What is a pig butchering scam? (2023)
wired.com
wired.com
Yes, it’s not just the elderly who are victims of these, but a lot of people at that age are too trusting of strangers and of people who sound like authorities. And let’s face it: older people have all the wealth in the world anyway so they’re more likely to be fruitful targets.
An uncle of mine was a notoriously a ruthless businessman in his heyday and he fell prey to a gift-card scam where he was kept on the phone for 8 hours straight while he did their bidding. We were all shocked he fell for this but then realized the techniques that they use prey upon individuals with inability to deal with stress or trigger anxiety/panic causing them to act irrationally.
As I age, I've noticed similar declines in ability to deal with multiple tasks, stress, etc.
A better defence is to reduce the attack surface. While, I have legal financial control over mom's estate, suffering from moderate dementia, I've removed her ability to interact with her finances by removing her check book (she had loaned a large sum to an acquaintance without informing us), lowering her credit card limits, removed access to online banking, maintaining a low-balance checking account. All her expenses are on autopay. She doesn't even think about her finances anymore. Whenever she gets telemarketers, she always says "you have to talk to my son". Once in a blue moon she asks me "do I have money? I don't even know" -- and I reassure her she doesn't have to worry about money.
I've done the same -- 2factor, using disposable credit card numbers, maintaining a separate PayPal-linked bank account separate from my main account etc, text notifications on all transactions etc.
The sophistication and technology being used is also becoming problematic in detecting these scenarios even for highly aware/technical folk.
This kind of worries me too, but I think we can still defend almost 100% by just following rule #1:
“Do not send money in response to anyone contacting you unsolicited, either over the phone, email, SMS, social media, etc.”
You can get a lot of mileage from just that. There is never a case where such contact is not a scam or spam. If it’s someone you know or already do business with, use rule #2: hang up, wait an hour, and call them back using a number you know to be correct.
In which case still call them back at the number you know is good. If they answer, you know the thing was a scam. If they don't answer, you don't know. Call known numbers of friends and family of the "victim" to find out if they really are traveling. This is not definitive, because the scammers might have called those people too.
I think the key to these situations is to ask questions of the "victim" that only the real person would know the answers to. They need to be questions about shared experiences that would not have appeared on social media. If they try to blow you off like "I'm under too much stress to think about such things right now!" hang up.
Also, consider asking your friends to let you know before they travel, and arrange with them a pass phrase they can say if they contact you for an emergency. Maybe a duress pass phrase too such that if they say it, you'll know they're in real trouble. Is this a pain? Is it too much to ask of many people? Yes and yes. But this is the world we're in now until we decide to start putting scammers in prison for long sentences.
I'm experiencing difficulties in even contact people who have expressed interest because they have expressed a broader interest than me eg they expressed an interest in foo and are now getting contacted by bar who has a relationship with foo but is not in fact foo and the contact could have occurred weeks ago.
I could stand up a website and plaster it with verifiable information but much of that info like say professional license is itself by dint of being public not entirely verifiable eg I could put up a website for Sam Spade with his license info. For the same reason you are able to verify his license number—its public—its not an actual verification that you are speaking to the right person.
Perhaps more relevant its easy to just never get to speak to the person in the first place because their defenses are rightfully up.
I wish there was an easier way to authenticate as legit.
I wish your phone had a standardized way to link your expressed intent, the nature of the caller, and official nature/licensing or professional affiliation and show this data on your phone during receipt or during call kind of like you can click on an icon and get information about the legitimacy of a website.
EG when you express the interest in <product> a singular number is created on your end and carried through to anyone who is actually acting such request whether it was asking someone to fix your cable or sell you life insurance and you could then verifiably see beyond caller idea and absolutely verifiable and relevant info in order to ascertain more data than is available via caller ID
On September 2nd 2005 you told comcast their bad equipment was making you consider rage stomping said equipment. You are receiving a phone call from agent 34534 in the <country> who is officially employed by Comcast domain: xfinity.com to handle tech support regarding this issue. OR
On December 10th 2012 you requested information re: life insurance from <Company>. You are receiving a call from <agent> who is a licensed insurance producer license #asdfasdf who has been an insurance producer for n years and has zero complaints regarding this request.
It would be great if you could even address this request online via some standard like canceling it so nobody bugs you or attaching metadata
I'd love to collect my own data and converse over email. I would be overjoyed in fact but I don't think people will put their personal medical history in a web page that isn't their doctors and I don't really blame them.
I've also gotten spam calls that are similar leadgen funnels, where the frontend is obviously robocall spam, and then you're transferred to sales reps at what is likely a different company who clearly expect to be speaking to bona fide interested customers rather than perturbed spam victims just looking to mess with them.
In general I've got to question the impedance mismatch of turning a web form into a phone call regardless of whether it's necessary. To me they're much different head spaces, and just because evening/night me is preliminarily looking into a topic doesn't necessarily mean that daytime me wanted to add it to the in-process run queue. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of your rejection is based on this dynamic where people wanted the interaction/information at the time they requested it, but not later when you're interrupting them doing something else.
I would have been screwed like two times in my life if I couldn't solve stuff like this.
I think the limit should just be how much you send.
Bail?
There was a scam attempt against me that spoofed the caller-id to look like the county sheriff; scammer would not agree to me calling them back on that (or any other) number for the sheriff.
You pay the court clerk [1]. You either pay in person, or possibly online depending on the jurisdiction. If you aren't paying in person, you'll need to contact them directly anyway, and their contact info should be easy to verify. It's not like they're going to be sitting next to the detained party on the phone with a bitcoin deposit address.
1. https://legalaidnyc.org/get-help/bail-incarceration/what-you...
A note to anyone in Canada reading this: This would be considered a bare trust and it would have to be declared to the CRA, starting this year.
I wish it was more intelligent; I'd love to tell it what area codes to permit; the advantage of having a phone from half way around the country is that I only care about a few area codes and the scammers don't know which ones those are.
I have a Wyoming area code. There are less than a million of those in circulation. I haven't lived in Wyoming in years, so the odds that a call with a Wyoming area code is both a) not already in my contacts and b) legitimate, is basically zero. So I let every single (307) call go to voicemail, and if they leave a message at all, I listen to it (and 99 times out of 100 discover that its a failed robocall. That 1 time, its an authentic wrong number, and I've called a few back if it sounded like something they were expecting to hear back about).
I'd love to ignore all calls from unknown numbers EXCEPT the actual area code I reside in, which they don't know. Then calls from schools, doctors, etc might actually get through.
As it is, those go to voicemail and I get them eventually.
Hell, my number is even commonly spoofed! Every few months, I get a call from someone, then I get to explain to them that scammers can spoof phone numbers.
He was not willing to listen to reason.
It's a good thing politicians and politcal propaganda outlets don't make use of this. :/
Great, that's that worry taken care of.
Not even one month later my mom spent an hour on the phone with a scammer before my dad finally got suspicious and made her hang up. I still have no idea what all they had her do, and she doesn't remember either. We had to basically treat it as a successful identify theft and potential intrusion into her device, even though she didn't actually give them any money, thankfully.
So, I don't know if The Talk actually does it. For her, it was the fact that there was another person on the line (people wouldn't lie to you, obviously) and that this person was telling her they'd get in trouble if she didn't go through these steps with them. The scammers are cynical experts, they're way more sophisticated than the median elderly person they're fucking with.
This all made me very scared for them, because I don't even know if this single incident will be enough to make them sufficiently canny.
I don’t even answer the phone to begin with. Everything goes to voicemail. If it’s important, they will leave a message, and I can determine later whether they are to be believed.
Of course there are old people falling for scams — dementia is a lot more prevalent and they tend to have retirement accounts — but younger people are vulnerable too.
Pig butchering often has a crypto component, a scam that appeals much more to younger people. I googled for demographics on this and came up with this:
https://www.globalantiscam.org/post/statistics-of-crypto-rom...
Looks like everybody needs “the talk”.
> It sounds ludicrous to you or I but their minds are from a different era. “Telephone calls are an expensive, special thing” their 1950s mind thinks
This is the key—grew up in a world where people often weren't around their phone to answer it immediately (the older ones, maybe a world in which not everyone even had a phone!) and it cost money to make long distance calls, so mass-call scams had trouble being profitable.
I mean, hell, that's only not been the state of things for a relatively short time. I was still paying connection and per-minute fees for long distance calls until at least the mid '00s.
I think it's seriously worth considering whether we need some more cost-friction on long distance connections. That'd be a pretty elegant way to curb this, since nobody seems willing to just force the telecoms to fix it directly.
Barely yesterday, and probably again tomorrow, throngs of people in their twenties and thirties were borrowing money to buy digital tulips whenever some dude on Twitter posted a graph with a line going up and a stock photo of a Lamborghini.
The threat of being scammed is not age-specific, although the ways people are approached and coached by scammers are sometimes different.
> and let’s face it: older people have all the wealth in the world
I know this is just a popular and divisive trope that pits one bunch of struggling people against another, but you must know different "older people' than I do if it rings true for you.
But then he got an email from my mom (they're divorced but still friends) that was so obviously a hack, not addressing him by name, and asking him to "help me purchases some stuffs on Amazon," and he was about to go through with it. I got the same email, and almost didn't contact my dad because I thought no way he'd fall for it. But he was just about to offer to help her buy some "stuffs" on Amazon.
I'm not sure there's anything you can do, including the talk, to stop this.
I learned about the above story when I sat down to have the “the talk” with her.
Eventually, maybe we can just run any email, text, or even phone calls through our own LLM driven assistant that detects and notifies about the scam.
And in general "don't give out money or information to anyone calling on the phone" is good advice, but thinking it's a complete solution is a bit fanciful. I'll admit to personally finding myself on the receiving end of a call from $bank, and in a moment of weakness having supplied various bits of low-stakes personal information for their "verification". I had called them earlier and was expecting a response, but it could have just as easily been a scam calling at the perfect time. After the mental gears started turning and I realized how little I actually knew about the incoming call and how the requests were escalating, I stopped the conversation and asked where I could call them back. The point is it took a realization on my part, because these banks utilize highly deficient security procedures that make people comfortable with insecure behavior (starting with the use of effectively public information for "identity verification"), and the scammers only need a very tiny sliver of success rate to make it profitable.
Also many of these scams are legitimate-business adjacent (medicare billing, medicare advantage, save money on electricity/tv, political campaigns, etc). Old people just want someone to talk to, effect their own fading agency, and really do believe the spiel of a friendly sounding person promising to help them. The potential damage there is lower than accounts being drained, but the continuum makes it hard to draw an absolute line when the "helpful" quasi-scammers blow right through it.
Your comment would have resonated without the unnecessary last line that I don't even believe - are they they the ones who built all the technology companies in the last two decades?
My argument is that your comment is incorrect (hint: they don't have all the wealth in the world) and your tone.
I don't disagree that they are the best target if you are a scammer its how you delivered the comment awfully close to blaming the prior generation for all our woes .. i.e. doesn't matter anyways because they "have all the wealth in the world anyways" flippancy.
Imagine vastly simplified world where people are in full time education (with no income and zero net worth) until age 20, then they start earning wealth at a constant rate. At age 30 they'd have 10 years of savings. At age 60 they'd have 40 years of savings, and that's 4x as much.
https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/more-than-half-of-us-wealth-...
Fun fact: Mark Zuckerberg personally holds over 1% of that 9%.
(That is, he holds ~0.09% of all the wealth of US citizens, and happens to fall into the group of Millennials who as a group have ~9%. This from rough calculations and googling. There's an old reddit post that has about the same numbers. https://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/comments/nbqfvn/requ...)
It would be more significant that the first two groups have twice as much aggregate wealth as the last if they didn't also have over a time and a half the population. (>30% vs. <20%.)
https://www.statista.com/statistics/296974/us-population-sha...
Statistically I believe op is correct, wealth is more concentrated in older demographics, and it has been increasing in concentration for quite a while now.
These "pig butchering" scams provide hilarious possibilities.
They like to send their photo pretty early (always an attractive Asian lady), so I try and beat them to the punch and send my own photo (of course, also a photo of an Asian lady). Curiously, this doesn't deter them! My wife finds this particularly hilarious.
One time, I had 2 people randomly texting me at the same time, using the same name - Jenny. I started sending them screenshots of each other's conversations, which kind of annoyed them. "Which Jenny is this? Do you know the other Jenny?" lol
A list of things which also doesn't seem to deter them or make them think they might be being toyed with:
- Claiming to work for the FBI (in an anti-scammer unit)
- Being homeless
- Claiming to be Peter Frampton
- Claiming to be Bill Clinton
But be careful with scambaiting.
1. Scammers can have networks, with connections that are more violent and capable than a given scammer. They might be capable of hitting you with a drive by, doxing, swatting, or hiring local muscle to visit you. The risk of this is kind of 'expensive' escalation low but not zero - especially if you're causing real problems for an operation
2. Many scam agents are victims coerced into scamming by their bosses. This makes it unethical to bait them unless you have the power and intent to liberate them - which almost no scam baiters do
3. Many scam agents have bots for dealing with repetitive objections or harassment attempts. It doesn't cost them anything to string "vigilantes" along with low effort bot responses, occasionally dropping the payload URL, hoping you will make a mistake
4. Some scambaiting activities are illegal and could make you liable for legal penalties - things like verbally harassing scammers, hacking scammers back to surveil their operations, threatening to have scammers beaten or murdered, etc.
Remember that the agents that you're talking to are softies, with a little power, but they're working under the supervision - and often the coercion - of hardened criminals in many cases. Scambaiting should not be done just for fun. It should be done with some form of desire to help liberate the victims enslaved by these operations.
I have personally chosen to stop most of my own scambaiting operations until I find a new form of scambaiting that can actually help victimized scammers.
The only kind of scam baiting that I do now is teaching python and open source contributions on GitHub, with the hope that teaching a valuable skill can help a scammer escape the cycle of crime and extortion. If a potential scammer is willing to learn Python with me and start making open source contributions, I don't really care what else they are doing. But of course this approach has a downside - I could be teaching valuable programming skills to a person who will just use them to automate their scamming operation.
I ask because worked for a cybersecurity firm and we would, on occasion, and mostly the “teh lulz” screw with phone scams. Our legal had nothing to say on that front.
Exactly; I'm sure that in many cases the people who taught them English had similar hopes.
And God help a scammer who ends up in my hands... Because I will definitely teach them python packaging and GitHub build automations for pypi publishing! I am honestly in awe of some of my students' abilities to deal with python BS.
And Poetry? Pip's own Pep 518 compliance ensures we don't need it! We're managing dependencies by hand, `pyproject.toml` style! Woohoo!
Telegram is full of them, often they are so blunt, that you wonder why so stupid. But I saw people react and fall for them in group chats (where other people could intervene), so apparently it works with private chat. And they use all kinds of pictures (not just asian) and try to adapt them to the local groups at times. But the general theme: sucessful and happy. Making the victim wannabe just like his new friend.
Some people are really desperate for success, so they ignore all warnings and go for it.
Seriously messing with them would require LLMs at this point, to automate it as well.
Are you sure they were not co-scammers though or the same scammer? Seems like scamming 101 to make victims fomo.
Everyone you engage you are making it worse for the person on the otherside
there's something in this sentence that hit different.
Scammers aren't always acting on their own free will.
... my god, might we even have a moral obligation to help them make their numbers?
STIR/SHAKEN is a good start, but we need to come down hard on this.
If someone tells you that it's impossible to trace the origins of spam, ask yourself how they can know whom to bill.
The reality is that it's possible and easy but only when the bottom-line is concerned.
It needs to make business sense to prevent spam/scams by there being penalties for screwing things up, and incentives for doing well. Otherwise you're right, unscrupulous telco companies like to make money by charging scammers to send messages to customers.
Currently that's not the case, so the excuse of not being able to trace the source of the spam is successfully preempting regulation as nobody involved has the skills and/or financial incentives to ask "hold on, how come you know who to bill but not who's originating the spam?".
Simpler explanation is that the phone companies don't care about the scams because it doesn't affect them. They aren't liable, and there is no mechanism to report scams to them, and make them spend money investigating.
And in this case, pig butchering scammers use Telegram and Whatsapp mostly.
It seems to have done nothing. Even for phones I get more spam than ever. Same for my Mom 99% of calls to her landline are scammers.
Now I get:
- Travel package scams (I believe this is related to timeshares, this is most calls I get).
- Medicare/Medicaid scams (a close second by volume)
- Auto accident scams (pitching an insurance payout)
- Home security system scams (free security system!)
• Home remodeling come-ons. So many. They know my name. Often “I’m calling for my Dad’s construction company, xxx, who is working in your area …” It’s a different company name every time.
• Medicare BS.
• “Scare” scams—just lately with no specific reason, just words such as, “…your case is urgent and you must call our agent Sam at 555-xxx…”
• Tax relief crap.
Also occasionally solar company calls. These appear to just be really shady lead generating companies, but the solar companies are real (if maybe themselves a little shady).
Once in a long time I get the "scare" scams - those are usually claiming you owe the IRS a bunch of money.
Now what really pissed me off is that it took more than half an hour to get to the scam part -- they put me on hold multiple times, and passed me back and forth between the two "cops", with really no information given to me. Once it got to the demand for money, I started putting them on hold, until I hung up (which he of course warned me not to do), and they kept calling back until I blocked the number.
The second half of the scam — the cryptocurrency theft. The one I've seen recently is variations on any of the terms "ChatGPT MEV arbitrage ETH slippage bot"; in essence, the author claims to have used ChatGPT to write a bot that waves hands does something something with arbitrage and makes tons of money. The explanation is technobabble, and the claims are often like "earn returns of $2k/day", which is of course solidly into the "way too good to be true" territory. The "smart" contract just steals your money, it's that simple.
I have been seeing these all over my YouTube sponsored videos. I.e., the scammers are running these as ads. I've reported them as I see them, but thus far, YouTube has taken down exactly none of them, AFAICT. (In fact, my entire report history is 0% removed, despite every entry being a rather crystal clear ToS violation since I'd otherwise have been too lazy to go through the flow for it.) As I write this, both ad slots on the homepage are this scam.
At this point I hadn't heard about this specific scam, as most scams are kind of low effort and quick to screen people for susceptibility. This one surprised me in that they were very good at acting like someone they claimed to be. Google Translate has gotten to the point where people can carry on a conversation in their own language and talk to someone in English without sounding too odd.
Before I blocked the scammer I took a closer look at "her" WhatsApp profile. She was a business account. Big red flag, I wish I had noticed that before. Still, if no money changes hands it's free entertainment? I also learned by paper trading on Forex that I suck at it and shouldn't play that game.
Crypto scammers also sometimes try to play the long game, and I think they are based in different countries from the pig butchers. I met one through the same platform and saw through it right away, but noticed that they were working as a pitchman for another scammer.
https://pjvogt.substack.com/p/whos-behind-these-scammy-text-...
How do I know? If you happen to have been a school teacher for 50 of those years, you keep excellent hand written notes of the events, that make your relatives sick to their stomachs.
While not quite what you asked, a service like this would at least provide an additional barrier, before someone hands over their net worth to a scammer.
The next step after that, often used for elderly people, involves a full power of attorney: someone else is completely responsible for their finances, and hands them either cash or a debit card with a small amount of money that they can use however they want. But that is for extreme cases.
For anything less, its too much work.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-08-17/crypto...
But one time, I decided to see how far I could take it.
Had a scammer message and follow me on IG. I went ahead with it. We kept it going for about a month which escalated to sending pretty scandalous pictures.
The scammer asked to me my d*ck. Full disclosure, I'm a pretty average 5.5 inches. Instead of sending a real picture of mine, I found one online of some guy who had a massive slong held next to what looked like a 7/11 big gulp cup for comparison.
I sent the pic to him and immediately the scammer reveals himself and threatens to reveal my messages and pic to my other followers on IG unless I send him some Bitcoin.
I chuckle and say, "go for it". Now my friends all know me really well and wouldn't be phased by this. My buddies I went to school with know my size because of the sports teams I played on with them and they thought it was the funniest thing in the world.
The girls all immediately began talking amongst themselves and I started getting hit on by acquantances that followed me.
Was probably one of the funniest stunts I've ever done.
I got confused because the forex company wasn't involved in crypto so I asked him for the site nor was anything he said related to trading or mining.
Going to the site, i immediately knew it was a scam. I asked him how he got a hold of this and some chinese woman had cold texted him. He's a senior so of course boomers are ripe for the pick since he lived alone. Ended up buying $10k worth of crypto to send to this scam site.
When he tried to withdraw they sent h some nonsense email about tax withholding from the WTO and subsequently "froze" his account until he deposited 75% more.
The worst part of the ordeal was how defensive he got with me about it. He was more concerned with the nonsensical scenario of him losing his PoA than losing $10k to an otherwise obvious scam.
I showed him some of the fun culturally insulting things I've said to indian and Chinese scammers who cold text.
Dad ended up getting a part time job to occupy himself and have some people to talk to. Haven't heard about him day trading or mining crypto either. I said if he wants to get into day trading to do it through some US based company you've heard before and if he wants to mine crypto, then I'll help him find hardware to do it.
I like that you didn't tell him to stop doing these things entirely (even though that might arguably be for his best) but instead you told him you would help him do these things if he wants to do them.
Crypto mining is a passive activity so no harm there
You can transfer that 100k to the Very Reliable Businessman, but it'll require you to accept the transfer now and confirm it 2-3 business days later before it activates.
I'd really want one of those on my accounts when I get older, preferably with a limit closer to 1k.
By the time you are sending someone money, you "trust" them.
The scammer, whom I met on social media, was extremely convincing. She claimed to be wealthy. She has pictures with celebrities, pictures with her Lamborghini, and so on. She said her stepfather is an executive in the Monetary Authority of Singapore, which gives him access to information that other people cannot have. This information allows her to make currency pair trades that bring guaranteed profits. (This would be insider trading, technically.) She showed me screenshots of trades where she made $250,000 USD to $500,000 USD in a matter of 30 minutes (buys and sells in 30 minutes; timing is based on instructions from her stepfather). Then she encouraged me to make trades with my own money as well.
She asked me to install the Coinbase Wallet app. She asked me to press the Browse button in this app, then type seemingly random characters into the box. (Part of the scam here is that victims may not realize they are actually typing a website URL). The website then displays inside the Coinbase Wallet app, and its function appears to be part of Coinbase Wallet.
She had me create a demo account, and guided me through the steps of making a demo transaction and showed me that I could make a significant profit. Then she asked me to make a real account. By this point I was suspecting a scam so I did not go through.
All this happened over a period of 3 weeks, so the scammer takes her time to "groom" victims. An Asian lady who speaks Mandarin and speaks good English with the help of translation apps. I never met the lady in person (she claimed to be on the other coast of the USA), but I did have a video call with her. She claimed to have been using the website for two years (but in fact, internet records show this site was only created weeks before). I discovered that her phone numbers are Twilio and Google Voice VOIP numbers, and her IP address is Azure, which probably means she is logged in to an Azure VM from another country.
Warning signs: They are always far enough away that you can't meet in person, but promises she will be moving to your city soon. (Or they are from your city, but currently away on business). Wants to switch to WhatsApp or Telegram. They always do video call to show that they are a real person. Shows off their wealth, mansion-like houses, fancy cars, dining at expensive restaurants. Casually mentions investing in crypto as their source of wealth. Then wants to show you how to invest in crypto yourself.
Edit: Here are some pictures the scammer shared with me. She is with celebs (Asian celebs, I don't recognize them), in her new Lamborghini at the dealership and so on:
[1] https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/whos-behind-these-scam...
A stranger (out of the goodness of their heart) lets you in on their secret technique for making £MILLIONS, and you didn't immediately tell them to bugger off?
And you reply "new phone who dis" and they apologize and chat about unrelated things for weeks becoming your friend.
This is why any text from an unknown number should be "block and report as spam".
Or maybe, just maybe, you should rethink how much you actually KNOW someone who you've merely been texting with for a few weeks.
I wouldn't trust my closest friend giving me advice about making money, because his advice was an MLM. I sure as fuck am not taking financial advice from someone I have never met face to face. Even if they are legitimately letting me in on a way to make free money, it's probably unethical at best.
But “hello Internet Stranger I know how you can invest and make $millions?” LOL how does that make any sense? Put yourself in the scammer’s shoes: you found a way to double your money. Are you really going to tell random people on the internet how to do it? Obviously not.
Yes, I'm amused by those too. In my experience, the IRS has always wanted US dollars. But maybe Apple gift cards became legal tender without us noticing?
LOL indeed.
Which is why all gift card racks now have the "IRS IS NOT ASKING YOU FOR THIS GIFT CARD" signs on them; still not good enough.
Does the world really need gift cards? Do their few, anachronistic legit use cases outweigh the scam use cases? I personally believe gift cards are an overall net negative, even just considering the amount of plastic and packaging wasted on them, but add on the scam aspect, and we have to ask: should gift cards even be a thing?
They're just currently the most effective "give me some numbers over the phone and now I have money" currently available.
It used to be Western Union, but it would move to something else.
Cash, money orders, PayPal, Zelle, any number of things have been used and will be used.
Anachronistic? I still give these as small gifts all the time, and every grocery or department store I go in seems to have a rack of them at the checkout stand.
But ye, if someone texts me on some chat service nowadays and it is a stranger I assume it is a scam.
This allows the price to be sought in a non-adversarial way since it makes building a connection and understanding of the local situation a part of the communication.
Much of the awkwardness comes from not really understanding how the local market and local way of life works while also basically being royalty from an economic perspective. This out-of-touchness creates a principal agent problem where the "foreign" other is distrusted but also relied on for "truth".
The negative experience doesn't come from the literal economic damage of being scammed but being treated (or programmed) like a pig let to slaughter.
Honestly for ACH and wire transfers they should have required financial counseling before executing — I remember that women with the “CIA” cash scam was handed a brochure, maybe they should sit down with CFP or someone before they can execute.
App that claims to be a trading business? Sure, greenlit no problems here. App that is obviously a scam version of lastpass? Hell yeah, get on the app store, you pass muster.
A trivial update to an open source app that doesn't even have any form of payment and requires nearly no permissions because it's not sending your data to fifteen different data brokers?
Hey, hold on there, that sounds sketchy so you will be denied
Ah, so not something we of the 'tism need worry about. The only way I respond to wrong numbers is by blocking them.
If you could make a honey pot LLM that engages the scammers, costing them time and learning their patterns, even misleading the scammers and figuring out their crypto wallets, could that be a profitable endeavor?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLPpl2ISKTg
(apologies if the YouTube link has geographic restrictions, don't know if it does)
What on Earth gives you this ridiculous idea? "Grooming" certainly isn't a euphemism. It is an entirely accurate and descriptive term.
Financial grooming has money right in the name. And there's other victim grooming patterns, so I wouldn't think 'financial grooming scam' is something to do with recombing a president's hair.
That is why we have the old saying: "You can't fool an honest man"
That isn't true of pig-butchering scams, or in general.
> That is why we have the old saying: "You can't fool an honest man"
The saying is "You can't cheat an honest man". And it's also bullshit. Don't trust old sayings; you can quote me on that.
The most effective way is to get a 'finance' app approved on the Apple/Google store (which is easy), then you send your victims there after grooming them for multiple weeks, then show above average returns, but not exceptional ones, so they keep depositing their savings, then when they try to withdraw, you make a message like 'you have to pay 40% taxes on your total earnings, please deposit that much before you can withdraw'.
That's why I think 'pig butchering', despite the negative connotation, is accurate. Yes, grooming is part of the scam, but it isn't the majority of it.
No, you're the one who made a claim unsupported by TFA, that victims usually believe they're acting illegally.
The scammers might very well tell everyone carlosjobim put them up to it. You can't just assume something is happening because it technically could happen.
Frankly you seem to be looking for some kind of argument where there is none.
Your comment claimed that most scam victims believed they were doing something illegal; I don't think that's a reasonable claim without evidence.
I've never heard of 'pig butchering' which sounds rather victim blaming and certainly would not be used as a *descriptive* term by UK banks, government or media.
I'm obviously missing some context or nuance here, since you're the second person to identify the connotation. Is it the "pig" part?
Your first sentence was fine, although I disagree that the term is intentional victim shaming.
But you came into a forum where people know term A, and went on full blast with "anyone who is still using (well known) term A instead of term B (that many people didn't even know exists) should be immediately discredited."
That's needlessly aggressive and doesn't really help get your message across.
Is it because the word "pig" implies that the victim hasn't kept Kosher and that the scam is god's punishment for that? Is there a general consensus that people who are "butchered" deserve to be murdered? This stigma was obvious and immediate for you, but I'm not picking it up. I don't wish to perpetuate the stigma, but you haven't shared what it is.