Pig Butchering-as-a-Service: How “Penguin” Industrialized Global Fraud

The world of pig butchering scams has evolved into a streamlined, automated service economy, with Pig Butchering-as-a-Service (PBaaS) enabling criminal operations to scale like software subscriptions. According to Infoblox, specialized service providers now sell everything from victim data to turnkey trading platforms, lowering the barrier to entry for fraudsters worldwide.

Central to this economy is a service provider tracked as “Penguin” (also known as Heavenly Alliance or Overseas Alliance), described as a one-stop shop for scammers that sells fraud kits, scam templates and other solutions. Penguin’s inventory includes the Shè gōng kù social worker database, stolen Western accounts for Tinder, WhatsApp and Apple developers, and curated “Character Sets” of influencer-sourced photos and videos, all feeding into automatic engagement via a SCRM AI tool.

The UWORK platform, supplied by another provider, supports hundreds of victims and agents, and was leveraged by Chinese criminal actors to steal in excess of US$13M in a United States case prosecuted in early 2025.