Banners, Bots and Butchers: An Automated Long Con Targeting Japan, Asia, and Beyond

Researchers uncovered a large, active hybrid investment scam that combines malvertising-driven lure sites with messaging-app pig-butcher social engineering; the actors use RDGA-registered and lookalike domains (23,000+ observed), shared website kits, and likely AI/automated chatbots in KakaoTalk/LINE/WhatsApp to recruit and defraud victims (primarily in Japan) of substantial sums, and the report includes infrastructure clustering, sample IOCs, and observations about the campaigns' scalability and global expansion.