WhatsApp Messenger’s prolific and effective use by human trafficking syndicates in their romance and financial “Pig Butchering” scams, enables billions of dollars in illicit revenue. Therefore, it is reasonable to suggest that many of the one hundred thousand cybercrime slaves in Cambodia alone, were kidnapped and trafficked as a direct consequence of WhatsApp’s absence of effective identity challenges for criminal users of its platform and lack of timely crime disruption provisions.
WhatsApp’s ease of use, combined with a glacially slow, or complete lack of law enforcement response to many cybercrimes reported through the US Dept. of Justice’s IC3.Gov portal, means that the success of these highly scalable scams directly correlates to WhatsApp’s and other Big Tech platform enablement.