There is an extremely sophisticated and downright evil scam that has become more
popular in the past year and has literally stolen billions of dollars from people in
that time. The scam is often referred to as the "pig butchering" scam, and the name comes from
the idea that the scammers will fatten up the victims by building their trust,
sometimes even over the course of months, so they can extract as much money as possible.
And this scam doesn't even start the way that normal scams do,
either. So really the best way to defend against it is to just know about it. And
really I would say there are three main phases to the scam, so I'll go over what those are,
and then afterwards I can go over some more variations and specific examples I've seen.
Alright, so what I would call phase one of the scam is basically the initial contact.
But like I said, the absolute key thing to understand here is that the scam does not
start in a typical obvious way that you might be familiar with seeing other scams. In this one,
the whole scam hinges on the fact that the scammer will need to make contact with you
in as normal of a way as possible before actually initiating the scam.
But this can vary in so many different ways that I really need to spend some time giving
some examples so you can get an idea. One example of a first contact method they may
use is to send out a seemingly innocuous and random text message out of the blue,
that basically pretends to be a wrong number.
So they may say something like, "Hey James, how's it going,
blah blah blah." And then they're assuming that you're going to respond something like,
"Uh sorry you have the wrong number." But this one is actually the easiest to spot,
because what the scammer will then do is try to actually keep the conversation going.
They'll say something like, "Oh I'm sorry, I was trying to reach my friend James. But you seem
nice, oh, what's your name, blah blah blah." And try to actually strike up a conversation with you,
and act all friendly and basically try to befriend you. But that is the big giveaway
if you tell them it's the wrong number and they keep trying to chat you up, that's a red flag.
And really it's meant to prey on lonely people, effectively. Another example that is totally
different, is they may set up a fake profile on some dating website or app like Hinge,
Bumble, Tinder, whatever, and basically again try to befriend you and present
themselves as an extremely awesome and successful potential romantic partner.
And this is probably the toughest way to spot as being part of the scam at first,
because people are literally on there to meet new people,
so you're kind of expecting it. But remember, the actual scam hasn't even started yet. These
are just a couple examples of methods they may possibly use to get their foot in the door.
But there's other ways they may try to reach out. They may reach out on social
media through Instagram DMs or whatever, where they may have a whole fake persona
set up on their profile, and they'll probably actually do that anyway. But
it's also possible that they'll buy entire existing profiles to seem really legit,
because they have a profile that seems to have a long history, that sort of thing.
But once you are in some kind of conversation with them, that's when they would move on to
what I would call phase two. All right, now before we continue though, I want to give a big thanks
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protection. And with all that being said, let's continue. So phase 2 is really where
they just try to gain your trust, and this can last again, potentially months.
They're just going to be talking like a normal person, and just interacting with you friendly,
kind of how you'd expect, depending on however they first reached out
to you. They'll probably message you pretty often just about normal everyday stuff. Oh,
how's your life doing? How's this? What'd you do today?
That kind of thing. Maybe even daily, though not necessarily to an annoying
degree. And the whole time, they'll be trying to get an idea of your personality,
so that they can either play on it, or maybe even mirror it, so you guys seem like you're in common,
especially if you met them on a dating app, basically just telling you what you want to hear.
But eventually the scam will begin, and they'll start dropping very subtle hints
about the rest of the scam. Basically at some point, the scammer will just very
casually and briefly mention that they do some kind of Bitcoin or cryptocurrency trading. And
they might not even mention it until the victim asks what they do for work or fun.
And they might just briefly mention it among other stuff they do, and then move on with the
conversation. They're not going to push it, most likely. But slowly, they'll bring it up
more often to try to fish for interest out of you. So you might say, "Oh, what are you up to today?"
And the scammer will say something like, "Oh, I'm just doing some trading, blah, blah, blah.
How about you?" And they'll probably also drop indirect hints that they're really successful
at making money with whatever they do, like pretending to do charity events where they
donate some Bitcoin or something like that. Effectively coming across as,
"Yeah I'm really successful because of this thing I just happen to be doing right now."
So you'll get interested. Basically, their end goal is for you to allow them to teach you how
to supposedly do this trading that they're doing to make money so that you can do it yourself. But
again, the really smart scammers won't be pushy about it at all. They may even wait for you to
explicitly ask them to teach you so that it seems like your idea, and you'll let your guard down.
And that brings us to what I would call phase three, the main scam. But it's
important to know that they're not going to stop with all the phase two stuff. They're
going to keep talking to you like a normal friend, talking about whatever life stuff
while this is all going on. And when they go to "teach" you this fake method they're using,
it's going to vary, but typically they're going to say you're going
to need to sign up for some kind of website or cryptocurrency exchange, is a typical one.
But here's the thing, the crypto exchange or website is fake and the scammer owns that crypto
exchange. But it will be perfectly set up to look like a real website,
a real trading website with charts and account balances,
the works. For all intents and purposes, everything on the website might work,
but on the back end, the account balances or the amount of money you have will be all fake.
It's very possible they will impersonate and clone a real site or exchange, and just say,
"Oh, well this one's on a different domain because this is the North American version or
your country's version," or something like that. And the whole thing is actually clever because
a lot of people might not see any red flags, in sending to a seemingly legitimate website,
as opposed to sending it directly to a person, which might set off red flags.
Oh, and if this wasn't clear, I assume what they have you do is first buy the
cryptocurrency on a legitimate exchange. So it's not like you're sending money directly
out of your bank account into the scam website. You're first buying it on a
regular crypto exchange, and then sending the crypto to the scam site's wallet.
And by that point, it's gone. But once you deposit your money into this fake website so that you can
do the thing too, it's not like they just run off with the money and the scam stops there,
they keep going with it. They may make it look like you're making money and show you returns
and stuff in your account, but anything you put in, you are never getting back out again.
And there are cases where the scammers are extremely creative too, surprisingly so. I
saw a video that I'll have probably pop out at the top left, where a woman fell victim
to the scam. And they met the scammer through a dating app, which is relevant because the website
that they had her sign up for, they did a fake "couples promotion event" where they said, "Oh,
well if you and another person deposit some amount, we'll give you a bonus,
as like a couple's bonus, so it's like a romantic thing." I mean,
I would never would have thought of that, it just shows how devious these scammers
can be. And apparently in that case, they even had the website set up on the
back end where they could do fake internal transfers, so they could make it look like
this other scammer guy was lending her money by putting money into her account and stuff.
And they even had a fake customer service person that she could contact. I don't know
if it was through email or chat or whatever, that basically was able to tell her what she had to do,
and string her along and all sorts of stuff. And while setting up a
whole apparently working website might seem a bit sophisticated for a scam,
remember that these scammers are potentially making millions of dollars.
So they have as much money as they want to hire people to build such a scam site. Anyway,
how the scam ends is you keep putting in more money for whatever reasons. They
might be doing promotions, there might be some kind of account balance limit
that you have to meet and you need to add more. The person might pressure you that,
I don't know, there's an opportunity coming up that you need to invest in, stuff like that,
they'll give excuse after excuse for why you need to put more money in.
And when you eventually stop or run out of money, that's when they stop talking
to you. So now that you know how it works, let me go over some additional notes that
might be helpful if you're trying to spot this scam. This type of scam originated in China,
but apparently most people over there became aware of this type of scam.
So they actually turned their sights to other countries like America or Europe
or wherever. So unlike a lot of scams that most people are familiar with,
a lot of these scams will have people from China doing them. And that will mean they'll be relying
on a translator to communicate with you. Now, they're probably not going to try and hide that,
they'll probably say it. It's just something to be aware of as a possible red flag. And they'll
probably say, yeah, they're from China, or they may say they're from another country,
such as South Korea or Singapore, somewhere else to apparently seem
more legitimate. So I'm not saying that everyone from another country is a scammer.
Again, it's just something to be aware of, keep in the back of your mind. Another thing I want
to emphasize is that the scammers who do this type of scam are going to be relatively smart,
and they are willing to target other smart people. So like I said, really the only way to defend
against the scam is to know about it, and realize that the biggest red flag is their end goal,
which is always, for whatever reason they give, for you to send money somewhere.
Doesn't have to be directly to them, it could be to some website or some other service,
I don't know. If you're sending money anywhere, they probably control it. Typically, it's been
a cryptocurrency exchange, but I wouldn't be surprised if they change it up to start using
fake stock websites if they have to in the future, if people get wise to it or anything like that.
The main reason they use cryptocurrency is because it's probably easier for them to
set up than having to set up a bank account. And also it's impossible to reverse a cryptocurrency
transaction. So just some things to be aware of. But I think now that you do know how this works
and have seen examples, this should set off some major alarm bells if anyone tries to do it to you.
So if you enjoyed this video, definitely give it a big thumbs up and let me know
down in the comments if you've ever encountered a scam like this before,
someone tried to reach out to you, but maybe you didn't respond or you caught on,
anything like that. And thanks again to Guardio for sponsoring this video.
Be sure to go to Guard.io/ThioJoe to install the extension and scan your browser for
threats for free. That link is also in the description. So if you want to keep watching,
the next video I'd recommend is another video about a very clever email scam
that again is not very obvious and you should definitely know about.
I'll put that video right here you can click on,
so thanks so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one.