This stuff makes me so mad.
I know a friend who told me about a loved one getting scammed. Dude meets some girl from a foreign country online. Next thing you know he thinks she got him into some great cryptocurrency, and nothing anyone can tell him will make him realize he is getting scammed.
Sad stuff.
It happened to my father. I told him he was getting scammed. My mom (divorced) told him. So did my sister. It didn’t matter. He lost all of his savings - 300k+. I wish I had taken his phone away, changed his passwords, etc. My mom didn’t want me to take drastic action because she was concerned that if he knew how much I knew he wouldn’t keep telling her things. It doesn’t matter once they’ve lost everything, of course.
To anyone reading this thinking it wouldn’t happen to your parents, don’t be so sure. I thought he was smarter than that, and at some point he was, but age dulls things.
He was a construction worker. That money didn’t come easily; he ruined his body to get it. I think these scams work in part because it’s hard for the rest of us to imagine so many people being so cold-hearted. It’s almost inconceivable.
Sorry to hear that. Makes me angry just reading it, I can't imagine how it makes you feel.
I've mentioned before here wondering if there is a name for this phenomenon, it's similar to sunk cost fallacy, but more emotionally charged. Like, the thought of having been scammed makes you put on blinders and keep going hoping you weren't. It doesn't make a ton of sense to me, but it happens all the time, to people of all ages.
This guy was only 53 and fell for the same traps, rather famously -
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/08/21/cryptocurrency-shan-hanes-pi...
Perhaps simple denial? If you continue having contact with them after giving them some money but they keep elaborating on how the money helped or satisfied their (scammer's) wishes, the victim may not think they have been scammed. Like "look she's still talking to me every day. We're close. A scammer would have vanished by now"
Oh, I definitely think that's part of it. Nobody wants to be betrayed, or made the fool.
I experienced the same thing in my family. It sucks. I still haven't fully forgiven them (the supposed victim).
As much as I agree it's partially mental decline, it's hard for me to imagine it's not at least also partially a character flaw that would get you into this situation
Sure, but we all have character flaws. I'm certain if he were 10 years younger it wouldn't have happened to him. There's a reason it's almost always older people that fall for scams like these. We need better ways to protect people of a certain age - my mom looked into it and apart from going to a judge to have them rule to give us complete control over his finances there was nothing we could do. Even an FBI office people could call where they'd call/send someone out convince them to stop would go a really long way.
I, tiptoeing here, kind of agree. Am I missing something or do these scams operate on a person's greed?
To be sure, I invest in order to see a return. That's greed, I guess? Or maybe not?
I think having (unrealistic) expectations of doubling your money in anything shorter than ... about a decade ... should be sending up red flags for anyone. "Make money fast" should fire the same neurons as "Put it all on zero and spin".
I had a friend who began to believe he had written code that could play the stock market and rake in the cash on trades (he was testing it on historical data and doing very well). The best way I could try to reel him in was to simply suggest that if it were so easy, everyone would be doing it.
Same goes for any get rich scheme.
Scams operate on any character flaw, with varying degrees of effort required. They exploit the human mind. They might target greed, or loneliness, or insecurity, or even fear of loss.
But we all have character flaws. Everyone. So we are all vulnerable. Not to the same scams, but to some scams.
Sure but can you admit some people are more flawed than others? I don't think it's useful to just handwave this away and act like we are all the same.
Yes, some people are more flawed than others. My point was that if you believe you are immune to scams, you're not. In fact, arrogance is another character flaw that scams routinely exploit.
My dad isn't a gambler. He invested in the stock market, but never anything like options. I've never known him to buy a lottery ticket. He's not greedy.
He is, however, pretty trusting. It took them months to get to the point where he was putting money in. I think he (naively) just trusted them. I wish he would have trusted us instead.
> I think he (naively) just trusted them. I wish he would have trusted us instead.
Probably he trusted people who spent more time talking to him. I don't mean it as an way to blame anyone, I just think it's the way the trust mechanism is wired into the human brain, and this is why these scams work so well.
Ironically this mirrors the parent's frustration of "I wish my kid trusted me and not his dumb-ass friends".
No, you're absolutely right. I had the same thought afterwards - but also, we're both introverted and definitely not phone-talkers. I don't really blame myself on that front.
Some of these scam victims are duped into trying to help someone they trust with a financial problem. In that case, the victims are being the opposite of greedy. The only character "flaw" I can think of in these cases is being naive/too trusting.
I don't know how common the "savior" victims are vs. the "get rich quick" victims, but they definitely exist, at least according to various mini-documentaries on pig butchering I've watched. Maybe these victims were modifying the story to seem more sympathetic, I can't say.
Bitcoin has done 4x in some years and 10,000x in a decade. Unfortunately that has led people to believe that crypto is magic. Classic Ponzis and such mostly don't work any more but if you add in crypto suddenly people are willing to buy in.
Classic Ponzis are still very much around too. The SEC prosecuted a fun one last month (https://www.sec.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2025-71) where they raised $91 million pretending to trade international bonds.
100%. That's why I'm so mad when influential people repeat the "crypto is the future of finance" nonsense. It is this uncritical hype that makes so many people vulnerable to crypto scams. Trump is doing it, Blackrock is doing it, it must be the best thing since sliced bread, right? No.
> The best way I could try to reel him in was to simply suggest that if it were so easy, everyone would be doing it.
Alas, most good entrepreneurial activities violate the efficient market hypothesis. Ditto for many investments. Some people are more alert to opportunities, have better deal flow, etc.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28029044
That's a common enough take, and I think there's some truth to it, but I think it's overly simplistic. I think there is certainly a motivation that such scams target, but I don't know if "greed" is necessarily the right word. Some of it is not necessarily knowing what is or isn't realistic, given the stories that we hear on the news. Some of it is feeling stuck, and trying to go out on a branch, and picking the wrong one. Not all of these cases are immoral, or at least not the same level of immoral.
With romance scams it's ego, especially with men. My neighbor needs to beleive that 25 year old blondes taking selfies on yachts are interested in him. Nothing in the universe could convince him otherwise. He would have to change so much of his personality and life to accept who he is or become who he would need to be. It's impossible. I think this is actually a question of thermodynamics at this point.
Disagree. I used to work with a guy that got scammed by a girl in Vietnam. They met online. He flew there to meet with her multiple times. He met her "family". They were even intimate. After a few months, she convinced him to invest in some sort of restaurant. He even went with her to talk to "lawyers" (in Vietnam; she never came to the US). Then she took all the money and vanished. I think it was close to six-figures.
He's a reasonably intelligent, humble guy. But he was also the perfect mark. He had just gotten divorced from a 10-year marriage, and he was lonely. So I wouldn't call his situation ego. I would call it loneliness. And I think that's how a lot of people get scammed. Everyone wants to feel loved.
I should have said it's often* ego. It can be either or both and other factors. I wouldn't rule it out entirely in your case though but you didn't mention the relative attractiveness of the people. I was talking about a 65 year old man, out of shape, in debt, poor skills with and understanding of women.
The difference between a good salesman and a fraudster is intent. This is weaponised grooming.
These scammers don't have code of ethics, they will push whatever emotional button they think will get the result they want. You're conditioned by society to respond to certain patterning, they take advantage of that in full.
> character flaw
It's usually greed. The aphorism isn't entirely true, but you can't cheat an honest man.
Awww, I don't know that that's true. If by "greed" you mean "it'd be nice to not have to clip coupons before doing my grocery shopping", sure, there are a lot of old people who would like things to be less tight.
But it's not greed in the sense of Ebenezer Scrooge or finance bros. All it takes is some pie-in-the-sky naivete and trusting the wrong person.
No, older people aren’t greedy. They are insecure about their age and doing things they perceive younger more successful people as doing reduces their existential angst and fear of mortality. Wanting to live and be loved is also not greed. The actual flaw is a society that permits crypto currency, and encourages trade and globalization at any cost. Gotta give all the elderly 5g cell phones and Facebook accounts, and be saddened when millions of Indian scammers reach out and touch someone.
Disagree. These unprincipled scammers often exploit character flaws, sure, but also exploit positive traits - trust, a desire to help, the desire for love and belonging, or (in the case of cyber trafficking victims that are then forced to scam others) the desire to find a good job to support one's family.
One should not hesitate to attempt to obtain a conservatorship if they can when this happens. It’s the only thing that will stop someone from losing it all. Unfortunately, if a court deems them mentally fit, there’s nothing to stop them.
The bar to get that done seemed too high before he lost all of his money. Now that's done there isn't much of a point, apart from protecting his house. My mom is on the deed as well so there shouldn't be too much risk there, though I've tried to convince her to put it into a trust for multiple reasons.
Recommend setting up deed monitoring/property alerts if your local property records/recorder supports it, should notify you if any documents are recorded or transfers attempted without your knowledge against the property.
Sorry for your loss.
I hear you. Same with my dad. Found out after he gave his old phone to my mom without logging out. Tried to show him he was falling for MS-clipart certificates and bossofbigbank@gmail.com but to no avail.
After tracing 250k wired in just 6 months, we detangled my mom out of potential liability and reported him. He was put into financial stewardship (= personal finances done by an attorney). He appealed and the court ruled he seems normal, so he could also be in charge of his finances with only a monthly checkup. We still had his email access. He contacted his scammers the day after promising more money soon...
Fast forward to today, he's broke, likley evicted from his auctioned off appartment in a couple of months at age 79 and dividing his pension between wiring it to scammers and eating just enough to stay alive. Lost all his friends (many borrowed him money), doesn't see his wife or grandkids grow up. The opposite of a happy end.
If you find yourself in such a situation: - I received a lot of valueable advice from the local anonymous addiction hotline (how to react, where to seek help). Best call you can make. - In Switzerland, the KESB (govt authority for protection of elderly and children) can help you. They had a neurological assessment made and a court put him financial stewardship. It would have saved him from himself if not for his appeal. - Think ahead and have one person act as "bad guy" - everything I tried was in consensus with the whole family, but I played bad guy. Of course my dad broke with me, but he keeps sporadic contact with everyone else - his only social contacts - priceless.
I see legislation improve hereabouts - my bank (in France) now requires to watch a screen for 3 seconds and confirm you're sure to wire X to Y and you are sure Y is Y before oking a transaction. Far from enough. We infortunately won't convince our dads that they are getting scammed, but better consumer (and boomer) protection is something we can lobby and vote for.
Sorry to hear. Heartbreaking. I truly don't understand why we as a society give these scammers (a $500bn a year industry, according to The Economist) better tools for their trade, crypto, with virtually no other use cases.
My mother is exceptionally vigilant, which is great, but her partner ... I've never met anyone who gets targeted so much, or who needs it spelling out to him so much that he doesn't really have $2m in a crypto wallet somewhere he forgot about that a helpful person can send him. I think it's a fixed personality trait. If they split up, and doesn't have her watching him like a hawk, I worry he's toast.
I think in a world where slitting someone’s throat for few thousand dollars (in some countries for few hundreds to just few) isn’t unheard of, I don’t know in what way people would find such scams inconceivable. I think the reason squarely is people being naive, or stupid, greedy, desperate (for love, better X times returns etc) etc - or a combination of these. And yes, they are victims, yes.
Keep in mind some of us still grow up in places where we can leave our cars/homes unlocked. Obviously extending that feeling to the entire world is naive, but it's also pretty understandable for our now elderly population..
This is horrifying. From your perspective, what's the hook that gets a person to hand over the money? Is it to make return on investment, or is it because they think the scammer loves them, or some other reason?
I cannot find the article again, it was posted here a few months ago so maybe someone knows of it but,
A guy intentionally went down the rabbit hole of one of these and wrote about the anatomy of it. In his case it was a young (like 30 something young) woman who graduated at the top of dentistry school in Uzbekistan and got a large grant to start a practice in the UK. Something like that. They talked/flirted for weeks/months, sent pictures, all that. The mark of course lives in the UK and she will need a place to stay while she gets her feet on the ground.
Finally right as she is leaving to come to the UK there is a bureaucratic problem and she needs ~$10k to resolve it quickly before the grant lapses, and she cannot access the grant money for expenses until she is in the UK. Also her bank froze her account because of this mess so she needs to use these alternate means to get the money to her, and she can immediately pay you back upon arrival. You get the idea.
I found it again: https://www.bentasker.co.uk/posts/blog/security/seducing-a-r...
Pretty simple, for women; the promise of companionship, romance, someone to listen to them.
For men; sexy pictures, flirting, promises or chances of physical intimacy.
Older, single or widowed people are especially vulnerable.
Usually it's a combination of both. The scammer works their mark for months and develops a deep relationship with the victim ("fattening the pig") before moving to the next phase where they mention how they started making tons of money in crypto, or recently got into financial trouble and need help, or similar ("butchering the pig").
I think in his case they simply built up trust, and made it seem incredibly casual. It's hard for me to know exactly because I wasn't super privvy to what was going on, but by the time I talked to him about it he effectively trusted them over me.
It all would have been so clearly a scam to anyone with any internet sense at all it blew my mind he would have been fooled.
I'm a big fan of YouTube anti-scammer vigilantes. They bait scammers, expose their tactics, humorously waste their time, or even manage a counter attack.
I believe these guys can be a big part of the solution. YouTube creates a financial incentive for individuals to go down this route, and apart from being entertaining to viewers, it broadens awareness of scammer tactics, which hopefully means more people detect scams early.
I wish these guys success and hope to see more anti-scam YouTubers appear.
Examples:
https://www.youtube.com/@NanoBaiter
https://www.youtube.com/@KitbogaShow
> YouTube creates a financial incentive for individuals to go down this route
No, YouTube creates a financial incentive for individuals to produce videos where they seem to do this. The problem of this is obvious, and if, as you hope, more of this content appears, there will not be enough people to check them all and keep them honest.
The worst part is, these scams flourish during bull markets, like now, when alts start shooting up 10-20% everyday. Stay safe.
Pig butchering gets additionally horrible when you consider the other side. People who actually handle the chatting are kept in inhuman conditions and physically cannot leave. Laundered profits go to criminal bosses at the top (corrupting various local governments, given they constitute a significant percentage of their economies at this point).
See Number Go Up by Zeke Faux for a glimpse into that (and how cryptocurrency, in particular stablecoins, in particular Tether, facilitate it). True, much of book is largely about the weird cryptobro culture and FTX collapse, but research into pig butchering and personal travel to scam compounds was the most visceral part for me.
> People who actually handle the chatting are kept in inhuman conditions and physically cannot leave.
I think there might be a word for this.
But I was informed that ended in 1865.
And that's why the term is "modern slavery".
The world's a big place.
On a more serious note, you might want to be aware that slavery is still legal in the US as a punishment for crime. For further reading, you might be interested in the prison industrial complex.
Since hearing this I have stopped insulting or berating them. I just reply "Kill your masters, you outnumber them" and then block.
i think the degree to which this is fully true is overstated from when i've looked into it. a lot of it is not the best working environments, but people are still scamming people for pay and are largely not forced to do so.
The difference here is that Zeke wrote a book chok full of sources (a significant chunk of the book in the end is basically pages of references), while you so far supplied none.
While I don’t know anyone personally, a local semi-famous person was abducted in Thailand and sent to one of these compounds (except in Myanmar). He was rescued by a combined rescue mission of his country’s and Thai governments. This made big news a few months back, and resulted in a drastic reduction in Asian tourist travel to Thailand (which itself doesn’t run these compounds, but is a big destination for tourism), so much so that Thai government was (maybe still is) in panic mode because of it.
Remember how Thailand tried to enact measures even technically abroad, like cutting off electricity and Internet connections (and how these compounds are controversially using Starlink now)? This was all posted on this site in the year leading up to today, and the reason for it is that pig butchering related abductions driven by crime nearby states made it unsafe for most Asian-looking people to travel to Thailand. Does it create an impression of voluntary labour in your mind?
Perhaps in near term LLMs will allow them to reduce headcount so much that the bosses become willing to pay and less inclined to keep them captive, but so far claims that it’s all mostly voluntary labour just don’t compute with available evidence.
(For the sake of completeness, I should add that Thailand’s crackdown could potentially be motivated not only by tourism revenue but also by the pressure from the government of PRC, which in turn could be motivated not only by its poorer citizens being among those kidnapped but also by its richer citizens being a target of pig butchering scams. Still, I don’t know how common the latter is—from my observations, in Western cultures people are more inclined to trust strangers compared to Chinese cultures—and in any case this does not make the well-documented kidnappings and forced labour less real.)
Various stories from people who have been on the other side of this tend to concur. I unfortunately cannot find the story, but a Pakistani call center scam artist who was hired by one of these crime syndicates went on record recently talking about the experience (I think it was in a podcast) and he said that he was recruited into a well paid, well organized machine and the workers themselves were treated well. He painted a picture of a hyper-competitive Glengarry Glen Ross-esque environment with leaderboards and the like, where people fought over and protected their "leads" (marks). The only struggle for him was not the working conditions, but rather with the moral aspects when he realized what he was doing.
Usually, as you would expect, the employees don't really realize until after they are recruited in what they are doing, and oftentimes the money and job is cushy enough they are willing to set aside their morals to do it.
The source is welcome if you ever find it.