Pig Butchering Scams: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

John Oliver did an excellent explainer about how pig butchering works. [VIDEO] (apologies if the YouTube link has geographic restrictions, don't know if it does)

[VIDEO] It's well worth the watch, but tl;dr: it's a long-con scam. They invest as long as it takes to establish a relationship with you, and then engage you to do something (crypto mostly, apparently) involving cash online. They will say they made a bunch of money, and point you at the super-easy online exchange they used. You buy the crypto, you see the crypto increase in value (because it has in the real world) so you buy more, and more and more. The problems start when you say you want to cash out. They switch from "buy more, it's going up" to "there are fees to withdraw, just deposit another <whatever> and then you'll get the withdrawal amount plus <whatever>" and of course no money ever comes out. Oliver interviews people who have lost hundreds of thousands of dollars this way, some of whom still believe that if they just toss in another <whatever> it will all be resolved and they'll get their money back. It's very sad, and I'm not doing the video justice.

These pig butchering scams play the long game with their victims. It's crazy. The payoffs are huge as well. These are just some of the stories I have heard through various mediums (ie, podcasts, news stories, media segments) - Kansas bank CEO charged with $50M embezzlement as a result of being a victim to "pig butchery". The bank itself was forced into bankruptcy due to this debacle [1] - Woman lost $450K in pig butchering scam [2] - US government often the subject of cybersecurity fraud as well. Pandemic relief programs paid out billions to scammers [3] - halfway decent segment on pig butchering on "Last Week Tonight" with John Oliver [4] Researching potential victims is so easy now with the proliferation of online dating apps. Then given how many breaches there are amongst the many services we use, it's even easier to gather more data points that can be used against a victim to drop their defenses (ie, social engineering tactics). The Nigerian scammers of yesteryear have learned the errors of their ways. Notes taken from the "cat fishers" of the 2010s. The Indian scam call centers have graduated from script based tech support scammers to these romance scams as well since it has a larger audience beyond the elderly. Even preying on their own countrymen. At this point, I think any relationship that continues online for more than a month and refuses to meet IRL. The relationship should be sus. I wouldn't even trust Zoom/Facetime/Webex /Meets with the accessibility of AI to gen

I recently watched John Oliver's video[1] about the "pig butchering" scam. It's a brutal scheme where scammers invest months in building fake relationships, gain a ton of trust, and then rob all of their money. Even though I'm pretty tech-savvy, I'm not sure I could totally avoid falling for this. These scammers don't ask for money directly; they casually mention how they're making big bucks through crypto trading on some app. Naturally, you get curious about the app, but you're still cautious. Then you see it's got a ton of good reviews on the app store, so your trust increases a little. You install the app, and it looks legit - like it was made by a solid dev team. It offers some limited-time crypto deals where you can't withdraw for a while. The victim invests a little, watches the crypto value climb, and sees their "money" grow on paper. So they put in more. When they finally try to cash out, they realize they can't. They panic and turn to their "romantic partner" for help. That's when the scammers and the fake app squeeze out the last bit of cash, claiming it's for taxes or fees, and they need to put some money. And the victim loses everything. It's not unreasonable for the victim to think the relationship is real if they've spent months chatting and calling, sharing really personal stuff. Plus, the app seems totally legit, both from the store reviews and how it looks and works. I really hope these scams will disappear soon. [1] [VIDEO]

For those interested in a lightweight summary, Last Week Tonight did a segment on pig-butchering about a year ago. [VIDEO] The interviews with the victims are heartbreaking. There's one dad/daughter pair where the dad has lost almost literally everything, is on camera being interviewed about everything that happened, and is still flipping between "it was a total scam" and "maybe if I just send them another fee payment I can get at least some of my money back" and the daughter saying, "No, dad! It's a scam, and you are not sending them anymore money!"

From what I understand, a number of them are Chinese nationals. I suspect that taking Chinese slaves might not be a great idea. China tends to carry a big stick; especially in that region. Wouldn't surprise me, if the DOJ had some "under-the-table" help from Chinese sources, but not in any way that anyone can prove. If you don't want to sign up for a podcast, John Oliver did a fairly decent bit about it: [VIDEO]

It's also not like Apple does a good job preventing scams on the app store to begin with. John Oliver ran an LWT piece just last week about Pig Butchering scams[0], which involved fake stock trading apps, with fake bought reviews, being used in... you guessed it, the iOS App Store. It's just such a nakedly bad argument because Apple already does a garbage job at maintaining the App Store against these supposed external threats. [0]: A "long con" scam, where the victim (the "pig") is lulled into a false sense of trust for an online stranger (making them fat and ready to for slaughter) and then convinced to spend large sums of money on dubious trading platforms ("being butchered") at a vulnerable moment. [VIDEO]

> 75 billion number comes from a study available on SSRN I am aware, I got the date range from page 2 of the study. 50% number came from the John Oliver segment [3] in which he refers to this UNODC report[4] (page 2 ). > "Research carried out by UNODC to understand the illicit financial flows (IFFs) in the Mekong region suggests that the scam industry in one country in the region may be generating between USD7.5 and USD12.5 billion, which is half this country’s gross domestic product " > least be a massive countrywide construction boom Why should there be one? These countries are only base of operations, the operators are likely neither local nor spending the money in these countries. The scammers - the ones doing the talking are also victims, UN OHCR reports their numbers in hundreds of thousands [1][2]. There are lot of illicit money flowing through tiny regions with favorable governance like say Cayman islands or BVI it doesn't reflect in the local economy all that much. There is of course more than just money moving through here , there are also tens of thousands people working to do this but in most countries in this region few hundred thousand people are not significant and they are not paid much if at all. Both report cite internal analysis, I am not saying UN sources can not be wrong, they of course can. However in the absence of strong counter data point I would trust it. [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [VIDEO] [4] [LINK]