Scamming Scammers - Weaponizing OSS Against Pig Butchering, Organized Crime
Erin West
DEF CON 33 · Day 1 · Main Stage
Erin West, a veteran prosecutor with 26 years of experience in Santa Clara County, delivered a stark and urgent call to action at DEF CON, exposing the devastating global crisis of **pig butchering scams** (known as *Sha Zhu Pan*). This sophisticated, long-con romance and investment fraud scheme is not merely a collection of isolated incidents but a meticulously orchestrated operation run by Chinese organized crime, including known triads. The talk highlighted the unprecedented scale of financial theft—estimated at over $50 billion annually in the U.S. alone—and the horrific human cost, with hundreds of thousands of individuals trafficked and enslaved in scam compounds across Southeast Asia.
AI review
West clearly knows this problem cold — 26 years of prosecution, firsthand compound visits, hands-on crypto recovery work. The talk succeeds as a threat briefing and awareness session, and the DEF CON crowd is exactly the right audience to recruit for disruption ops. But it sits more comfortably in the 'impassioned briefing' lane than the 'technical research' lane, and the gap between the problem's scale and the actionable depth offered is real.