Pig butchering as an IT weapon: how Americans were scammed out of hundreds of millions

The US has imposed sanctions on a Chinese IT specialist and a company from the Philippines, who helped organize “pig butchering” attacks, as a result of which Americans lost more than $200 million.

The US Treasury Department announced sanctions against Chinese citizen Liu Lizhi and the Philippine IT company *Funnull Technology Inc.*. They are accused of providing technical support for a large-scale scam network that implemented “pig butchering” — a type of attack that combines social engineering, fake identities, romantic scenarios and fake crypto investment platforms.

• Funnull provided the infrastructure: IP addresses, hosting, domain names, website templates. This allowed the creation of hundreds of thousands of fake platforms under the guise of legal crypto exchanges, which disappeared along with users’ money after “investment”.
• Each victim lost an average of $150,000. In total, since 2023, at least $200 million. Liu Lizhi personally managed the distribution of domains and owned internal documents that kept records of employees and the progress of tasks.

“Pig butchering” attacks are a hybrid of financial fraud, where IT infrastructure is used for mass psychological manipulation. Attackers create fake profiles, simulate romantic interest, build trust — and involve the victim in “investment”. As soon as the money ends up in the attackers’ crypto wallets, the platforms disappear.

IT companies that sell infrastructure to scammers become accomplices in global fraud. Modern attacks no longer look like primitive letters from “Nigerian princes” — they are multi-level operations with hosting, IP management, artificial intelligence and elements of psychological pressure. Sanctions against Funnull are a signal to the industry: ignoring customer verification leads to international liability.