Pig Butchering Scam

Some Members might have heard about the “Pig Butchering” phenomenon, but for those who haven’t this is nothing to do with pork or butchery. In fact the ‘pigs’ referred to are the victims of an elaborate on-line scam who are fattened up with false promises, to be ‘butchered of their savings. According to PSP data it is apparently the second most reported scam this year, in the category of IT and communications fraud. You may have seen attempts to ensnare you already and not realised that is what was happening and hopefully you’ve all recognised it as a scam and ignored it.

This began on dating sites, where people were sent apparently innocent messages from someone pretending to be contacting them by accident and now it has also been seen on both Facebook, Tik Tok and YouTube by people leaving comments on videos that they have watched, to find that someone then leaves a message to say something like “Hey, John told me to message you” or some other nonsense. The sole intention is to get you to respond and then invite you to contact them on WhatsApp or some other messaging system, to get you off the site that they contacted you on. 

In general, this fraud consists of creating a relationship of gradual trust with the victims, leading them to make considerable contributions (investments), often in the form of cryptocurrency, according to the PSP, which makes tracking and recovering the money more difficult.

The scam is usually in 3 phases: the fraudster starts a private conversation with the victim, pretending that they received your personal data accidentally or through a mutual contact. These interactions aim to create a relationship of trust with the victim and may include the use of attractive images, benefits or even an excellent and exclusive deal. The next step reveals that the amount to be “invested” is small and only as the tasks progress the payment of larger amounts is requested, with guaranteed return on investment, which can happen for small monetary returns. After convincing the victim to invest and make a larger payment, the fraudsters become uncontactable, eliminating their online profile, leaving the injured parties with no way of recovering the money invested.

The PSP advice of course is to avoid responding to unsolicited text messages and to block and report the person or the entity to the authorities.

As people become more aware of scams they obviously become less effective, so the nature of the crime is constantly evolving and criminals create new variants, so that’s why it is important to be well informed and report these situations. We have highlighted scams as often as we can in our News from afpop mailings and will continue to do so, but the rapid spread of this scam is alarming and is apparently raking in hundreds of millions of euros/dollars/pounds for the scammers who are operating from China and the Middle East. 

Please don’t think that they are innocent and that you might be helping them. If you don’t know who messaged you, don’t even respond. Simply block their number, report the message if it is possible on the platform that you are using and delete it.