I saw a post on LinkedIn about "pig butchering scams". What a magnificent term! I do feel sorry for the pigs. They're metaphorical, no pigs were harmed, though I wonder if there is some historic fake pork scam involved --- "a pig in a poke"? Wikipedia defines these as "a type of long-term scam and investment fraud in which the victim is gradually lured into making increasing contributions".
According to the Tennessee Department of Commerce and Insurance "It is one of the leading scams reported to the FBI and is still underreported."
This isn't anything new. I've seen similar things many times. It's been a while since I was last targeted personally but I've certainly seen the approach. What I found interesting about this, and the movie ""No More Bets" that this inspired, was the background of people trafficking to enable this.
I've always wondered about the people that are the front end operators of these schemes. They know they're doing crime, or at least taking advantage of the gullible. And the prevalence of spam, phishing, advance fee fraud and all the other methods of capitalizing on people's gullibility show that they work. Spam is a big business.
It looks like some of the people doing the work are doing it under duress. A bit like women being lured with fake jobs in bars or restaurants finding themselves in the sex industry, password confiscated. A less violent iteration of Taken, or the mega violent Rambo:Last Blood. Distasteful.
The more recent "Beekeeper" movie made the working scammers a bit more complicit and more directly involved in profiting from the activity. The call centres are shiny and new. Inviting even. Still distasteful, still preying on the gullible, careless, greedy, desperate or sometimes just unlucky.
How many times do you see in the media someone who gets taken for everything who really ought to have known better. The Wikipedia article blames pig butchering for the failure of a Bank in Kansas, where the manager embezzled $47M to partake in one of these scams. You generally assume a bank manager knows what he's doing.
So two things from this: I have bad taste in movies, and you really really always ought to repeat, over and over, "if it sounds too good to be true, it isn't".
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_butchering_scam
- https://www.tn.gov/commerce/blog/2024/1/31/what-is-a-pig-butchering-scam.html
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_More_Bets
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taken_(film)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rambo:_Last_Blood
