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I am happy to share my mom's story, as tragic as it is.

My stepfather passed away just before Covid. After he passed away, my mom was isolated and started spending time on Match.com.

Eventually she found her match - a total scamming operation.

She proceeded to liquidate my deceased step father's retirement savings and also took out high interest loans to send her match money.

She wired the scammer well over $100k. The high interest loans totally ruined her life.

They were using a US bank. She was using Wells Fargo.

She is/was:

1. Desperate for attention 2. Prone to deception 3. Tech illiterate - some of the photos the scammer sent her were so obviously photoshopped

Happy to share more if it's helpful. It's been one of the most difficult things to deal with throughout my life, but I hope that our story can be helpful to someone else.

I think I understand. Thank you and I'm sorry.

You don't even have to be tech illiterate.

A former roommate of mine who is extremely tech-savvy but just fat and lonely was constantly wiring women he'd never met money.

He was constantly getting catfished on dating apps and talking all day to fake facebook profiles 2-3 hours away and they'd always have an excuse to not meet him and have their hand out for escalating amounts of money until reality hit him and he'd start over and do it again with another catfish. I moved out partly because he would miss his mortgage payments because he wired some scammer money.

https://xkcd.com/632/#-chat-suspicion

If it kept happening like that, it kind of sounds like he was subconsciously willing to pay for the “privilege” of chatting with a “hot online friend”, similar to how some lonely people pay to chat with a famous pornstar on Only Fans – even though they (should) know they are chatting with a random call centre employee.

I do think social desperation is real and does a number on some people. There are people out there in the world who will enter fairy tale love story mode if the right sequence of words reaches them as if they were some kind of self destructive sleeper agent.

A lot of these people lived decent rational lives and should know better. They are college educated and had good careers and large retirement accounts and made all the right financial decisions to lead a good life. But then some stranger pretends to misdial your number and reads a script about how they feel like they really connected with you. You get 'activated' and enter an irrational universe where you can be convinced to send your money away and keep the relationship a secret from everyone you know and lie to your bank about why you are withdrawing anything and who knows what else.

I like to think I am immune to this but who knows what I will be in 30 years. I make a living by being distrusting (security) and got activated as a good boglehead at a really young age. Or maybe the stupid-juice will suffuse my brain at age 70 and I'll give it all away to a cute AI voice that robodials me after decades of not answering any call that isn't already in my contacts, and everybody who knows me will be mystified as to why, including myself.

They butter you up for a long while before they get to the offer - that's the distinction from normal scams. They act as a friend and confidant for weeks, maybe flirt, and when the pig is "raised" they move to the slaughtering process

so it's not a stranger, it's "your close online friend says they have a good retirement fund and it might do better than yours, would you try it out?"

I chatted a bit to one of them trying to get money from me and it was quite subtle. Blah blah I make money in crypto why don't you try I'll show you what to do and then instead of going to say mexc which is a real exchange it would be to mexx or some such which is a clone they've made. It would actually semi function and show profits encouraging the punter to stake more not realizing it was a fake exchange.

I didn't send money to the mexx.com site but I did send some to a site called ftx.com which pulled a more subtle scam. Got that refunded eventually.

The trick is that they don't feel like an unsolicited stranger. The stories you read about these scams summarize away weeks or months of talking, flirting, maybe falling in love a little bit, until they're not a stranger but your very cute and very rich friend.

What does work is an absolute, ironclad rule that I do not trust and am not friends with anyone I meet online until we've met multiple times in person. But there's a lot of lonely people out there who don't find that rule so easy.

I think of it like the xz backdoor. A long time investment of goodwill over months before you tighten the noose.

The more sophisticated attempts seemingly do not straight up ask for cash. They offer an investment opportunity on a scam website which will report the investment doing well, so the victim will independently invest more money.

>What does work is an absolute, ironclad rule that I do not trust and am not friends with anyone I meet online until we've met multiple times in person

That's a good rule and should be common sense for all internet users.

I know two people in my network who this happened to. One is the elderly father of a friend who has dementia who was told that his friend in Asia had a business opportunity (they actually collected this money in person in San Jose). The other is a young woman whose mother is a member of the CCP (as many in China are) and who was told that she had to do this or her mother would face consequences there.

I found both situations unbelievable but I can see how. Two situations which turned out legitimate were:

* I was in a bad accident and there was a settlement which was intended to go to the insurer but went to me instead. The subrogation claim eventually made it to me and I was informed via phone. I told them to send the docs etc. and contacted the insurer to ensure this was their guys. It was and I paid (perhaps more than I should have but not all that I received)

* About half the time I send a big wire on Chase, they call me to confirm details and this and that. I always say "I shouldn't really be doing this, right? Can you tell me how I can call you?" and they tell me to go on the site and find the number etc. etc.

So it seems there are many cases where the fake seeming is legit. These two were drowned in a large number of other scam phone calls, admittedly, and I must confess that hearing an Indian accent with a Western name now sets off my alarm bells.

The Economist has an interesting podcast about this phenomenon called Scam Inc. You need to be a subscriber to hear more than the first few eps, but they were interesting and went into this situation in detail. Worth a listen to understand this crime and its nuance a little better.

Hah, this is too close to the joke that popped into my head:

Sure, we can explain how this works, you just need to subscribe to our educational series on the topic...

It's all about framing the con in a way that gets past the defense mechanisms the OP assumes. Whether this is done with synthetic intimacy, urgency, exclusivity, high-mindedness, etc. depends on the target victim profile.

But, it's always social engineering. The only 100% defense is to assume a deeply untrusting posture that makes social living nearly impossible.

haha, it's getting dystopian isn't it? At some point you end up letting your guard down just to be a human again -- it's all so exhausting.

While I've been an Econ subscriber in the past when magazines were a thing, the podcast didn't con me into subscribing. _this time_ But I enjoyed their free eps all the same.

The Beatles had it right with Eleanor Rigby.

"All the lonely people, where do they all come from? All the lonely people, where do they all belong?"

There are a lot of sad people out there. And some of them are at the nunchucks, bongs, and throwing stars store.

> The thought of giving money to a stranger who I met via a dating app or other social media platform

The thought of telling somebody your real name to somebody online used to be considered a poor decision.

The bar has really moved for what people need for trust.

It is also incomprehensible to most victims, before and even after it happens to them. Many people never report the crime because they're so embarrassed and cannot explain their own behavior. If you talk to them about it they usually won't defend their decisions, they'll say something like "I know it doesn't make sense, I don't understand why I did it and I see now that the scam is blindingly obvious, I don't know what happened".

Desperation and loneliness are often a part of it, and these scams happen over a period of months, so at the critical moment it doesn't feel (emphasis on "feel") like you're talking to a stranger at all. These criminal organizations have done this thousands and thousands of times, they know how to emotionally manipulate someone away from thinking objectively about the situation. They just have to catch someone at a vulnerable moment and get them talking for a day or two, and already they aren't a stranger anymore, they're "a guy I've been talking to", and they just build up the relationship for weeks or months before they even bring up money or investing.

This Economist podcast is pretty good if you want to understand more, even if you don't have a subscription the three free episodes are great: https://www.economist.com/audio/podcasts/scam-inc.

This is also a good blog post about how even someone extremely knowledgeable about technology and fraud can be easily scammed if you just catch them at the right time: https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/05/cyber-dunning-kruger/. It can happen to you too, you are not immune just because these victims seem like morons to you. They seem like morons to themselves too, but it still happened.

Maybe it's trusting a personal connection and word of mouth over mainstream information because of some vague anti-establishment feelings? I also don't know really. I mean, even a small bank CEO fell for one https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/cryptocurrenc...

I've only heard of "pig butchering" scams in the context of people who pose as family/friends of people on social media whom they target with urgent requests for money, e.g.:

> I've been arrested/kidnapped/lost my wallet

the scammers create a flase sense of urgency and exploit the victim's concern for their loved one's well-being.

IMHO, that's not really 'pig butchering', that's another category; FTC calls it 'family emergency scamming'.

To me, pig butchering is a long term process where the victim is convinced that a new contact is a trusted friend, and then the trusted friend needs money for (transportation, investment, living arrangements, etc). The symbolism being that the victim is a pig that is fattened up via building up a relationship, and then butchered via the demand for money.

There is a kind of threshold in most humans where we assume we are dealing with someone who "feels like" they are (real and) in our circle of contacts. Once this threshold is passed, critical thinking as to who this person is/what their motivation is moves to a much lower priority.

I think you are looking at it from the wrong direction. The scammers are calling everyone.

Of those you have met, who would be at risk of falling for such scams? I know about maybe two.

And the combination of being both susceptible and not chronic broke is quite rare. Both those I know about who I guess fall for this stuff are broke.

To be fair, if Troy Hunt, who's made his career in cybersecurity can get scammed, thinking you're too smart to ever fall for a scam is just pure hubris.

If am referring to pig butchering scams, not phising attacks or scams in general.

I would e.g. instantly enter my username and password at work into any prompt that requests and looks as usual since Microsoft request my system password randomly all the time theough webpages. It is not my fault...

By "everyone" I'd say that if any social or comms platform allows DMs you will get messages that say something like like "Hey!" from those scammers. If you reply you will get questions meant to qualify you like "How old are you?" pretty quick and if you pass they'll work you over for months

Young folks on the other hand get hit with

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sextortion

which often ends by suicide in 15-20 minutes.

> This is an earnest request. Please help me understand the mindset of people who fall for pig butchering scams.

Same logic behind AI girlfriends or in general losing yourself to online life. It's a lack meeting your needs offline and scammers/technology willing to fill those needs online.

Please help me to understand the urge to blame pig butchering on pigs rather than on butchers.

If you target 100,000 people, a 0.01% response rate ends up being a lot of money.