On October 3, Mona, a beautiful woman, sent me a text. “It’s been a long time!” she said. “How have you been? I’m coming to the United States soon.” On July 25, Ray said he was going to travel to Italy soon and he wanted to ask my advice on something. On May 1, Bella asked if this was still Danny’s phone number. On April 5, Linda sent me a message saying the quote for my home renovation was complete. On March 28, Vandia told me that Ana had recommended me. And just yesterday, Jonathan offered to buy my house.
Just one thing: I don’t know Mona, I don’t know Ray, I don’t know Bella, Linda, Vandia, Ana, or Jonathan. I don’t know what scams they were running, exactly. But it’s very likely they were running pig butchering scams.
Lesson summary
Welcome to Plain English, where we help you upgrade your English with current events and trending topics. I’m Jeff in Mexico City. JR is the producer, and he has uploaded today’s full lesson to PlainEnglish.com/525.
Coming up today: Pig butchering. It’s an ugly name for an ugly scam. The latest version of a confidence scam comes from southeast Asia and tries to get you to invest in cryptocurrency. And this scam is working on real people.
In the second half of today’s lesson, I’ll show you what it means to show your true colors. And we have a song of the week. Let’s get going.
Pig butchering scams cheat victims out of millions
Pig butchering is a variation on an old scam: a confidence scam. In a confidence scam, a stranger slowly builds confidence with a victim, over weeks or months. It’s a slow, high-cost way of scamming a stranger. But the paydays can be big. You heard about romance scams in Lesson 375 . Pig butchering is a romance scam’s crypto cousin.
First of all, a note on the name. These scams are called “pig butchering” because the scammer takes a long time to “fatten” a pig (the victim) before slaughter.
Here’s how it works. A scammer creates a false identity, usually on a social media network like Instagram, WhatsApp, or even LinkedIn. The scammers then send messages to other numbers or profiles, faking a case of mistaken identity. These are the Monas, Vandias, Rays, and Bellas that litter my own WhatsApp inbox.
When a victim responds, the scammer tries to continue the conversation in any way possible. “Oh, you’re not traveling to Italy? I’m sorry. I’m so confused these days because my mother has been so ill. I must have gotten the wrong number, please forgive me.”
If the target responds in any way, the scammer has a hook. The conversation might start with an innocent discussion of sick relatives, travel, mistaken identities, anything. It doesn’t matter. The scammer just needs a reply, a spark, some way to keep a conversation going. Then, the scammer befriends the victim, talking about anything and everything. It’s like serendipity: a case of mistaken identity turned into a real online friendship.
Over the course of weeks or months, scammers develop the friendship and drop hints that they’re expert investors in cryptocurrency. They’re careful to sprinkle these details in the conversation—their crypto success is not the focus on the conversation, at least not yet.
But it’s usually enough to pique the victims’ curiosity, and it’s the victims who usually ask for more details about the crypto investing. And after building trust, the scammers generously offer their targets a chance to invest in crypto themselves. The scammers create fake web sites, which are supposed to be investment accounts. The victims, hoping to take advantage of the hot crypto market, deposit a little bit of money in the fake investment accounts.
The investment accounts then show an increase in value in the target’s investment. This is part of building the confidence. Yes, you sent $1,000. But now look—it’s a few days later and you have $1,200. Some scammers even let the targets withdraw the profits once, twice, three times, just to “prove” that the accounts are real.
The fake investment accounts show fake profits. The fake initial profits give the victims the confidence to invest more and more. If an investment is working, why not continue it? The genius of the scam is that the scammer doesn’t ask for money—the victims are the ones who ask to invest more and more.
But eventually the victims want their money back, and that’s when the scammers show their true colors .
Here’s a real example from a podcast I heard recently . One recent victim, a Chinese immigrant to the United States named Jane, wanted to get her money back, over $600,000 that she had invested.
When she attempted to withdraw it, the scammers told her that there was a problem with her account and she needed to invest more money to access the money she already had in her account. That didn’t seem right, so she called the investment account’s customer service. But that, tragically, was part of the scam—they had a completely fake customer service phone line. The customer service agents convinced her to send in more money. She got the money from family. She sent another $600,000. At this point, she had put in over a million dollars, but the account showed a balance of over $3 million—a nice profit.
When she tried again to get her money out, the scammers told her she had to pay taxes on all her gains. But she couldn’t pay for it out of her balance—she had to send in more money to cover the taxes. She did. And guess what? The scammers told her she had to pay another fee before she could make a withdrawal.
That’s when this victim knew it was a scam and called the police—the police said there was nothing they could do. She had lost over a million dollars of her own and her family’s savings.
Other people are not so lucky. The fees become more ridiculous. ProPublica details one scammer requesting a tax, then a security deposit, then a processing fee, then a fee to expedite the processing, one “fee” more brazen than the last. The victim said he had paid so much money that he kept giving in to the scammers’ demands.
Other victims are prompted to take out loans, cash in all their savings, even re-mortgage their own homes. And it all starts from an innocent text—a wrong number, a case of mistaken identity . Sometimes the scammers gloat; they mock their victims, just when the victims realize they’ve been scammed.
Listen to a victim’s own words
If you think that these scams only target people who aren’t smart or savvy, think again. It’s working on real people. In the transcript, and in our Facebook group, I’ll link to a podcast episode where you can hear a woman, in her own words, in her own voice, describe how she lost the money to pig butchering.
Your heart breaks as you listen to her. Her whole savings is gone. She offered to divorce her husband, that’s how ashamed she was of her mistake. It’s very powerful. So go to PlainEnglish.com/Facebook or check out the transcript and find the link.
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