A scammers guide: How cybercriminals plot to rob a target in a week

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A web camera is seen in front of the displayed words \Internet Safety\ in this illustration taken October 21, 2025. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration

Dec 31 - A handbook found during a police raid on a compound used by a cyberfraud gang in the Philippines offers detailed instructions in Chinese for conducting scams and reveals a blueprint for grooming and deception.

A womans IQ is zero when in love, it states on its second page. As long as the emotions are in place, the clients money will naturally follow.

A second handbook, seized during another law enforcement operation in the country and reviewed by Reuters, gives tips in English and Chinese about how to conduct romance scams.

Together, they provide a window into the psychological techniques criminal gangs use to beguile a victim into believing they are in a romantic relationship, before duping them into fraudulent investments.

This kind of fraud is known as pig-butchering because the gangs say targets are led like hapless pigs to slaughter. It is among the most prevalent scams today, according to the FBI.

In a series of stories this year, Reuters documented how these pig-butchering scams are often carried out by victims of human trafficking, who are forced to work in industrial-scale scam compounds in Southeast Asia run by Chinese-led gangs. Such cyberfraud has been supercharged by artificial intelligence, which allows scammers to deploy sophisticated tools to make their fraudulent appeals for money more deceptive, the series revealed.

The two manuals, the contents of which Reuters is reporting exclusively, show that