Pig Butchering is a scam I have not talked about on this site yet, but I’m getting ready to now as it has been growing quite a bit in the last few years. Pig Butchering is a form of a cryptocurrency scam, but it typically goes further than other cryptocurrency scams since cryptocurrency in general still remains unregulated. Pig Butchering kind of also dabbles into the dating scam realm as well and I will talk about why that is.
Now what is Pig Butchering? Basically, it is when someone lures you into signing up for what is promised to be a legitimate cryptocurrency investing site, such as a crypto exchange and promises lots of returns in a short amount of time. So lets say if you sign up for it, they’ll say to start out with an initial investment of $500. Then they’ll say to check on it in a few days and suddenly your investment skyrockets to $1500. They’ll say to invest more money so you can get even bigger returns.
When you check on it again, it may say you’ve made $10,000 or more and then they want you to put more money in. The problem will then come when you try to take out the “profit” you made from the investment as messages might pop up saying “Unable to process transaction” or to call a number that doesn’t pick up or is disconnected, emails then go unanswered, and the person who told you to sign up for this investing opportunity in the first place suddenly vanishes without a trace. This is what Pig Butchering is. You sign up to a fake cryptocurrency investment site (that might actually mimic a legitimate one), you make an initial investment that skyrockets in a short amount of time (which is actually fake), and they tell you to invest more money. It’s like fattening a pig before its slaughter except the scammer is getting you to put more money in until a point is reached where the scammer takes it all.
I’ll be taking a look at a California woman who lives in the San Francisco area who happened to lose money to this type of scam and how AI actually warned her that it is not legitimate.
Nearly $1 Million Lost To Pig Butchering
This story was posted back in December from a local news station in the San Francisco area and I will post a link to it. It is so heartbreaking to hear how this scam unfolded, but this is exactly how the Pig Butchering scam works, basically like how I described it earlier.
An elderly woman out of San Jose met someone online through a friend on Facebook who to her seemed genuine and wanted to begin a relationship. Over time, the person she talked to seemed like he generally cared about her and asked her about things in her life and stated that he is from Texas though he is of Chinese decent. The chatting between them increased significanly and moved on to an online message service that’s called WhatsApp.
She soon was so trusting of this person that she started calling him “love” and he started using another nice word to describe her. Here’s the thing though, they never met up in person. You should never be fully trusting of someone until you meet them in person and more than once as well.
Now at some point, this person began asking her if she had investments of any kind. She initally told him that she doesn’t have any kind of investments. Later on he would tell her that he’s pretty well off with money and that she could be as well. Eventually he started asking her if she knew anything about investing into crypto. He then said he could give over $15,000 to invest, but she said that it is not necessary and that she has her own money where she can do that.
The next thing that happened is this person (scammer) was able to direct her to wire money to an account online and then get her to sign up and log in to a cryptocurrency investment site/app. She said that she went into the platform and traded that $15,000 that she wired and the platform said she made $24,000. Basically, the platform on the app told her she made a huge profit in just a matter of seconds after that inital trade (MASSIVE RED FLAG!). She was then told to invest more from the person she had talked to online for a long time and that person started promising her that he can make over $1 million for her.
Not long after that, he instructed her to start investing more money. She ended up taking over $100,000 from her IRA account and then put it into the account that he supposedly set up for her. Once she did that, the app showed she made big profits again. Next he said to now put in nearly $500,000. She began questioning of why she needed to put in such a large amount. He then said the goal is reach over $5 million now. Sadly, she wired the exact amount he asked for, again from her IRA account. Needless to say, it seemed the money grew very quickly again in the app.
Believing that she really was making a lot of money from this, she wired the remaining amount of money she had left from her IRA which was tens of thousands of dollars. She did inform him that she no longer had any money left to invest. Do you think he stopped asking her for any more money? If you thought yes, you’re definitely wrong as he pressured her to get even more money by getting loans if necessary. Believe it or not she was able to get a second mortgage to the tune of over $300,000 and she wired it ALL over to him to be used in that app. Needless to say, the crypto account now said she had made millions of dollars.
Sadly, we’ve reached the time that it all falls apart. Realizing that she needed the money now, she tried to withdraw the profits the platform said she made. As soon as she tried to do that, the accout was then frozen and nothing could be withdrawn. The scammer then said he froze it and in order to unfreeze it, over $1 million would need to be sent. He pressured her to borrow more money in order to get that, but she said she can no longer borrow anymore and then he started threatening to take legal action.
She decided to use the AI platform known as ChatGPT and asked it if what she had done was legitimate. Fortunately, the response from it said that this was definitely a scam and she needed to contact authorities or go to the nearest police station.
So what happened to all the money that she wired? It was all transfered to a bank in Malaysia which is where the scammer is truly from and unfortunately, all that money from her IRA and her second mortgage is now completely gone with no way to recover it. She is out of money and now faced with a massive tax bill for withdrawing all her founds out of that IRA. So heartbreaking to hear that her financial life is ruined all by this scammer she was encouraged to talk to online. You can read the entire story here. Have I encountered a Pig Butchering scam as a Bank Teller? I’ll talk about that next.
Have I seen Pig Butchering as a Teller?
The short answer to that is no, meaning that the customers at my branch have not encountered or fallen for a Pig Butchering scam thus far which I am very thankful for. I do also try to educate my customers as much as I can about the increasing amount of scams that are happening out there so that they don’t become victims, but I have shared in the past some scams a few have fallen for.
I do know, however, that at some of the other branches outside my town, mainly in the nearby city, there have been some customers who have fallen for Pig Butchering scams and fallen for them hard. I know one of them refused to believe they were losing money to the scam, but before they knew it, most of their life savings and retirement were gone. Unfortunately, in that type of situation, there is little recourse or anything else that can be done to try and recover that money because they were warned it was a scam and still continued to send money to the scammer.
This is why tellers always need to be vigilant and pay attention to what is going on with a customer’s account. If they suddenly want to withdraw large amounts of money or wire lots of money somewhere, we try to ask as many questions as possible to gauge whether it’s something legitimate or if it’s a scam. I know my manager has stopped a few customers in the past from sending out money via a wire because their answers indicated that they were falling prey to a scam. So what can be done to educate customers about the dangers of Pig Butchering scams? We’ll dive into that next.
Always Be Wary of Who You Meet Online
In this day and age, it is not as easy to trust people, especially people that are met online. In this case, the woman I talked about earlier from that news story ended up meeting this person online through Facebook and continued what she thought was a genuine online relationship, onto an online messaging app.
Keep in mind that I did mention that this was an elderly woman and that is a common age group that tends to fall victim to these scams more than others. I’ve said in a previous post that a lot of the elderly tend to be very lonely and so they go online in the hopes of finding someone that they can connect with. Unfortunately, because they are not careful of where or how they contact someone online, they end up contacting a scammer or the scammer may even search them out.
This is where Pig Butchering also dabbles into the realm of online dating scams. The scammers will try to convince you or someone else that they are in love with you and want to have a genuine and loving relationship. They lie and say they are telling you details about their lives and want to know more details about you. After trust is well established, that’s where they move in and say that there is an “opportunity” to make some great money by investing in cryptocurrency which in the case of that California woman turned out to be completely fake.
Always check in on your loved ones to make sure they haven’t met someone mysterious online and if you can, watch their accounts closely to make sure that no unusual movements of money are taking place. If they suddenly take out loans, or try for a second mortgage on their house or other unusual financial activity, this is a huge red flag they may have fallen for a Pig Butchering scam and it needs to be stopped before they permantenly lose all that money and are brought to financial ruin. One thing I am proud to say is that my parents (though my dad handles all the finances due to my mom’s detoriating memory) have not fallen for these kinds of scams and I continue to educate them on the scams happening today.
Many people like the California woman, who lost her entire IRA to the Pig Butchering scam, continue to become victims to this particular kind of scam. This type of scam typically originates over seas over in Asia such as Malaysia and Thailand. What is shocking about this also, is that the people enacting the scam, are they themselves forced into it against their will. It really is shocking how all this is happening.
If you thought this was bad, stay tuned because I have a Pig Butchering scam that was so shocking, it actually made national news here in the US and happened right in my home state of Kansas! I still can’t wrap my head around this and it happened nearly two years ago. You’ll definitely want to check back for this!