Feed: Slashdot
Feed Link: https://slashdot.org/
---

Title: US Sanctions Cloud Provider 'Funnull' As Top Source of 'Pig
Butchering' Scams

Link: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/05/30/21512...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from KrebsOnSecurity: The U.S. government
today imposed economic sanctions on Funnull Technology Inc., a Philippines-
based company that provides computer infrastructure for hundreds of thousands
of websites involved in virtual currency investment scams known as "pig
butchering." In January 2025, KrebsOnSecurity detailed how Funnull was being
used as a content delivery network that catered to cybercriminals seeking to
route their traffic through U.S.-based cloud providers. "Americans lose
billions of dollars annually to these cyber scams, with revenues generated
from these crimes rising to record levels in 2024," reads a statement from
the U.S. Department of the Treasury, which sanctioned Funnull and its 40-year-
old Chinese administrator Liu Lizhi. "Funnull has directly facilitated
several of these schemes, resulting in over $200 million in U.S. victim-
reported losses." The Treasury Department said Funnull's operations are
linked to the majority of virtual currency investment scam websites reported
to the FBI. The agency said Funnull directly facilitated pig butchering and
other schemes that resulted in more than $200 million in financial losses by
Americans. Pig butchering is a rampant form of fraud wherein people are lured
by flirtatious strangers online into investing in fraudulent cryptocurrency
trading platforms. Victims are coached to invest more and more money into
what appears to be an extremely profitable trading platform, only to find
their money is gone when they wish to cash out. The scammers often insist
that investors pay additional "taxes" on their crypto "earnings" before they
can see their invested funds again (spoiler: they never do), and a shocking
number of people have lost six figures or more through these pig butchering
scams. KrebsOnSecurity's January story on Funnull was based on research from
the security firm Silent Push, which discovered in October 2024 that a vast
number of domains hosted via Funnull were promoting gambling sites that bore
the logo of the Suncity Group, a Chinese entity named in a 2024 UN report
(PDF) for laundering millions of dollars for the North Korean state-sponsored
hacking group Lazarus. Silent Push found Funnull was a criminal content
delivery network (CDN) that carried a great deal of traffic tied to scam
websites, funneling the traffic through a dizzying chain of auto-generated
domain names and U.S.-based cloud providers before redirecting to malicious
or phishous websites. The FBI has released a technical writeup (PDF) of the
infrastructure used to manage the malicious Funnull domains between October
2023 and April 2025.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

---
VRSS v2.1.180528