Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Scammers fatten victims for slaughter
How the romance builds
The name comes from the scammers themselves: the victim is the pig, fattened for slaughter. It begins with a cold text, such as a complaint that the recipient never waited at the restaurant or a question about whether they were the person seen on the street today. Anyone who replies to correct the mistake gets a photo of a beautiful woman and a friendship that grows into flirtation and then romance.
The persona is usually a wealthy, single, attractive woman, and the courtship can run for weeks, months, or more than a year, until the victim is sometimes completely emotionally dependent. Then she brings up that if the relationship is going to continue, it would be good if the victim were wealthy too, and she introduces an investment platform where a few thousand, tens of thousands, or a few hundred thousand dollars can make them rich like her.
The crypto trap
Victims are walked into converting their money to cryptocurrency, often Tether, a stablecoin that holds its value and moves across borders easily. The platform shows their balance doubling and tripling. When they try to withdraw, the scammer demands another $10,000 or $100,000 first. Only after sending everything do they realize the relationship was an illusion and that they are not just broke but in debt.
The scale of it
Pig butchering is the most profitable cybercrime in history, taking tens of billions of dollars a year, and it is run from scam compounds across Southeast Asia. The nets are cast wide. The targets are often lonely, sometimes elderly men with retirement savings, though some victims lose only a few thousand dollars. One group of around 30 scammers in a Laos compound earned about $2.2 million over three months, and there are dozens of such compounds in Laos, with many more in Cambodia and Myanmar.
Why do scammers want victims to use Tether?
Crypto transfers cannot be reversed by a bank the way a card payment can, and they cross borders in minutes. Tether is a stablecoin designed to trade at one US dollar, so a victim's balance does not swing in value while the scammer waits. Victims typically buy the coin on a regular exchange and send it to a wallet address the scammer supplies. Tether's token launched in 2014 and has since become one of the most traded cryptocurrencies by volume.
Where did the name pig butchering come from?
The English term translates the Chinese phrase sha zhu pan, roughly a pig-killing scheme, which Chinese-language scammers used years before the scheme drew Western attention. The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center reported $4.57 billion in investment fraud losses in 2023, up from $3.31 billion in 2022. Cryptocurrency investment fraud made up most of that total.
Why do wrong-number texts work so well?
A first message with no link and no request for money gives spam filters nothing to catch. A polite person's natural reply opens the conversation, and the scammers need only one reply to begin the long courtship. The US Federal Trade Commission reported that consumers lost $330 million to text message scams in 2022, more than twice the 2021 total.
How do fake investment platforms show growing balances?
The platforms are fabricated websites or apps, so the rising balance is a number typed into a database rather than money invested anywhere. FBI warnings describe victims being shown fake gains and sometimes allowed a small early withdrawal, which builds confidence before larger deposits. Withdrawals of larger sums are then blocked behind demands for additional fees or taxes.
More from Fresh Air
