I recently talked about a Pig Butchering scam that a California woman fell for and lost nearly $1 million dollars. I talked about how she fell for this scam because of someone she met online and formed a relationship with who would later on scam her out of all the money from an IRA she had as well as taking money from a second mortgage that she secured. I also posted a link to the original news story that had more details of what happened. You can read more from my post if you haven’t read about it yet.
For those that did read it, you’ll remember that I ended my post talking about a Pig Butchering scam that is so shocking that it made national news here in the US and it happened in my home state of Kansas. Well I’m now going to talk about exactly what that is and if you read my title to this post, you might be wondering if you read that correctly. Yes, a bank did collapse all from a Pig Butchering scam and I will talk more about that now.
Bank CEO Falls Prey To Pig Butchering
This story begins in a small Kansas town (Elkhart) in the southwestern part of the state. Now I mentioned that I live in Kansas, but live in the eastern half of the state near Wichita so this happened a ways away from where I live. The name of the bank was Heartland Tri-State Bank and was one of five banks that failed in the US back in 2023, but the reason for this bank’s failure was far different from the rest.
The former CEO of this bank got involved in a cryptocurrency scheme that was all part of a Pig Butchering scam. This probably sounds very shocking because you might be thinking, how can the CEO of a bank actually fall for this type of scam especially when you’re in charge of trying to keep the bank’s customers safe from just these type of scams? The answer is simple, the scammers knew how to invoke greed and make it seem like he was going to make lots of money in a short amount of time and so when greed takes over, logic takes a backseat to it, because all you can focus on is the money you think you’re going to make or earn from this.
Because of what this Bank CEO did, the institution lost over $47 million dollars and the FDIC had to take over because of this. There were a series of wire transfers over the course of a few months that drained the bank of its money. If you think it couldn’t any worse then that, you’d be wrong. The CEO then had the audacity to ask for funds from a church in town, an investment club, and took money from his own daughter’s account that was meant to be used for her to go to college. All because the scammers convinced him that he was going to make so much money from cryptocurrency and that he needed to keep sending them more money. The more money he sent, the more the scammers kept saying that he would unlock higher and higher returns on the investments. Of course, he never received ANYTHING from this and lost all the money.
The thing is though, this was customer’s money that he used from the bank to feed into this particular scam and so many people who banked there, lost lots of money including most of their retirement money. Because of these actions and how he convinced others outside the bank also to give money into this, he was arrested by Federal Authorities and sentenced to over 24 years in Federal Prison for his actions. According to those in the courtroom, he showed no remorse except a look of shock when he was sentenced.
In my opinion, this has to be one of, if not the most shocking cases of Pig Butchering I’ve ever heard because it involved the head of a financial institution, someone who is trusted at the top, lied about what he was doing, and used his position to get more money to continue to feed this Pig Butchering scam. He stole from customers, people in his community, even his own daughter to feed into this scam, This is a massive reason why scams continue to happen to this day and are getting worse as time goes on. You can read the new story about this CEO by clicking here. Pig Butchering is one of the worst forms of scams out there and I’ll talk about why next.
Emotion and Trust Is Why It Works
I’m not sure how this former CEO encountered these paticular Pig Butchering scammers, but one thing is clear. He let greed and emotion dictate his actions which led him to Federal prison. This is generally what scammers are hoping for. They don’t want you to stop and think, they want you to act on emotion and in this case, greed came in to play here.
The scammers were able to convince him that he was going to earn lots of money from cryptocurrency and that he had to keep feeding in more money to get even more profts. They used a fake program or application that made him believe he was truly earning lots and lots of money. The trick here is, if you can see something that can prove to you that you are making money, your brain will think that it is true, that you really are making money and that you have to continue on to make even more.
In this case, the scammers were able to get into contact with someone of power, financial power at that, the CEO of a bank and hit the ultimate payload. The most shocking part of it all is that he refused to believe he was being scammed and stole from others without any remorse of what he was doing. The scammers basically got him to do the money stealing for them. This is exactly why he went to prison because he didn’t use his own money though it may have started that way. He soon moved on to the money from the bank, which was the customers money, and then others out in the community.
This is why Pig Butchering works so well. It’s able to play on greed, which is someone wanting to get more and more of something. In this case, scammers are able to convince a person that they are really earning a lot of money in a very short period of time and so they continue to tell you to invest even more money to get even bigger profits. They typically use cryptocurrency as the investment since it remains unregulated at this time.
If something seems to good to be true, that usually means it is and you’re not going to make quick money like that from cryptocurrency as it’s a longer term game like more traditional investments such as stocks. Always take a moment when someone promises quick money in a short amount of time and think what will happen if you invest this money and are never able to get it back. This is how you will avoid falling into a Pig Butchering scam.