Interpol wants everyone to stop saying 'pig butchering'
theregister.com
theregister.com
But these are different things. They are strategies for separate components of a scam. Romance is one method of luring the mark, obtaining their trust, motivating them to pay, etc. Pig butchering is one game plan for maximising the profit extracted from the scam.
You can have a romance scam without pig butchering, and you can have a scam that employs pig butchering without any romantic element.
But, somehow, in your view, calling a victim a pig is accurate enough for the term to be valid?
Romance scam is a completely different thing, but they could happen in parallel.
I'm not sure how successful this will be since the existing term is pretty snappy and evocative, if a bit distasteful.
It is The Register. Snark is pretty much their style most of the time, even when they entirely agree with who-/what- ever is being reported on.
Cons seem to love bad names, though. “Ponzi scheme” is completely meaningless on its own. “419 scam” likewise. There’s also the Spanish Prisoner, phishing, catfishing…
I also think it is good that normal people are hip to this sort of slang, in case they run into it.
On a similar note, a "badger game" has nothing to do with Wisconsin.
Anyhow, I like this meaning so I will share it with you. I first saw it use in the context of governments and their resident corporations. The government starts with fairly liberal corporate policy, this encourages the corporations to grow and make money. that is, fattening the hogs. and when times get tough, perhaps money is a little tight, they start pulling funds out and killing the corporations via increased taxes, fines, regulation. A process sometimes referred to as pig butchering.
I suspect the main problem with this is the absence of a stable environment to do business in.
The fattening stage is making you invest progressively more in scam websites that offer incredible returns. Dad "invested" petty change, and was allowed to withdraw about twice that. The website had graphs that showed how well his investment was doing, and he was literally feeling like a stock wizard. At some point it was doing so well he tried to withdraw more, but the site wouldn't let him unless he "invested" more money. He caught on and stopped doing so, and magically his graphs slowly started going red until all his money was gone.
The butchering stage could have been a lot worse for him, if he had been more greedy and bet his life savings.
Let me make a prediction for a title of a future news article from The Register somewhere in the late 2025: "Interpol wants everyone to stop saying 'romance baiting'".
What do we achieve by focusing on words instead of focusing on the substance of the problem?
We can argue about whether or not that's true, but it seems to be at least not just cosmetic in intent.
That is probably not why Interpol wants that though.
And I agree with you about the other examples.
There's a few different cases here, but the general principle is that, for many people, words carry emotional or semantic connotations, and we want to use different words to manage these connotations.
1) For the "sexual assault vs. rape" case - Some words may be more unpleasant for many people to hear. Many people may find the word "rape" to evoke more unpleasant emotions than the more muted "sexual assault," so may use the latter in situations where we prefer not to elicit a strong emotional reaction, such as in a professional or therapeutic environment.
2) For the other cases - many people find certain terms more dehumanizing than others. With the homeless example, many people feel that "homeless" has become not just a descriptive term, but a term that carries connotations such as "crazy," "disgusting," "failed," and maybe above-all, "other" - outside the realm of people we consider "us". In contrast, the term "unhoused" carries more of a connotation of a temporary state a person is in, rather than an inherent label or trait of that person.
There is certainly a treadmill phenomenon to this - in a few years, if "unhoused" catches on, and if homeless people are still dehumanized, it's likely that the word will take on a dehumanizing connotation and many will seek to replace it.
> What do we achieve by focusing on words
All that said, while I think language is important, I do agree with you that there is an excessive focus on language and an inadequate focus on actual solutions. I would say that the current economic system and power structures make solving these problems very very hard, and as a result many people focus on policing and adjusting language because it is something that they feel they can actually change.
IMHO the action being described evokes an extremely strong emotion, and therefore so too should the word we use.
Unhoused may be because homeless covers people living in homes. But I'm not arguing this case because I don't trust that's a real issue you're raising given the others.
> Interpol argues that the term 'pig butchering' dehumanizes and shames victims of such frauds, deterring people from coming forward to seek help and provide information to the authorities."
There you go.
You're arguing this like this is instead of, rather than alongside, targeting criminals.
How victims feel and how likely they are to report issues is important. If you called fraud "scammed an idiot" would you get as many people reporting? Pig butchering is a shockingly dehumanising term.
My understanding of the word homeless depends on the fact that someone has no home. Can you expand on what you mean?
adjective plural noun: the homeless; adjective: homeless (of a person) without a home, and therefore typically living on the streets.
So those would actually describe different things. Not everyone uses them consistently either tho to make things more confusing ;)
If you're sleeping in a homeless shelter, isn't that a place you have to sleep? Are you now not homeless?
"Rough sleeper" is the term for sleeping on the streets. That helps a key distinction between people who don't have a place they can rely on and people sleeping under bridges. Both are bad outcomes but require different handling.
It's tricky, but it is important to have terms that we can use for lots of technical things.
Own your place? You're golden.
Rent officially? Probably have good tenant protection laws.
Anything else is subject to circumstances which might change with short notice. If you're crashing on a friends' couch you're one disagreement or girlfriend away from being kicked out.
I would not consider someone homeless who chooses to couch surf around friends’ pads for a while as they figure out something permanent, but has options and means, certainly not homeless
A "digital nomad" that crashes on a different friend's couch, possibly in different countries even every month by choice is not really homeless.
Someone that can't afford / find a place other than a friend's couch or their car is homeless. Even if he's not completely shelterless. Same with a homeless person sleeping in a homeless shelter. They have shelter. But no home. This one gets more complicated in terms of the wording because some of these homeless people have been doing it for so long that they actually seem to prefer to be home and shelterless in some cases. Sometimes they don't really prefer sleeping in a church entrance during sub-zero (C) but they prefer it over the rules or company in the homeless shelter (e.g. alcohol / pet related). These are many of the "living in the streets" people my parent commenter thought were the only ones that count as homeless I suppose.
This isn't unique to programming
Ice on the cake are the 13 year olds which use the “wrong” party political hashtag and get their house raided.
If you kiss someone who doesn't want to be kissed then you've sexually assaulted them but you've definitely not raped them
I bet they wouldn't have done so if it translated to the n-word. Translators have agency and should take responsibility.
> This change is an important step towards humanizing and supporting victims of these crimes.
Great. Message received. Now please re-deploy the resources you gave to your Marketing department to produce and distribute and raise awareness of this "important step" back to the Investigation or Enforcement departments to prevent and prosecute.
Some countries are scammer h(e)avens, but when that fact is reported, the highest levels of government issue denials and condemnation.
Governments around the world need to stop playing word games, and stem this problem, by applying political pressure, or even focusing 'other' means on it.
You below complaining about language sensitivity would probably be fine with calling rape, "slut reaming". Because, why not?
What we achieve by focusing on words as well as the substance of the problem is avoiding hideous insults and insensitivity toward people harmed by crime and abuse.
This isn't even hard people.
Pig and Butcher are worse than catfishing.
But, if I were king, I'd try to think up a better term for it.
Now the media is telling us we should stop using a term they popularized, by continuing to use the term in their headlines.
Maybe if they just no longer used it, the problem would self-correct itself and we wouldn’t need to chastise ordinary people for using common language.
The media is conveying Interpol’s recommendation, not their own.
But then they would lose the opportunity to shame people for a mistake they made, and this is the MO of the media: gaslighting people into thinking that normal folks are always spreading incorrect information while the media is always on the right side.
> And in an effort to rewrite history, the agency has gone back through old press releases and replaced the now taboo term.
> Viewed through the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, Interpol's past use of the term "pig butchering" is evident.
What heroic ambition! Interpol is making even the world of the past more humane. Now if only all other law enforcement agencies would hire the necessary media staff to emulate this progressive policy, how much memory of suffering might be exorcised from the world's billions ...