A qualitative analysis of pig-butchering scams
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
"The bond phase showed that scammers had tremendous patience; this phase lasted anywhere from 3 to 11 months before the scammer moved on to the next stage of the scam."
"When I spoke to her on a video call, it was the same person from the photos. She was even wearing the dress that matched a photo she had sent earlier in the day."
“She did not push me to invest, or ask for money. She seemed genuinely interested in me and we spoke for nearly 6 months before she even brought up investments; it all seemed so real and organic."
"It seemed legitimate, there was no reason to think that it could be fake – if she could be a scammer, so could any of my actual friends."
"[the site] was similar to what you would expect on an investment portfolio website; in fact, the prices of stocks and bitcoin also matched..."
"According to recent research [23], these scams have resulted in losses of nearly 75 billion dollars since 2020."
The conventional wisdom is to wait 2 years to marry someone, and 1 year at the absolute bare minimum if you are old or at the edge of the fertility window or in some extenuating circumstance.
This seems somewhat confirmed by the fact it outlives the measure of these long-running scams. Perhaps the conventional wisdom is correct.
aka the honeymoon phase. wait until the dopamine hits stop and then see where you stand with that marriage...
presumably this is where the name comes from, no?
you spend a year fattening the pig, before you butcher it, hence pig butchering schemes.
Someone gullible, like a reality show contestant (90 Day Fiancé, Bachelor, etc). A person who can “fall in love” immediately and will do whatever to prove their affection because they believe they have limited alternatives.
A year investment…that is a meaningful (platonic or romantic) time for a relationship, where some sense of obligation/pity to the scammer could develop.
Imagine: you meet someone online. You talk for a while, and decide to meet up for dinner. They say nothing, but upon googling them (for safety, of course) you discover they're the son of a billionaire - a weapons or diamonds magnate or something to that effect.
Anyways, the day of the date comes around and a brand new Rolls Royce Phantom comes to pick you up, then drops you off at a private jet. You go to one of the highest end restaurants in the continent. You're experiencing a probably $20,000 night between tips, booze, food, and entertainment. You're showered in expensive gifts over weeks and weeks - honestly, where is all this money coming from, if not his pocket? He's a billionaire! You see him checking into hotels all around Europe, but you mention you miss him so he flies in just to get coffee with you for an hour. He's clearly head-over-heels for you.
tl;dr he has a scheme where he's got some photos of his guard roughed up, and a little blood on the "swindler", which aren't shown until the woman is deeply infatuated with him. It's a very urgent problem - some business competitors are out to get him, and they're tracking his cards. Can you please take out a loan for $50,000 and send it? It's okay if the bank won't normally approve that - I'll "employ you" and send over a paystub showing you make over $90,000/month! That loan gets approved instantly. You take out a few more because you want your boyfriend of 6 months to survive of course.
You're simply funding his night out with his next target. It's a rotating scam. Pretty insane to me.
If any of the scam farm worker failed they will get physical punishment or even capital punishment...
It’s a horrific and brutal scenario that pits victims against victims. In many ways, the targets have less to lose than the victims targeting them.
Still, it’s a testament to the level of emotional damage that these scams must levy on their actual victims.
Fortunately, there are plenty of worthy partners in the world, even if there are lots of ones that are a waste of time and resources.
Which isn't that far from the truth, eh.
Tupperware and Amway might be legit MLMs (there is a product attached, after all), but there are sooo many "side hustles" preying particularly on women that are outright scams - and inevitably the victims of these lose almost all of their friends and even family because they're all sick sooner or later from them constantly attempting to shill whatever supplements, insurances, shitcoins or kitchen gadgets they're currently dealing. It's truly heartbreaking to see people you know fall for that bullshit and get sucked into the vortex with no way of pulling them out.
Wow, this really makes me think. You see, I have this president that ...
The persons profile was strangely convincing, it was hyper-local to my neighborhood growing up. This account had existed for something like 4 or 5 years and had posts going back at least a few. It was almost convincing. The tell was just that their posts were too targeted, all "Hey, local event is going on" "Hey, local politics thing" with no other thoughts expressed. Their replies section was just littered with replies to people about how things were "awesome" or "great news" without any critique or thought.
The whole thing was very unsettling. It was the first scam where I really felt like it would have been easy to fall for with a standard amount of critical thinking. If I had a hazier recollection of my childhood I might have.
I can't imagine this bot was made specifically for me, I'm not that important, but certainly people in my area. I genuinely wonder if this is part of some larger network of hyper-local bots. I don't look forward to the attacks to come as AI progresses.
These are easy to fabricate and maintain, and consist of a social network of individuals who are either loosely connected or constantly changing.
They use these accounts to collect data about key people, events, meet-ups and news events.They have developed a full lifecycle for these accounts. Creation, enrichment, data collection, then consumption and end of life when they are used for scams.
They are playing the long game.
[1] https://pikabu.ru/story/temu_neponyatnyiy_razvod_11302944
The best thing is just to ignore completely. If you engage at all, you risk worsening their situation by wasting their time, while if you do engage you might be saving someone else at their expense…. It’s lose/lose to engage in any way.
I’ve settled on just saying, hey, I’m sorry that they are in the situation they are in, and I hope they find the strength to make it out someday. That makes it clear that there is nothing to be gained while offering a tiny bit of hope and empathy, which I’m sure is in short supply.
I don't understand what you are arguing for here? That they need to be allowed to scam someone else to avoid worsening their situation?
I'd say wasting their time is the best solution. It avoids giving the bosses info on what approaches works with who and helps makes runnning these sorts of operations uneconomical.
There are two levels of scammers here. One is the low level scammer that is directly interfacing with you. In these situations they are also victims that are being held by violence. Simply put if bad things happen to these people or not the scam will remain as this level is rather cheap.
The bosses will observe from a higher level based on the successful feedback and direct their efforts there, much like a spammer that calculates the return on millions and millions of sent emails.
To catch the bosses we need nation state/global level enforcement against said people. The problem is they quite often pay their local governments handsomely to protect against them.
The less efficient you can make the process, the less you make it attractive to put resources into scaling it. Focus on making them generate the types of proof that aren't as easy to fabricate or at least give them as little information about why their initial approach failed as possible by playing along for a while after you catch on so they can't figure out how they got caught.
While what you are saying is theoretically effective, it assumes that enough people will do this to impact the business model… they won’t. So all you will accomplish is increasing human misery of trafficked slaves or their loved ones, while accomplishing nothing besides feeling a sense of retribution.
This problem requires state-level intervention, but it is mostly getting state level support.
The incentive alignment on this is not going to allow improvement. Perhaps if client nations imposed sanctions on nations that allowed this kind of industry, that could be changed.
You seem to be asserting that we should let them scam someone else. If you think that funding the scammers to protect their vicitm workers is moral then you should do it yourself rather than pawning the costs off on someone less aware who might unintentionally feed the scammers money they can't afford to lose.
The kind of people that run criminal organisations generally don’t give credit for trying. It’s strictly numbers.
Hence my argument that wasting the scammers' resources is the moral choice. If you help the bosses identify bad prospects (even if just yourself), then you make the activity more profitable and incentivize it.
Any tips would be appreciated. Locking down phone hasn’t really helped, and finances are already segregated to hopefully avoid giving away total life savings.
I'm not claiming a trust is a bad idea, only that you need to take care picking the trustees. And be sure there's an "out" if you and the trustees fall out.
The interviews with the victims are heartbreaking. There's one dad/daughter pair where the dad has lost almost literally everything, is on camera being interviewed about everything that happened, and is still flipping between "it was a total scam" and "maybe if I just send them another fee payment I can get at least some of my money back" and the daughter saying, "No, dad! It's a scam, and you are not sending them anymore money!"
It is not about education or IQ level, but rather if cons target someone currently vulnerable. Note: the 7 spear-phishers on YC are rather obvious in an attempt to avoid IT people. =3
This. I am a senior software dev, living in Switzerland. Few years ago there was an issue with my residence permit renewal, process that should have taken few weeks took more than a year. No way to contact that Geneva immigration office, and you can't visit them personally, emails ignored. Official phone contact is just a single phone that often rang few times and then dropped the call, 19 out of 20 times. Few times it was picked up clearly annoyed and couldn't-be-bothered woman who just told me to wait, no further info. My boss applied for same after me, got the papers in 3 weeks.
Me and my kids (who have same permit as me) were basically living in Switzerland semi-illegally, while sporting high paying permanent banking job and wife is a doctor.
One day a call came which introduced themselves as Swiss police, a very elaborate scheme, stating that my ID was used in fraud and I am being investigated. They caught me in this period of fear of getting deported, ruining efforts of past 15 years and my whole family lives. I followed through, they were very clever, pulled just the right strings.
But then came the moment when all this could be solved if I just went to the shop and bought... Apple gift card. LOL. But man I felt extremely vulnerable and under tremendous stress during those few hours.
My country has AML law, but all the time people are tricked into wiring money to scammer for a house or something else because they take wire details by spoofed e-mail or a received phone call.
The scammers are very clever, they will monitor e-mail from a title company or some other company with large invoices, then trick you at the exact moment you are making a legitimate transaction to a legitimate institution. Because you did not make a mistake sending the wire, nor did the bank, only sent it to exactly the wrong person, once the wire gets forwarded on out of country you're often SOL.
The day my mother asked to receive her pension, she received calls from scammers, even though she had been relatively spared until then. I have had similar feedback from people who have to call for help with mental health, depression or addiction issues.
These people have no scruples and are willing to pay others without much hesitation.
And crypto, needless to say, enables these pig butchering scams (and others). The Economist estimates the scam industry to rake in about $500 bn a year.
You can google the many data breaches of such data. Great for scams.
These are mostly cryptocurrency investment scams. More crypto regulation would help, but the so-called crypto industry doesn't want to see that happen because their product has no other utility than enabling this stuff.
Something very eye opening is know precisely who L Ron Hubbard is, what kind of person he was, and nonetheless seeing a real religion building up around him made me realise that all of the major religions must have started similarly.
Watching Trump's followers turning MAGA into a new political religion gives me the same heavy feeling of dismay.
People need to segment into belief groups, and politics is the new church.
Only this church is a popularity game to decide who controls a vast federal standing domestic army of armed police, as well as an outward projecting armed forces. The scary thing is that everyone seems to believe their church is correct, and willing to employ the machine of violence to enforce it.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Cross-Purposes-Christianitys-Bargain-...
My current feeling is that there's nothing more dangerous than "Man's Search for Meaning" and if people can't find meaning in the little things they do every day that search for meaning inevitably leads to trouble.
[1] often the ones who actually go to church are these kind of people: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:dx3ay6rcqediw2gbhb4bp76l/po...
I don't know about the exact causality but in terms of chronology they started raising prices rapidly around the time Snow White broke eventually putting the auditing route out of reach for a lot of people.
Under David Miscavige the church made a transition to soliciting donations for "Ideal Orgs" [2] and to the IAS in general. The model now seems to be to get large donations from a few whales and if there is a role for less well heeled members it is to have extras to populate the scene and look as if there was a broad-based movement to contribute to.
One interpretation is that social inequality has increased and that the plain ordinary Joe doesn't have enough money to be worth soliciting and if you wanted to build a cult today it would be oriented 100% around finding people in the intersection of rich and vulnerable. Sometimes I think 'rationalism' is all about that -- there's no point in scooping up aimless students at airports in 2025 and making them live in communal houses making money selling candles when you could make a movement which is all about getting the rich to donate money, e.g. "effective altruism". You don't want people's time anymore, it just isn't worth anything.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Snow_White
[2] https://tonyortega.org/2021/12/23/insider-how-scientologys-i...
> The term comes from fraudsters referring to their victims as 'pigs' – those they gradually 'fatten up' by luring them into a fake romance or friendship before 'butchering' them by convincing them to invest, often in fake cryptocurrency schemes.
Source: https://www.interpol.int/en/News-and-Events/News/2024/INTERP...
I always answer on the positive, it is very fun to see them try to ask a question that will make me answer 'no that's not me' so they can continue on the next part. Can recommend.
(I knew it wasn't genuine as I'm still paying for my daughter's cellphone)
Anyway, I played a long for a bit but finally told them that I knew it wasn't genuine as my daughter is not that polite when she asks for money.
It was called the "ore ore" (pronounced "o-ray o-ray") scam because they would typically use the word "ore" for "I", a familiar and often brusque or aggressive form of the first person singular.
The pig-butchers had some type of bot/AI/wage slaves for the backend and they used Zendesk for the frontend. I am not happy that Zendesk is being used to basically rob people and I am minded to write up the whole sorry saga here just to inspire developers to steer their companies away from the Zendesk product. They didn't shoot my dad, they just sold the gun.
It's mostly run by Chinese. (But they scam Chinese too. It originated as scamming older single Chinese ladies, actually.)
This comment suggests that the main target would be non-Chinese, with some incidental Chinese targets/victims. I think the reality is the opposite, and that the primary targets are Chinese, with some incidental Western victims, for the simple reason that both the perpetrators and the (involutary) scam workers are largely far more fluent in Chinese and knowlegable about Chinese financial systems, culture, etc.
Both in mainland China and other countries with large ethnic Chinese populations, there is quite some awareness and media information these issues, e.g.:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_More_Bets
https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/southeast-asia/article/323544...
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/08/30/1078663/pig-butc...
p.s.: From casual conversations with European friends, there are probably smaller scale "native" versions of such scams in many Western countries. Large scam centers with imprissoned workers might be somewhat specific to Chinese/Cambodia.
First, China has vigorously cracked down on crypto, and secondly, it has engaged in large scale information campaigns and PSA warning about these scams.
The people trapped in the scam centres are often English speakers, such as from the Philippines, India, Hong Kong, anglophone African countries, etc., targeting Western countries, or nationals of the target countries, e.g. Thailand or Vietnam.
The Chinese gangsters, like Russian hackers, now prefer to target foreigners.
If you want to know more, I can recommend the usual books about crypto, the podcast and article series on Scam Inc by The Economist, and Martin Purbrink’s substack.
https://asiacrimecentury.substack.com/
https://asiacrimecentury.substack.com/p/scam-inc-explaining-...
https://asiacrimecentury.substack.com/p/betting-on-chaos-the...
It's not my imagination, these scam centeres in Myanmar definitely exist and kidnap and scam people, I guess they also moved to other countries now though.
Amazing how much infrastructure is built up to support these operations.
https://www.npr.org/2025/05/23/1253043749/pig-butchering-sca...
A lot of people actually are scammers - and this is socially accepted. What is the difference between the "everyday scams" and the scams from this article is rather the scope.
Thus, to make people scam-resistant, you have to make them insanely distrusting about everybody in society (or to express it more directly: make the people paranoid and near-schizophrenic), including the government, the politicians etc.
Since school serves an agenda, this is of course not done.
There is an old saying: "You can't scam an honest man." I think a lot of people misunderstand this; it is not that being honest somehow lets you just know when you're being scammed. Indeed the natural "surely they'd be even more vulnerable" probably has some truth to it in some sense.
What it means is that the vast bulk of scams involve convincing the mark that they are dishonestly pulling off a scam. You pay $400 and you're going to get $millions. She misidentified you as someone else but hey you're just so amazingly charismatic that she's into you anyhow, and if you just pour a few more hundreds in she's totally going to let you sleep with her. You know you never entered that lottery, but hey, if they're going to make a mistake and say you won who are you to argue, right?
Not everything fits into this; one classic that affects businesses more than individuals is Ye Olde Just Issue An Invoice And Hope They Pay It. There are also some scams around posing with varying degrees of fidelity as a specific individual you know, such as by hacking their emails and sending this out as them, although in many cases that's still just a delivery mechanism for a scam based on convincing the mark they're going to pull a scam.
A solution that will make you highly resistant to scams, though as I am saying outright, not immune, is to realize that you will not get anything for free, to refuse to participate, to be aggressively honest even if it seems to hurt you. Perhaps ironically, or perhaps counter to your intuition, in the modern world, such aggressive honesty will on the net benefit you by protecting you from these scams. The same ethics that make you give $5 back to the cashier that they gave you in extra change will save you hundreds of thousands in a pig butchering scam.
In the modern era it probably is getting more important to verify identities even of people you know, which is a new and developing angle.
Just blocked anyone I didn't know after that and after 3-4 numbers it stopped forever.
it usually IS
"If it sounds too good to be true, it usually isn't (true)"
vs
"If it sounds too good to be true, it usually is (too good to be true)"
The scammers worked with additional people who met them in the real world.
Someone else's elderly father wasn't so lucky: they kept sending all their life savings to the scammers, until the wife divorced him and the family suffered so much.
I know of a building housing one of these. Obviously they pay the local police and have cover so just filing a complaint or whatever is not an option.
There is a more recent conflict over this issue in Cambodia.
I'm thinking more targeted interventions. International organizations and so on.
Failing that, maybe accidentally short the xformer supplying the building...
The question is are there any effective interventions, short of war (which, happened), given that.
And I thought - "these are scams?" But hey, everything is possible.
And then got to the comments and learned a few things :) The article is very good and the comments as well.
Pig butchering and related crypto scams are an enormous problem. Latest estimates are that the cyber scam industry revenues exceed the illegal drug trade. There are so many victims, both cyber trafficking victims promised great jobs then forced to perpetrate the scams, as well as victims handing over huge sums. Both suffer not only financial loss, but psychological damage.
Lastly, this threatens to destabilize whole countries - as the narcos screwed up Colombia and Mexico, so these scammers are screwing up the Philippines, Cambodia, Myanmar etc.
Again, that such a massive problem is so little known is in itself scandalous.
I posted about it here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45037474
Their "relationship" developed over about 1 yr, and which point they sent ~£30k to temporarily cover a cashflow shortfall in their scammer's apparently legitimate business.
This was quickly detected by their spouse, who was obviously livid.
However..... not only did they transfer these funds to some limbo, and had received extremely clear advice that they had been scammed, they did the same thing with another ~£30k about a month later.
The funds so transferred went to some account in China.
The repetition of this "aberrant" behavior contributed to the divorce of my relative and their spouse.
In later conversations with the victim, who did eventually realize that they had been scammed, I attempted to reassure them by saying that these scammers are very skilled, and that they were innocent in the whole affair. It was small consolation, though.
Who is working on AI agents startup to automate this? /s