This is not new at all, there are US companies facilitating this (see: Tinder e.g) with zero regard for the lives of the people forced into doing this. They actively ignore these things and profit off it, absolutely disgusting.
The Tinder things are very rarely romance scams, they pivot to crypto scams immediately, "I work in the finance industry scoping out markets for crypto" etc - then I'd imagine they'd encourage someone to invest but they usually see through my attempts at scamming them back, one day I'll figure it out.
Most users offered the jobs are getting them via everything apps like WeChat, Zalo, WhatsApp forwards, Viber, Line, etc.
I don't think that's an entirely accurate assessment. There's a significant userbase in Europe as well, on the same order of magnitude as North America.
There is also the collateral, the profiles/photos they steal are of real people, which may or may not end up in real life ramifications for them. It used to be entirely generic Asians (Orient, not SE, as they're more attractive to the west apparently) - but these days they've upped the game and use region specific photos (ie; in my case, Slavic origin)
It’s becoming basically unusable unless you communicate with photo verified users only, but I’m sure a lot of photo verified accounts are run by these scammers too.