I’m tired of the financial scammers. A few months ago John Oliver did a great show on how these scammers operate what is known as pig butchering. A typical pig butchering scam works as follows.
First, a scammer poses as someone else online, typically someone prominent in the financial space. They then use their fake financial persona to convince unknowing victims to invest their money with them. The scammers have a few different ways they do this.
One involves pumping thinly-traded penny stocks that the scammer already owns and then dumping their shares for a profit after their victims have boosted the price enough. This is your classic pump and dump scheme.
Another method they use is cryptocurrency fraud. The victim typically downloads an app (sent by the scammer) and starts trading according to the scammer’s instructions. And, as they do so, they see their “balance” on the app start going up. Before they know it, they are gaining “wealth” rather quickly.
What they don’t realize is that the app is controlled by the scammer and the wealth isn’t real. But, the scammer doesn’t let their victim withdraw any money yet, because it’s too soon. They need to fatten up their pig a bit more before they butcher them.
To do so, they convince the victim to deposit more money into the app and take part in even larger trades. This continues until either the victim asks for their money back or the scammer decides to bail. At that point, all the victim’s money disappears. The scam is complete.
The crypto version of this scam works because the transactions occur on the blockchain where they are both anonymous and irreversible. After all, what could be better for scammer? You can’t call the scammer’s bank to get your money back because
