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/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.

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.

My friend is convinced the scammer is also a victim who has "lost" 90k by "loaning" it to him in preparation for the pig butchering event. Unfortunately, he's continuing to speak with her and I'm concerned for his well-being.

It's sick how persistent these scammers are - they will isolate and wear down their victims over time until there's nothing left.

I get nearly daily "hi!" 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?

I'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.

But it has not worked, and I'm concerned about the ethical, personal, and community risks. So I have stopped the attempts for now.

Failure modes

Solicitations

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 "rapport building" -> "solicitation" link in their kill chain. They don't value the coding skills they're learning, and only see one way to spend rapport: starting the extraction phase of the scam.

I reject solicitations by explaining I'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.

I explain I realize they're trying to work me into the extraction phase of a scam, but won'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.

They are usually offended by my reveal that I know they're a scammer, and may try the harassment mode of engaging their targets. But they continue engaging, assuming I must not be certain they're scammers.

Harassment and Threats

Sometimes they taunt or harass me if they'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're scared they're going to lose an uncapitalized scam asset. I call this process "renormalizing" the asset.

Unfortunately, once it'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 -> renormalization phase, so I consider this a total failure mode.

Conclusion: Don't do this

My work has not been successful for either my immediate goal of supporting open source assistive technologies, or my ultimate revolutionary goals.

Most of my scammer assets won'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'd worry they would try to scam users and contributors in the community.

Worse, while I believe my assets are all free individuals, it'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're not being coerced.

Thus far my efforts in revolutionary reverse pig butchering have failed.

Ideas and improvements are welcome. I will not retry this strategy until I have a more sound counter kill chain that can

1) align the assets into genuinely wanting to contribute to open source

2) align the assets into genuinely abandoning the desire to solicit victims

You are perfectly safe to assume that no one will ever approach you with a proposal that is beneficial to you.

I also recommend the recent Last Week Tonight episode on this topic.

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