U.S. sanctions cloud provider 'Funnull' as top source of 'pig butchering' scams

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Emotional impact & victim profiles

  • Multiple commenters share devastating family stories: parents losing $250k–$300k+ and homes, despite repeated warnings from relatives.
  • Victims are often older, lonely, recently divorced or widowed; some were previously savvy, but cognitive decline and isolation increased vulnerability.
  • Several note lasting anger not just at scammers but also at the victim, and guilt over not intervening more forcefully (e.g., conservatorship).

How pig-butchering scams work

  • Scammers cultivate long-term emotional bonds (“fattening the pig”) via romance, companionship, or empathy, then pivot to “investment” or “urgent help” requests.
  • Hooks vary: high crypto returns, rescuing the scammer from bureaucracy, or helping with made-up financial distress.
  • Commenters debate whether “greed” is central; many argue trust, naivete, loneliness, ego, sunk-cost/denial, and “savior” impulses are often more important.

Crypto’s role and broader debate

  • Strong view: crypto (especially stablecoins) dramatically lowers friction for cross-border, irreversible transfers, making pig-butchering and ransomware much easier and more profitable.
  • Others say such scams existed with wires/cash; crypto is a new rail but not the root cause.
  • Counterpoint: crypto is a lifeline under capital controls, corrupt or unstable regimes, or for sanctioned/out-of-system individuals (e.g., migrants, political refugees); use cases include remittances, savings, payouts, and niche payments.
  • Extended arguments over irreversibility: bank transfers are technically reversible and legally contestable; crypto is designed to resist reversal, which heavily favors criminals but can also shield against state overreach.

Coerced scam labor and “modern slavery”

  • Some describe pig-butchering compounds in Southeast Asia as outright forced labor and trafficking; others claim many workers are simply well-paid call-center scammers.
  • Cited books, news, and specific rescues from compounds are invoked as evidence for large-scale coercion.

Funnull, sanctions, and due process

  • Funnull is identified as a malicious CDN/anti-DDoS actor linked to previous Polyfill.io supply-chain attacks.
  • Debate over U.S. sanctions: some see them as obvious, necessary action against foreign criminal infrastructure; others worry about executive power without judicial oversight and limited due process for foreign entities.

Mitigations: telecoms, platforms, and ISPs

  • Calls for:
    • Stronger responsibility for cloud providers, CDNs, captchas, and hosting to act on abuse reports.
    • Authenticating caller identity and fixing easily spoofed phone systems.
    • Bank and legal tools (conservatorships, property monitoring, transaction friction/alerts for elders).
    • Optional ISP-level or home-firewall blocking of known-bad ASNs and recently registered domains.

Terminology and societal trust

  • Interpol’s push to drop “pig butchering” for “romance baiting” splits opinion; some say less-stigmatizing terms may increase reporting, others find the original metaphor more accurate and not always romance-related.
  • Broader discussion over high-trust Western societies colliding with low-trust global environments; some want more skepticism, others stress that high trust is a core asset worth preserving.