Pig Butchering: The Fraud That is Even Worse Than It Sounds
Of the various fraud scheme names that have been coined over the years, pig butchering is one that provokes the most visceral response. Yet the actual act of pig butchering is even more horrible than the name suggests. It is the latest variation of an age old type of crime under the umbrella of romance schemes, people who prey on the lonely and the elderly, pretending to be a potential romantic partner with the express purpose of defrauding them.
One recent study by the University of Texas put the global losses from pig butchering schemes at 75 billion in just four years’ time.
What is it that has made this scheme so much more harmful than other romance schemes?
What can law enforcement do to root out and hold bad actors accountable?
And how can individuals avoid becoming the latest pig to be butchered?
These and other scams aren’t the work of individual scammers. They are highly organized operations orchestrated by transnational organized crime groups. Investigating complex, cross-border criminal organizations requires law enforcement agencies across state lines and international borders to work collaboratively. Sounds simple enough, but it can be very challenging, and yet the stakes couldn’t be much higher in terms of the human toll that this scheme continues to take.
A few months back, I introduced myself to Erin West after having read about her in the Wall Street Journal. At the time, Erin was an assistant district attorney in Santa Clara County, California who has garnered a great deal of expertise and experience holding these transnational crime groups accountable, assisting victims and being a resource to state and local law enforcement interested in becoming more proficient in their investigation of cryptocurrency investigations.
Erin is a force of nature. While still with the DA’s Office, she launched Operation Shamrock, which is now her full-time job. Operation Shamrock is a coalition of law enforcement agencies, finance, civil society and tech companies, including organizations like Microsoft, Meta and LinkedIn. It’s objective is to pool their talents to strengthen law enforcement efforts directed at the organizations behind Pig butchering.
I interviewed Erin on a recent episode of the #FraudEatsStrategy podcast. I asked her start thing off by explaining the origin of the term pig butchering and where this heinous fraud scheme first started.
Erin explained that during COVID, Chinese organized crime was looking to take advantage of the fact that gambling is not allowed in China and neither is cryptocurrency. So they built these massive hotel casinos in Sihanoukville, Cambodia to lure Chinese gamblers in. When COVID hit, people weren’t allowed to travel. The casino owners needed to use that square footage for other means of making illicit funds. So they repurposed it for something they called Sha Zhu Pan which roughly translates to Pig butchering. The idea was to fill these unused casino towers with a human workforce that will run at a massive level targeted scam to start off with a romance scam and then entice people into a cryptocurrency investment scam and drain the rest of the world of all of their money. And it’s been immensely successful.
When I first heard of Pig Butchering, I kind of just chalked it off as yet another iteration of romance schemes and I didn’t fully appreciate how much it is being promoted by these very large criminal organizations.
I asked Erin to provide an overview of the typical Pig Butchering scheme. Erin advised that they usually begin with a seemingly innocent, misdirected text message intended for someone else. Messages seem obvious to the recipient that they were not the right party. They include messages like “what time am I picking you up at the airport”, “you left your bag in my car”, or “what time is our tee time on Thursday?” Like so many schemes, they really on the fact that most of us are trusting and want to assist the person on the other side of that phone. So, we respond and tell the sender that they’ve reached the wrong party. The next text received in reply is usually a photo of an attractive young Asian woman and an effort at striking up a conversation. And because many people are feeling isolated and alone, many recipients respond.
The initial contact isn’t always by text, they can be via LinkedIn, Facebook groups or other social media platforms or messaging apps. The conversations usually escalate quickly into a very typical romance scam. But it’s a romance scam on steroids in that they are sealing that relationship within days and using, I love yous and calling you honey and dear and making sure that you have your jacket on when you leave the house and being super caring about you. And at the end of the day, what they’re trying to do is really get to know how much money you have, and where it’s located. Because that’s the tragedy of pig butchering scams that’s different from others is they don’t stop until they have taken every last penny from their victim.
The Pig Butchering scheme is a perfect storm. COVID caused transnational crime groups to repurpose some of their real estate assets and their scheme was launched at a time where the world was feeling very cut off. And feeling continues because there’s still quite a few people who are working remotely and some of them are feeling very isolated. The potential victim pool remains very large as result. Another element that has contributed to the exponential growth to the Pig Butchering scheme is the rise and take off of cryptocurrency as a means an accelerate path to wealth. So many people perceive crypto investing as a short cut to a dramatic and positive change to their new worth.
Indeed, the cryptocurrency investment component is an important differentiator in the scheme. Victims eventually are convinced that the person that they’ve been interacting with for days or even months is interested in a romantic relationship. Their guards come down and they are more susceptible to what comes next. And what comes next is usually an investment in what they believe to be cryptocurrency. I asked Erin to how these schemes use seemingly legitimate smartphone apps to perpetrate the fraud.
One of the real issues with this crime is that it all feels very real said Erin. They’ve been sold this relationship, it seems genuine to them as does the fact their new romantic partners is affluent thanks to their profitable cryptocurrency investments. They share pictures of their Range Rover, their luxury travel and then eventually, they share a website or a smartphone app to download from the app store. These scammers have created a scheme that all feels very real and as a result, it’s very difficult to get victims out once they’ve been led to believe that all of this is true.
It’s also this kind of weird, relatively new part of human nature that somehow a website or an app bestows some legitimacy, which of course is not the case. It’s not a big investment, and it’s not as though there’s some regulatory agency that approves the launch of your website or your app. It’s a few lines of code. And yet we as individuals probably equate legitimacy with the fact that they have a website or an app.
There are some other, very other troubling aspects to these schemes, most notably that the individuals who are the ones targeting pig butchering victims are themselves often the victims of human trafficking and what the UN terms forced criminality. I asked Erin to explain the human trafficking component of pig butchering.
Erin explained that it is the most difficult part of pig butchering schemes to fathom. It is human trafficking on an industrial, massive scale. Slavery that is occurring in 2025. When you learn that the people on the other side of the phone are trafficking victims and have no choice but to try to scam people all day, it’s jaw dropping. This scheme requires a large human workforce. And to do that, they’ve got all this space, they’ve got unused casino space and they’ve built entire compounds. In fact, a big part of these schemes is recruiting. To do that, they make very realistic looking job boards and advertisements and target victims in parts of the world where unemployment rates are very high. The victims believe that they have this great work opportunity that will enable them to live where they work and send money home. And when they arrive in Bangkok, their passports are taken and they are bused and boated to these compounds where they are locked down, unable to leave and forced to work 17 hours a day under the constant threat of violence.
To close things out, I used Erin to explain the work of Operation Shamrock and what law enforcement agencies and individuals can to prevent people from becoming victims. The thing we need to know is we need to be talking about this all the time everywhere to anyone who will listen because this is the threat that will ruin our country. Every day, Erin’s email box receives more and more messages from victims who lost their entire net worth. This is a systematic, very targeted, laser focused work. Erin encourages awareness, talking about it. People can join Operation Shamrock at shamrock@operationshamrock.org to get the newsletter. They are in a bit of a moment of flux with a new administration but there is a fantastic argument that Americans are getting fleeced by outside bad actors and somebody has got to do something about this. Law enforcement, country leadership, companies like LinkedIn, Apple, Meta and Microsoft, financial services companies all need to come together to meet this crisis head on.
To hear the entire #FraudEatsStratey podcast episode featuring Erin West, please click here.
