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Comment by boeingUH60 | Hacker News Reader

I’ve had a random person contact me out of the blue on Telegram and try to build a friendship that obviously ends in a pig butchering scam.

Fortunately, I have a rule to never make online friends. If I’ve not met someone in a personal or professional setting before, I assume they’re a robot unless proven otherwise.

Some pig butchers have also tried to contact my parents, but my parents are careful, and I immediately block any such number.

Pretty sad to see that these operations could easily be stopped, but the perpetrators live in extremely corrupt places/semi-failed states where they just pay bribes to the local authorities to leave them alone.

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Can relate. I was in a dating app and there were so many of them pretending “nice looking girl looking for husband” that then tried to befriend you and tried crypto scam. It’s so smooth that even as someone who is relatively well versed in the crypto world and associated scams I couldn’t tell at least in first two or three attempts. Their first few messages leading upto this would be “do you believe in financial freedom as for a happy life?” I would play along just to see what their strategy is and it would almost always end up trying to lure you into yield farming asking to deposit in some random wallet address promising 15% monthly yield.

It was so frustrating at some point, my first questions to someone matching me would be are you a crypto or onlyfan scam? Man the online dating world has turned completely shameless.

Just try Tumblr nowadays, which is not even a dating app. But those scammers don't mind, they "only want to make friends" and push ahead with one fresh empty profile after another. And I'm sure it brings them profit, otherwise you wouldn't see them swarming you by dozens.

A quick way to spot one of these is once you establish a nominal connection, ask to meet or video call. The standard scammer response will be something like “I don’t like video calls” or “let’s get to know each other online” first.

Sorry, is "pig butchering" a euphemism for something, or am I missing out on some new scamming trend?

It’s the name of the scam where they trick people into investing in fake platforms and steal their money.

The scammer starts first by building a romantic relationship with the target (this part can last weeks or months). Along the way, they start suggesting cryptocurrency investments on trading platforms that look legit at a glance but are fake underneath. They instruct the target to deposit money into a wallet, like any exchange, but the perpetrators just steal the tokens and show the mark fake figures.

It’s a long term thing that takes a ton of work…I have no idea how the scammers even pull it off at scale.

This site goes into more detail; https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/feature/Pig-butchering-sca...

> It’s a long term thing that takes a ton of work…I have no idea how the scammers even pull it off at scale.

When cost of living is a few hundred dollars a month at best, looting 10k from a single mark is going to last quite the time.

Someone's obviously making the websites, a few other people are finding the victims, and all the money is funneled to one overlord who pays everyone else a small cut of the stolen money.

It is appalling that no social platform is taking this seriously.

> It is appalling that no social platform is taking this seriously.

The big social media corps won't eat into their profits by hiring people to find the scammers.

It will take a law that says something about keeping a human in the loop, or that your reports should always be validated by a human.

Tumblr has created a special reporting type exactly for these, and they do disappear afterwards quickly (tested this). But by the amount of requests I still receive daily from fresh and empty accounts, I guess the work on avoiding them in the first place still has a lot to catch up. A quarantine period for fresh users risks alienating legit ones, IP filtering won't bring it too far, no idea what one could do to quench it.

It's really nasty, I lost contact with an ex girlfriend after her social media got taken over by this shit. Still no idea if it was just her account that got taken over or if she got swept up into some nonsense.

Idk, I’ve seen the former happen pretty frequently. They basically just socially engineer getting ur login credentials from u. I’m not even sure how the conversation would start but I would guess it’s one of the end goals of “Special offer for u! Check your DM!” incessant comments

It felt way more insidious than that, they were really either trying to be her or roped her into something. I've seen the latter happen pretty frequently, probably because I don't tend to live in what you might call prime target countries for these types of scams to hit as an endgame (NA/Europe/wherever else the money is greener)

"take it all" - https://www.wired.com/story/what-is-pig-butchering-scam/

Both, for instance https://www.wired.com/story/what-is-pig-butchering-scam/

The term was also new to me. From [1] I understand it is a class of cryptocurrency scams starting by building a cordial relationship via social media or dating apps and then suggesting financial investment.

[1] https://www.michigan.gov/ag/consumer-protection/consumer-ale...

So-named because you "fatten up the pig" before slaughter.

"The pig butchering scam is a type of fraud in which criminals lure victims into digital relationships to build trust before convincing them to invest in cryptocurrency platforms. Unbeknownst to victims, the fraudsters control the platforms and will eventually take all the money and vanish. "

I've taken it from the article here: https://www.aura.com/learn/the-pig-butchering-scam

See this documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bW4wYV0V-5s

That's a nice way to avoid scams, but the cost doesn't seem worth the benefits to me as someone who otherwise has good awareness about scams. I've made some nice friends off the internet and yet to fall for a scam, so it doesn't seem worth locking out that possibility of friendship just to reduce the odds of being scammed slightly more.

I could easily see giving very different advice to a friend with less scam awareness, though (like an older friend with limited knowledge of technology).

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