This is an earnest request. Please help me understand the mindset of people who fall for pig butchering scams.
The thought of giving money to a stranger who I met via a dating app or other social media platform who shifted the conversation to WeChat and asked me to wire money to a bank account is so incomprehensible to me that the mind of someone who would do that is entirely different to how mine is constructed physically, chemically, and electrically to such a degree that it is difficult for me to even believe that it exists.
I am not even particularly financially literate. In college. I barely scraped by my statistics class, took no finance or business classes, and the only formal financial literacy education I have ever received was a single one hour course given to me by the US Army in late 2001 when they announced the TSP (401k for military) was coming where the only takeaways were “compounding interest is magic” and “put your money into a retirement account and don’t look at it until you’re a decade out from retirement”.
To me, believing an unsolicited stranger who is offering you an investment opportunity like what pig butchering scams are will make you rich is the same exact thing as walking out of a rundown gas station that also sells nunchucks, bongs, and ninja throwing stars with a little baggie of pills that have a tiger on the label thinking that they’ll turn you a super sex machine.
Is it desperation?
Profound financial illiteracy that exceeds mine by several orders of magnitude?
I thought that US banks had to know their customers
If you pick the right credit union, your experience will truly be so much better.
Even one as big as NFCU. I've never looked back since switching.
> In October, the U.K. began requiring banks to reimburse scam victims up to ÂŁ85,000, or about $116,000, per claim when they make a fraudulent payment on behalf of their customers, even if the customers authorized the transfer.
How does the bank verify the scammer and the "victim" aren't colluding?
I.e. Mal opens a bank account with $100k, it gets cleaned out when he's "scammed" by Eve, then Mal is reimbursed $100k. Mal & Eve collectively start with $100k, and end up with $200k.
(This is why I put "victim" in quotes: In this scenario, Eve and Mal are co-conspirators trying to defraud the scam reimbursement system.)
AMLKYC always seemed obviously backward or ridiculous to me. The fact that banks are essentially tasked with enforcing laws is... a crutch to say the least.
Analogies are by definition imperfect but:
1. why not point the finger at ATT and Verizon for allowing phone calls and IP packets that facilitated crime?
2. toll road owners, car/truck manufacturers, UPS, USPS, should they be tasked with "knowing" more about their customers?
All this just ends up blaming the victim and doesn't really fix the problem while having massive collateral damage like folks having their bank accounts closed for no good reason and causing real losses to actual businesses.
What's the solution? I'm not sure. Perhaps it begins with holding countries more to account for the actions of their resident criminals.
So pig butchering based out of SEA is now the dominant scam form? It’s crazy how quickly this came to dominate the landscape.
I've said it before here, I'll say it again: it is high time that our governments follow the money and the scammers. Sanction the source countries of these scams to hell and beyond until they clean up their act and pray in front of us on their knees for forgiveness. And yes, I'd like particularly Narendra Modi to kneel - it's hard to wish anything else after watching more than two Scammer Payback videos. Obviously Indian police is aware of what's going on, he's posted more than enough proof, but mysteriously the callcenters get warned in time and vanish.
The US alone loses 158 billion $ each year [1] to scams, the global toll is allegedly around 1 trillion $ [2]. That's fucking insane, this has to stop.
[1] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ftc-states-scams-cost-us-cons...
[2] https://www.gasa.org/post/global-state-of-scams-report-2024-...
On the side of the banks, whatever happened to KYC?
This will continue to happen until all foreign transactions are insured and reversible.
>A huge portion of such fraud is transacted in cryptocurrency.
Yet another reason to avoid cryptocurrency, until that is 100% fully regulated, I will always avoid it.
One of the biggest reason is every tom, dick or harry is creating their own cryptocurrency these days. Including the dummy in charge of the US :)
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The Economist's Scam Inc podcast (mentioned elsewhere in this discussion too) has fascinating (and very troubling) insights into this.
I have sons heading to college this and next year and I have tried to prepare them for the world of scamming that exists out there. I sure hope I've done enough.
Just a few minutes ago I had a scam text that pig butchering begins. I typically delete them immediately but this time just to see what happens I wrote back in several languages aggressively counter-offering to teach them how to buy crypto. I got a puzzled response, then a picture of a waifish asian woman on restaraunt balcony, I think it's AI generated, but it doesn't matter, and then after me clearly not biting a "Fuck you". I wrote "I feel for you doing pig butchering, but its not going to work here", translated it to Chinese and sent that, and got back another "Fuck you", this time in Chinese. ... Now that I typed this out, I realize this was kind of pointless exchange