Interpol: Can We Drop the Term 'Pig Butchering'?

Interpol’s “Think Twice” campaign urges replacing the stigmatizing term “pig butchering” with “romance baiting” to encourage victims of long-con romance investment scams to report incidents. The brief notes these schemes are run by large, international cybercrime operations—sometimes via forced-labor call centers in Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar—causing billions in losses and even surfacing in the Russia-Ukraine conflict context. The campaign emphasizes victim support and the alignment of scam tactics with coercive control dynamics identified by academic research.