To a scammer, sending a gift is worth a thousand WhatsApp Text messages. To a victim, receiving that gift might just be what they needed to push them over the edge. And now, one investigator, Troy Gochenour of the Global Anti Scam Organization, has stumbled upon a new disturbing scam service emerging online to do just that.

Designed to lure victims in, new “Scammer Gift Relay Services” are sprouting up across dark web channels designed to help scammers send and receive gifts with their targets.

The Big Con – Gifts Delivered From Agencies, Not Love Interest

An ad on Telegram’s Shan Songs channel targets their clientele: Pig Butchering Bosses, the guys who run massive scam compounds in Thailand and Cambodia. The cartoon of a delivery boy running shows that they are serious about getting the gifts to victims quickly.

The ad starts with ” Send gifts to your customers, no matter which country your customers are in or what gifts you want to send, just find Flash Express: it’s done with one click!”

Further down, they show the range of gifts they can send: flowers, cakes, luxury goods, clothes, shoes, electronic products, paintings, legal drugs and gold.

“We’ll Take A Photo And Change The Face To Yours With AI.”

The services will not only send gifts to victims but also help the scammers by allowing them to receive gifts in the city where they told the victim they live. The service has residential addresses of mules that will collect the gifts, take videos and photos, and send them back to the scammer.

In one ad, they show how far they will go. “If your customer send you clothes, you can pay extra to arrange for American models to wear the clothes and take photos. We can select according to your body requirements.. After taking the photo, you can use AI to change your face!”

Pictures can be a powerful way for scammers to connect with their victims. After all, in the victims’ eyes, the scammer must be real if they received the gift and took the time to send back a photo of what they received.

In one ad, the gift relay service says, “Why explain it with words?”

The Cheap Gifts Lure Their Victims

It’s quite sad to see photos of the victims posing with the meager, cheap gifts they have received from the scammers. These victims are looking for any shred of evidence that the person they are getting scammed by exists and truly loves them.

Look at these two men, one elderly man poses with red flowers he has received, and the other is static to receive a box of Ferrero Rocher chocolates.

He Goes Down Rabbit Holes To Find Scams On Telegram

Day and night, Troy Gochenour hunts down clues on what Pig Butchering scammers are up to on Telegram. It’s not easy. After all, the scammers communicate in Chinese, so he has to translate every post to understand what they are saying. The scammers have their lingo, which adds an even deeper layer of complexity.

It’s an arduous process. He tells me he often finds himself going down rabbit holes, clicking link after link, trying to discover what they are doing. When he recently discovered ads for new gift relay services, he knew the scammers were upping their game. “They are figuring out new ideas”, he told me. “We’re amazed at how the scam industry continues to evolve.”

A Growing Subculture Is Emerging

What has Gochenour even more concerned is a massively growing subculture of services catering to the bosses of these scam compounds, something I see firsthand myself.

It’s growing very fast. Whether it’s recruiting channels to bring scammers into compounds, channels selling torture devices and telecom services, channels selling AI tools, or gift relay services, the prevalence of these services suggests were are in the middle of a scam gold rush in Southeast Asia.

It’s only going to get worse from here.