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How Pig Butchering scams work (2022)

64 pointsby aritraghosh007about 1 year ago

5 comments

fs_tababout 1 year ago
A close friend of mine lost $200K USD (around half of it borrowed) over a period of five months. The scammer met him on Facebook Dating, had video&#x2F;audio chats with him on a daily basis, then eventually introduced him to a fake crypto trading platform to help him pay off his mortgage.<p>These platforms generally allow users to withdraw their funds at the beginning, and it was only after he had deposited a significant sum that they disabled withdrawals. They then demanded (and collected) withdrawal taxes, fees, etc. before moving their platform to a different domain.<p>My friend is convinced the scammer is also a victim who has &quot;lost&quot; 90k by &quot;loaning&quot; it to him in preparation for the pig butchering event. Unfortunately, he&#x27;s continuing to speak with her and I&#x27;m concerned for his well-being.<p>It&#x27;s sick how persistent these scammers are - they will isolate and wear down their victims over time until there&#x27;s nothing left.
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poulsbohemianabout 1 year ago
I get nearly daily &quot;hi!&quot; type messages and friend requests on various social media platforms from what are obviously fake accounts - which leads to the question of why is anyone accepting these requests or bothering to interact with these fake accounts? This pig butchering might be a new variation, but confidence scams have been around forever. Are people just that lonely, unaware, or greedy?
barfbagginusabout 1 year ago
I&#x27;ve been recruiting pig butchers and trying to press gang them into assistive technology coding for open source, recruiting them into my own pre-released projects, where I am the only community member they can threaten. The goal is to help them learn to love Open source and helping others, like I do. Then I would help them adopt revolutionary open source projects - developing free services that can replace the need for corporations and states.<p>But it has not worked, and I&#x27;m concerned about the ethical, personal, and community risks. So I have stopped the attempts for now.<p>Failure modes<p>Solicitations<p>Scammer Assets always try to use coding wins - like a successful PR or good unit tests - to shift the conversation to investments, get rich quick schemes, or other obvious scam extraction points. I call this the &quot;rapport building&quot; -&gt; &quot;solicitation&quot; link in their kill chain. They don&#x27;t value the coding skills they&#x27;re learning, and only see one way to spend rapport: starting the extraction phase of the scam.<p>I reject solicitations by explaining I&#x27;m not interested in creating money through investments. I am only interested in developments that create genuine open source values for humanity. I explain I am doing this process with many scammers, and wish to teach all my assets to love building open source codes for all.<p>I explain I realize they&#x27;re trying to work me into the extraction phase of a scam, but won&#x27;t be revealing their tells, because that would increase their scammer skill. I claim to forgive them for their attempt, and express that I only want to help them live a better life without the need for crime against innocents.<p>They are usually offended by my reveal that I know they&#x27;re a scammer, and may try the harassment mode of engaging their targets. But they continue engaging, assuming I must not be certain they&#x27;re scammers.<p>Harassment and Threats<p>Sometimes they taunt or harass me if they&#x27;re getting frustrated in the rapport building phase or have attempted multiple solicitations. I call this the intimidation move. I simply reflect their tactics, escalating to unhinged and disrespectful speech. I explain that I have no problem reflecting abuse at them, because I know what they are and what they do to others for a living. I explain I will push them until they either return to respectful comms or break coms. They apologize when they&#x27;re scared they&#x27;re going to lose an uncapitalized scam asset. I call this process &quot;renormalizing&quot; the asset.<p>Unfortunately, once it&#x27;s obvious that assets are willing to engage in harassment to work on their targets, I no longer consider them safe to take part of an assistive technology project, since they could Target and harass vulnerable users. I am not sure what good I can expect to accomplish with an asset that has passed the harassment -&gt; renormalization phase, so I consider this a total failure mode.<p>Conclusion: Don&#x27;t do this<p>My work has not been successful for either my immediate goal of supporting open source assistive technologies, or my ultimate revolutionary goals.<p>Most of my scammer assets won&#x27;t reach the level of making commits to assistive projects. None of them reach the level of being self reliant open source contributors. And if they did, I&#x27;d worry they would try to scam users and contributors in the community.<p>Worse, while I believe my assets are all free individuals, it&#x27;s possible that some are captives. Some assets will volunteer information about the structure and leadership of their scam orgs, but in those cases they are younger people and describe a loose knit team with a single leader and no violent enforcers. I have no way to confirm they&#x27;re not being coerced.<p>Thus far my efforts in revolutionary reverse pig butchering have failed.<p>Ideas and improvements are welcome. I will not retry this strategy until I have a more sound counter kill chain that can<p>1) align the assets into genuinely wanting to contribute to open source<p>2) align the assets into genuinely abandoning the desire to solicit victims
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scotty79about 1 year ago
You are perfectly safe to assume that no one will ever approach you with a proposal that is beneficial to you.
BlindEyeHaloabout 1 year ago
I also recommend the recent Last Week Tonight episode on this topic.