blueprint: How cybercriminals plot to rob a target in a week

Summary

NOTICE: Your bill is overdue. Hello old friend, are you going to the party tonight? We’ve all received a random buzz on our phone — a message from an unknown number.Many will ignore it, suspecting a scam. I hope you don’t mind me contacting you Long time no see, how are you You have a package that needs to be claimed. Hi, my name is Sam. It’s nice to meet you. A haven, or perhaps even romance. Illustration showing a warm, glowing, orange house among dark empty woods. Even if it was sent under false pretenses. Illustration showing the side of the house and how it is propped up by sticks, depicting a fake facade. So how does a scammer carefully construct a facade that can convince someone to part with their money – and even to fall in love? Illustration showing the facade collapsed on the ground. Some can rely on intricately constructed guides to grooming and deception. A scammer’s blueprint How cybercriminals plot to rob a target within a week. A handbook found during a police raid on a compound used by a cyberfraud gang in the Philippines offers detailed instructions in Chinese for conducting scams.A second handbook, seized during another law enforcement operation in the country and reviewed by Reuters, also gives tips in English and Chinese about how to run romance scams.Together, they provide a window into the psychological techniques criminal gangs use to beguile a victim into believing they are in a romantic relationship, before duping them into fraudulent investments. The Chinese handbook says:This kind of fraud is known as “pig-butchering” because the gangs say targets are led like hapless pigs to slaughter. It is among the most prevalent scams today, according to the FBI.In a series of stories in 2025, Reuters documented how these “pig-butchering” scams are often carried out by victims of human trafficking, who are forced to work in industrial-scale scam compounds in Southeast Asia run by Chinese-led gangs. Such cyberfraud has been supercharged by artificial ...