I’ve written before that online privacy and security are priorities to me. Part of this is the usual Nate guarded cautiousness™. Part of it is seeing waves of people get their social media accounts hacked or their bank accounts compromised. In March, I suggested using a password locker but that it shouldn't be LastPass as their data security practices aren’t up to snuff and you shouldn’t trust them.
To be clear though, I am absolutely a layman when it comes to cybersecurity but I am going to return to that well this week and discuss Pig Butchering Scams and this damn dog.
On Wednesday night this text came in from a scammer trying to woo me with a picture of a walking allergen—little did they know I’m immune to the charm of cute dogs
Hope and I made a decision when we moved overseas to keep our US phone numbers. It makes texting with our older parents easier and T-Mobile’s international roaming gets us online quickly when we land in new places. Because of the time and distance difference, we talk to family when we wake up or before bed. Unless someone back home got hit by a bus, any text coming in during US daylight hours is spam (or a late night soccer take from Zach P). Over the last few years, the spam has evolved. There used to be calls (and voicemails) from American Benefits, student loan scammers, or the extended vehicle warranty guys but those calls went away because spam is an arms race. Tech and telecom companies build algorithms to filter incoming spam and the spammers adjust to circumvent the firewall (I know it’s not actually a firewall. I’m speaking colloquially, nerd). When you are getting a lot of spam, it means the spammers have outflanked the tech companies. When a variety of spam goes away, it means Google/Apple or your phone company have outmaneuvered the spammers.
The current spam texts we are all experiencing are attempts at Pig Butchering. The term Pig Butchering is a translation of shāzhūpán from Mandarin and emerged in China. It is a long-term con where the mark—usually someone 55+ with a lot of assets—is “fattened-up” over time before being “slaughtered.” These scams are particularly devastating because unlike credit card cons, which might take a few hundred dollars, the Pig Butchering marks are often taken for their life savings.
Some recent attempts that’ve come my way:
(631) 743-XXXX - David, I'm visiting you in Florida next month, do you have time to hang out with me?
(847) 718-XXXX - Remember me?
(312) 882-XXXX - I am on a conference call, I will call you back as soon as I am done.
I asked folks on Mastodon about their experiences and D.S. shared this one.
It’s worth noting that “Lily” is using the Nigerian +234 country code
The scams are carried out by armies of people, some of them victims of trafficking, working under duress in Asia. Here’s Vice on who is operating the scams:
But while this narrative of duped victim and online predator is as old as the internet, the scale of human suffering sustaining pig butchering is unprecedented in the world of online scamming. Propping up the industry are thousands of people trapped in a cycle of human trafficking, debt, forced labor, and violence; people from across the region lured by fake job adverts to scam centers in Laos, Myanmar, and Cambodia… individuals robbed of their life savings and plunged into debt, as well as those on the other side of the screen, imprisoned victims forced to groom others and scam.
Both the victims and the con artists are being exploited in Pig Butchering.
I saw one of these cons unfolding online this week. On Reddit, u/flyingsmitty shared that his father-in-law was neck deep with a scammer promising guaranteed 3% daily returns. If anyone offers you 3% daily returns when the federal funds rate is 5.25%, you should run like hell. The original post included a link to the scammer’s web page but the post has since been edited. I visited the website; it promises impossibly high “guaranteed returns.” I could easily see how someone could fall for this trap, especially after hearing the returns talked up for months by their “online friend.”
The “VIP Investment Packages” being offered in the Reddit con including the minimum deposits and promised returns
With my mom in her 80s and Hope’s parents in their 70s, I’d be lying if I said I don’t get angry when I think about the possibility of some scammer preying on them. I think it’s worth having a hard conversation with your peeps about these scams. We all gotta find our own way of saying “no mom, your friend Esther from eleventh grade isn’t randomly texting you out of nowhere. It’s a trafficked scammer in Myanmar.”