A pig butchering racket run by Chinese scammers against people in China had its ‘headquarters’ on the Isle of Man. It looks like they were recruiting some people under false pretenses to work legitimately and that some people didn’t know of the pig-butchering :

A seaside hotel and former bank offices on the Isle of Man have been used by scammers conning victims in China out of millions of dollars, a BBC World Service investigation has found…

The deception, which happened between January 2022 and January 2023 according to Chinese court documents, used a method known as “pig-butchering”. It is so-called because the process of “fattening the pig” – gaining the victim’s trust – is vital to its success…

One former member of staff, Jordan [not his real name], told us he had no idea of the murky world he was entering when he arrived on the Isle of Man. He says he was relieved to have found what he thought was a stable administrative job…

He did notice, however, that his new employer seemed quite secretive – for example, he and his colleagues were forbidden from taking photos at company social events. What he says he didn’t realise was that many of his Chinese colleagues were actually scam artists…

The Chinese court said it was difficult to verify the victims’ total losses – but it said 38.87m renminbi (£4.17m/$5.3m) had been taken from at least 12 victims….

“This is the first such case we’ve seen of one of these pig-butchering scam operations setting up in a Western country,” says Masood Karimipour, South East Asia representative at the UN Office on Drugs and Crime….

Full article / source here.