Hacker News Reader

Comment by apetresc | Hacker News Reader

Sorry, is "pig butchering" a euphemism for something, or am I missing out on some new scamming trend?

The term was also new to me. From [1] I understand it is a class of cryptocurrency scams starting by building a cordial relationship via social media or dating apps and then suggesting financial investment.

[1] https://www.michigan.gov/ag/consumer-protection/consumer-ale...

So-named because you "fatten up the pig" before slaughter.

It’s the name of the scam where they trick people into investing in fake platforms and steal their money.

The scammer starts first by building a romantic relationship with the target (this part can last weeks or months). Along the way, they start suggesting cryptocurrency investments on trading platforms that look legit at a glance but are fake underneath. They instruct the target to deposit money into a wallet, like any exchange, but the perpetrators just steal the tokens and show the mark fake figures.

It’s a long term thing that takes a ton of work…I have no idea how the scammers even pull it off at scale.

This site goes into more detail; https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/feature/Pig-butchering-sca...

Someone's obviously making the websites, a few other people are finding the victims, and all the money is funneled to one overlord who pays everyone else a small cut of the stolen money.

It is appalling that no social platform is taking this seriously.

Tumblr has created a special reporting type exactly for these, and they do disappear afterwards quickly (tested this). But by the amount of requests I still receive daily from fresh and empty accounts, I guess the work on avoiding them in the first place still has a lot to catch up. A quarantine period for fresh users risks alienating legit ones, IP filtering won't bring it too far, no idea what one could do to quench it.

> It is appalling that no social platform is taking this seriously.

The big social media corps won't eat into their profits by hiring people to find the scammers.

It will take a law that says something about keeping a human in the loop, or that your reports should always be validated by a human.

> It’s a long term thing that takes a ton of work…I have no idea how the scammers even pull it off at scale.

When cost of living is a few hundred dollars a month at best, looting 10k from a single mark is going to last quite the time.

It's really nasty, I lost contact with an ex girlfriend after her social media got taken over by this shit. Still no idea if it was just her account that got taken over or if she got swept up into some nonsense.

Idk, I’ve seen the former happen pretty frequently. They basically just socially engineer getting ur login credentials from u. I’m not even sure how the conversation would start but I would guess it’s one of the end goals of “Special offer for u! Check your DM!” incessant comments

It felt way more insidious than that, they were really either trying to be her or roped her into something. I've seen the latter happen pretty frequently, probably because I don't tend to live in what you might call prime target countries for these types of scams to hit as an endgame (NA/Europe/wherever else the money is greener)

"The pig butchering scam is a type of fraud in which criminals lure victims into digital relationships to build trust before convincing them to invest in cryptocurrency platforms. Unbeknownst to victims, the fraudsters control the platforms and will eventually take all the money and vanish. "

I've taken it from the article here: https://www.aura.com/learn/the-pig-butchering-scam

See this documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bW4wYV0V-5s

"take it all" - https://www.wired.com/story/what-is-pig-butchering-scam/

Both, for instance https://www.wired.com/story/what-is-pig-butchering-scam/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com