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Blog Internet Security What are Pig Butchering Scams and How Do They Work?

WHAT ARE PIG BUTCHERING SCAMS AND HOW DO THEY WORK?

McAfee

Mar 08, 2024

13 MIN READ

“Jessica” cost him one million dollars.

In an account to Forbes, one man described how he met “Jessica” online.i
Readily, they formed a friendship. Turns out, “Jessica” was a great listener,
particularly as he talked about the tough times he was going through. Through
chats on WhatsApp, he shared the struggles of supporting his family and rapidly
ailing father.

The story telegraphs itself. Yes, “Jessica” was a scammer. Yet this scam put a
new twist on an old con game. The man fell victim to a pig butchering scam — a
scam that weaves together long strings of messages, cryptocurrency, and bogus
investment opportunities.

Many victims lose everything.

“Jessica’s” victim broke down the scam, how it worked, and how he got roped in.
It began with an introductory text in October that spun into a WhatsApp
transcript spanning 271,000 words. Throughout, he shared his family and
financial struggles.

Then, “Jessica” offered hope. Investments that would turn a fast buck.

“Jessica” walked him through several transactions on an app he was told to
download. Small investments at first, yet increasingly larger. “Jessica” needed
him to invest more and more, despite his reservations. Yet his balance grew and
grew each time he followed her explicit directions.

Then, the trap sprung. Twice. In November, he logged into the app and found a
negative balance close to half a million dollars. “Jessica” reassured him that
he could get it back, and then some. “Jessica” encouraged him to borrow. He did.
From his bank and a childhood friend.

Soon, he was back up to nearly $2 million. Or so he thought. In December, he
logged into the app once again and found a negative balance of $1 million. His
savings and borrowed money alike disappeared — straight into the hands of
scammers. All the while, they manipulated the app with a plug-in that fabricated
financial results. His whopping gains were actually massive losses.

He’s far from the only victim of pig butchering. Last year, we brought you the
story of “Leslie,” a retired woman who fell victim to a different form of the
same scam. A so-called friend she met online directed her to invest her
retirement funds for even more returns. Soon, a lonely yet otherwise sharp
retiree found herself down $100,000.

Victims like these find themselves among the thousands of people who fall for
pig butchering scams each year. The problem is global in scope, costing billions
of dollars each year. Yet as pig butchering represents a new type of scam, it
uses some age-old tricks to separate people from their money.

With that, pig butchering scams are preventable. Awareness plays a major role,
along with several other steps people can take to keep it from happening to
them.

WHAT’S A PIG BUTCHERING SCAM?

It’s a con game with a vivid name. Just as a livestock farm raises pork for
profit, scammers foster long-term relationships with their victims for profit.
The scammers start by taking small sums of money, which increase over time,
until the victim finally gets “fattened up” and “butchered” for one final
whopping sum. The term appears to have origins in the Chinese phrase zhu zai,
meaning “to slaughter a pig.”

What sets pig butchering scams apart from romance scams, elder scams, and other
con games is cryptocurrency. Scammers lure their victims into investing in
ventures, seemingly profitable ones because the scammers appear to make the same
investments themselves. With great success. Victims then mirror those
investments, yet the “market” is rigged. With phony sites and apps, the
scammers point to big gains — which are all mocked up on the screen. Instead,
the money goes straight to them.

The scam follows a script, one that “Jessica” played out to the letter. You can
see the steps.

It starts out innocently enough. A text on the phone, a note on a messaging app,
or a direct message on social media comes to the victim from out of the blue.
It’s from someone they don’t know, and they might ask a simple question, like …

“Is this John? We shared a tee time at the course last week and I have that
extra club I said I’d give you.”

“Hi, Sally. It’s me. Sorry I can’t make lunch today. Can we reschedule?”

Or even as simple as …

“Hey.”

These “wrong number” texts and messages are anything but unintended. In some
cases, victims get randomly picked. Blasts of texts and messages get sent to
broad audiences, all in the hope that a handful of potential victims will
reply.

Yet, by and large, victims get carefully selected. And researched. The scammers
work from a dossier of info gathered on the victim, full of tidbits harvested
from the victim’s online info and social media profiles. Who puts together those
dossiers? Often, it’s a large, organized crime operation. The scammer behind the
messages is only one part of a much larger scamming machine, which we’ll cover
in a bit.

With that intel in hand, the scammers have their opening.

After an introduction, the scammer kicks off a conversation. Over time, the
conversations get personal. And those personal touches have a way of luring
people in. Scammers pose as another person, such as “Jessica,” sprinkle things
into the conversation like similar interests or family backgrounds. Anything
that’s just enough to intrigue the victim and keep them chatting.

From there, scammers play a long con game, building trust with their victims
over time. Things tend to get increasingly personal. The scammer pumps the
victim for more and more news of their life. What they’re worried about. What
dreams they have. And in cases where the scam takes a romantic turn, how they’ll
build a life together.

Then, money comes into play.

With a solid read on their victims and their lives, scammers drop hints about
investment opportunities with big returns. The scammer rarely takes the money
themselves. In fact, they almost always insist that the victim handles the money
themselves. Instead, scammers lure their victims into using bogus apps that look
like they support a legitimate trading platform. Yet they’re not. These apps act
as a direct line to the scamming operation that the scammer’s working for. The
money goes right into their pocket.

Meanwhile, victims see something else entirely. Scammers give them step-by-step
instructions that cover what to invest, where, and how to conduct transactions
with cryptocurrency. The sums start small. First $5,000 or $10,000. The victim
checks in with their new investment “app” and sees a great gain. The process
repeats, as the sums get proverbially fatter and fatter.

Finally, the truth comes out. Hard reality strikes when victims try to transfer
their cryptocurrency out of their app. They can’t. There’s nothing there. The
scammers manipulated the info on that bogus app. All the investments, all the
transaction history, and all the earnings — fake.

And because the scammers did their dirty work in cryptocurrency, that money is
gone. Practically untraceable and practically impossible to get back.

Clearly, “Jessica” followed this scam to the letter. However, it’s highly likely
“Jessica” didn’t work alone.

PIG BUTCHERING SCAMS AND ORGANIZED CRIME.

Organized crime props up the vast majority of pig butchering scams.

The United States FBI points to several large-scale pig butchering operations,
centered mostly in Southeast Asia.ii Other findings point to operations in
Nigeria, where thousands of “Yahoo Boys” fire off romantic messages in their
form of a pig butchering ring.iii

In another account, a Reuters Special Report traced $9 million to an account
registered to a well-connected representative of a Chinese trade group in
Thailand — which hinted at yet broader collusion and fraud.

These are big-time scams, backed by big-time operations. They run like them
too.

They have dev and design teams that create legit-looking finance apps. They have
even further trappings of a large, legitimate company, including support,
customer service, accounting, and the like to manage transactions. Then they
have their front-line operatives, the people doing the texting and messaging.

However, many of these front-line scammers do it against their will.

An even darker aspect of pig butchering scams reveals itself when you discover
who does the actual dirty work. As reported by the FBI, these front-line
scammers are often human trafficking victims:

Criminal actors target victims, primarily in Asia, in employment fraud schemes
by posting false job advertisements on social media and online employment sites.
The schemes cover a wide range of opportunities, to include tech support, call
center customer service, and beauty salon technicians.

Job seekers are offered competitive salaries, lucrative benefits, paid travel
expenses as well as room and board. Often throughout the process, the location
for the position is shifted from the advertised location. Upon job seekers’
arrival in the foreign country, criminal actors use multiple means to coerce
them to commit cryptocurrency investment schemes, such as confiscation of
passports and travel documents, threat of violence, and use of violence.iv

The cruel fact of pig butchering scams is this: victims victimize victims.

Meanwhile, organized crime operations get rich. One piece of academic research
traced $75.3 billion to one suspected pig butchering network alone between 2020
and 2024.v

In the U.S., the FBI points to $2.57 billion in cryptocurrency and pig
butchering fraud reports in 2022.vi As always with such figures, many losses go
unreported. That figure climbs much higher. Yet higher still when it accounts
for victims worldwide.

HOW TO PREVENT PIG BUTCHERING ATTACKS.

Effective pig butchering requires that dossier we talked about before. A profile
of the victim that includes personal details siphoned from online sources. One
move that can lower your risk of becoming a target involves trimming down your
presence online.

Steps include …

Make your social media more private. Our new McAfee Social Privacy
Manager personalizes your privacy based on your preferences. It does the heavy
lifting by adjusting more than 100 privacy settings across your social media
accounts in only a few clicks. This makes sure that your personal info is only
visible to the people you want to share it with. It also keeps it out of search
engines where the public can see it. Including scammers.

Watch what you post on public forums. As with social media, scammers harvest
info from online forums dedicated to sports, hobbies, interests, and the like.
If possible, use a screen name on these sites so that your profile doesn’t
immediately identify you. Likewise, keep your personal details to yourself. When
posted on a public forum, it becomes a matter of public record. Anyone,
including scammers, can look it up.

Remove your info from data brokers that sell it. McAfee Personal Data
Cleanup helps you remove your personal info from many of the riskiest data
broker sites out there. Running it regularly can keep your name and
info off these sites, even as data brokers collect and post new info. Depending
on your plan, it can send requests to remove your data automatically.

Delete your old accounts. Yet another source of personal info comes from data
breaches. Scammers use this info as well to complete a sharper picture of their
potential victims. With that, many internet users can have over 350 online
accounts, many of which they might not know are still active. McAfee Online
Account Cleanup can help you delete them. It runs monthly scans to find your
online accounts and shows you their risk level. From there, you can decide which
to delete, protecting your personal info from data breaches and your overall
privacy as a result.

HOW TO STOP A PIG BUTCHERING ATTACK.

Whether you think you’re a target or think you know someone who might be, you
can take immediate steps to stop a pig butchering attack. It begins with
awareness. Simply by reading this blog article, you’ve gained an understanding
of what these attacks are and how they work. Not to mention how costly they can
be.

If you think something sketchy is going on, take the following steps:

Ignore it.

It’s that simple. The fact that a lot of these scams start over WhatsApp and
text messages means that the scammer either got your phone number online or they
targeted your number randomly. In either case, they count on your response. And
continued responses. In many cases, the initial contact is made by one person
and viable candidates are passed on to more seasoned scammers. Bottom line:
don’t interact with people you don’t know. No need to reply with “Sorry, wrong
number” or anything like that. Ignore these messages and move on.

When a stranger you’ve just met online brings up money, consider it a scam.

Money talk is an immediate sign of a scam. The moment a person you’ve never met
and got to know face to face asks for money, put an end to the conversation.
Whether they ask for money, bank transfers, cryptocurrency, money orders, or
gift cards, say no. And with pig butchering scams, never follow their directions
for making a specific investment with specific tools. Doing so only funnels
money into the scamming operation’s coffers.

End the conversation.

You might say no, and the scammer might back off — only to bring up the topic
again later. This is a sign to end the conversation. That persistence is a sure
sign of a scam. Recognize that this might be far easier said than done, as the
saying goes. Scammers horn their way into the lives of their victims. A budding
friendship or romance might be at stake. That’s what the scammers want you to
think. They play off emotions. Hard as it is, end the relationship.

Talk with trusted friends or family members. And look out for them too.

Sometimes it takes an extra set of eyes to spot a scammer. Conversations with
scammers won’t always add up. By talking about the people you meet online with
someone you trust can help you see when it doesn’t. Given the way that scammers
pull all kinds of strings on their victims, conversation — even to the point of
showing messages to a friend — can help clear up any clouded judgment.

WITH ANYONE YOU MEET ONLINE, TAKE THINGS SLOWLY.

Alarming as pig butchering stories sound, not every new person you meet online
is out to get you. For every “Jessica” out there, you’ll find far more genuine
people who really do want to strike up a friendship with you. Yet as these scams
increase, our guard must go up as well.

It’s always been good advice to take a relationship slowly online. Scammers have
long taken advantage of people who rush to provide personal details and hand
over their trust. As with any confidence scam, look for people who want to have
a video call with you, meet in person in a public place, or otherwise give you
the chance to see that they’re a genuine person. And not a “Jessica.”

Know those signs of a scam when you see them. And if they rear their head, act
on them.

[i]
https://www.forbes.com/sites/cyrusfarivar/2022/09/09/pig-butchering-crypto-super-scam/?sh=7417db61ec8e

[ii] https://www.ic3.gov/Media/Y2023/PSA230522

[iii] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4742235

[iv] https://www.ic3.gov/Media/Y2023/PSA230522

[v] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4742235

[vi] https://www.ic3.gov/Media/PDF/AnnualReport/2022_IC3Report.pdf

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