Finding love online is not a shocking thing anymore—assuming you’re making a meaningful connection with, you know, a person and not a scammer. Or, worse, an organized group of scammers who are looking to build trust with an individual to get as much money as possible. One particularly heinous investment scam involving cryptocurrency also comes with its own not-so romantic nickname: “pig butchering.”
A study from the University of Texas at Austin has estimated that these kinds of bad actors have collected more than $75 billion from victims worldwide between January 2020 and February 2024. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, meanwhile, found that cryptocurrency scams cost US victims $5.6 billion in 2023 alone.
Jorij Abraham, managing director at the Global Anti-Scam Alliance (GASA), said that he often tries to steer away from the phrase because, “We’re really talking about victims who are really hurt in two terrible ways.”
Abraham continued: “They lose money, but they really lose the trust in people because they have built up a relationship with a person, sometimes over years, they love or they trust, who they see as their best friend, and then it proves that their best friend is not their friend at all, but somebody who really knows to get…everything.”
In the worst incidents, some victims have even died by suicide. In June 2024, CNN reported a man taking his life after being victimized by a pig-butchering scheme, and noted that he’s not the only one.
How scammers take everything. The bad actors, after building some kind of relationship with a victim, will often offer advice on investing in cryptocurrency and testify that they used the same means to afford a wealthy lifestyle.
Victims, after investing on what looks like a credible platform, will try to take out money from their investment only to learn that there are more barriers to their money, like an online validation fee or a global tax, according to founder and president of Operation Shamrock (an advocacy group that aims to educate, mobilize, and disrupt cyber scams) Erin West.
“It’s a very genius operation, because the victim is led to believe they’re helping themselves,” West said. “Another narrative that you frequently see in the media is the people gave this money away or they’ll say, ‘Don’t send money to someone you don’t know.’ That’s not what’s happening here at all, they think that they are investing their money for their own benefit.”
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Abraham agreed with the scam’s sophistication, but noted seeing some victims being able to take out some money, “They get enthusiastic, and they really believe.”
The scammer continues to push the victim, sometimes telling them that they have to invest imminently before a market boom, to try and lure them to invest everything they have in the scheme.
Once the scam is revealed, victims can be contacted by someone posing as law enforcement. Instead, it’s the scammers reaching out again to ask the victim to pay fake fees, according to Abraham.
“They’re scamming the same person over and over again until they know for sure that there’s no more money to be gotten,” Abraham said.
Who are you, really? Carole House, a board member of Operation Shamrock and a former National Security Council official, told IT Brew the scheme goes after vulnerable individuals, specifically trying to build trust through a relationship, where that be platonic or romantic.
“It’s not always romantically bound, but it’s a really common mechanism for how that trust development really goes over time,” House said.
In 2023, the World Health Organization declared loneliness as an urgent health threat, which West said is a variable of the pig-butchering crisis happening globally.
“I think there’s a narrative that plays in the media of, these are old people, these are old people, these are vulnerable people. But the fact is, there are people who are interested in having a relationship,” he said.
Scammers, according to West, “will build a relationship with you that is unlike anything you’ve ever had in your life before, because this person will target in on the things that make you you, and the things that you need. They will fill those gaps and people will say, ‘I lost a lot of money, but honestly, that was the best relationship I ever had.’”