Pig butchering: one of the world's fastest growing scams

The FBI has warned about a potentially devastating cryptocurrency scam called "pig butchering".

The con, which CBS News said could "wipe out someone's life savings", has been growing in scale over the last five years and, as China has cracked down on the operation, it has spread around the globe.

'Fattening up'

The operation is given its eye-catching name because it involves "fattening up" victims before taking everything they have. The operators assume false online identities and spend months "financially grooming" their victims to win their trust and get them to invest on "fraudulent cryptocurrency websites", said CNN.

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The process involves "building seemingly intimate relationships with victims", explained Wired, and the "attacks often start by texting potential targets out of the blue and getting them talking".

The attackers "begin to build a rapport and introduce the idea of a special or unique investment opportunity" and victims send funds – typically cryptocurrency – through a "malicious platform meant to look like a legitimate money management service", before the money is laundered from there.

Deepening the criminality involved, a CNN investigation last year found that many of the scammers are themselves victims of human trafficking.

The FBI estimates that pig butchering scams stole nearly $4bn in total from tens of thousands of American victims last year, a 53% increase from the year before. It's "theft at a scale so large", said CNN, that investigators are calling it a "mass transfer of wealth from middle-class Americans to criminal gangs".

Nigeria to the Isle of Man

Beijing has "made a concerted effort" in recent months to "crack down on pig butchering schemes", said Wired, but the activity is now "proliferating around the world".

Since 2021, Dubai has emerged as "the largest epicentre of pig butchering outside Southeast Asia" and it's also prominent in "multiple African countries" because of "an existing culture of organised scamming".

In Nigeria, for instance, "readily available" prefab cryptocurrency investment platforms, templates and scripts are "available for sale online to anyone who wants to get started". The fraud has reached eastern Europe with at least two centres  uncovered by law enforcement in Georgia, and scam compounds "have also been broken up" in Peru and Sri Lanka.

Closer to home, a "seaside hotel and former bank offices on the Isle of Man" have been used by scammers conning victims in China out of millions of dollars, a BBC World Service investigation found earlier this year.

Serious money

Mina Chiang, the founder and director of Humanity Research Consultancy, told Wired that fraud is "not being seen as a serious crime – not like drugs, not like terrorism" and "we need to start shifting that idea, because it creates the same kind of damage", and "maybe even more because the amount of money we're talking about is so huge".

As criminals "learn that they can make serious money" pig butchering, they’re going to make those pivots", Ronnie Tokazowski, a researcher on the issue told the outlet, so pig butchering "is cropping up in more and more countries" and "even with all the interventions" from the authorities, there is "little to no sign of this stopping".