What is a pig butchering scam? How the crypto con works

Pig butchering is a scam in which a stranger spends weeks or months winning someone's trust online, then steers them into a fake cryptocurrency investment that shows growing profits, until the money is gone. The name is a translation of the Chinese phrase sha zhu pan: the scammers "fatten the pig" with attention and imaginary gains before "slaughtering" it. What makes it work is time and trust, not technical skill.

In short

• It starts with a friendly message from a stranger and builds a real-seeming relationship before money is ever mentioned.
• The "investment" is a fake app or website whose balance is just a number the scammers control; withdrawals are always blocked by one more fee.
• Once the warning signs show, the only move that saves money is to stop paying, keep every record and report it.

How does a pig butchering scam work?

The US Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) set out the pattern in a September 2023 alert. The details change; the sequence rarely does.

Stage	What happens	What it feels like to the target
1. The opening	A text "to the wrong number", a message on a dating app, social network or professional site, or a reply to an old post	A harmless mistake, or a pleasant new contact
2. Fattening	Daily chats over weeks, often moved to a private messaging app; photos of a successful life; talk of family, food, hobbies	A friendship or romance that seems real
3. The pitch	The new friend mentions an uncle, a mentor or a trading system that makes steady money, and offers to teach	Being let in on something by someone who cares
4. The small win	A first deposit of a few hundred dollars in crypto, a dashboard showing gains, and sometimes a small withdrawal that really works	Proof that it's real
5. Going bigger	Encouragement to add savings, retirement money, loans or credit; deadlines and "special opportunities"	Excitement, then pressure
6. The slaughter	A withdrawal is blocked until the target pays "taxes", "fees" or a "security deposit"; each payment leads to another; then the contact vanishes	Shock, shame and fear

The small early withdrawal at stage 4 is the cruelest part of the design. It turns doubt into confidence, because the target has seen money come back. From then on, the balance on the screen is a number the scammers type in. The deposits went straight to wallets they control.

Most payments are made in cryptocurrency, usually bitcoin, ether or the dollar stablecoin Tether, because crypto payments are fast, cross borders easily and can't be reversed by a bank. FinCEN notes that some schemes use wire transfers or fake foreign-exchange and gold trading instead.

Who is behind it?

FinCEN describes most of these scams as run by criminal organizations based in Southeast Asia, many of which use trafficked workers to send the messages. In August 2023, the UN human rights office reported that credible sources indicated at least 120,000 people in Myanmar, and around 100,000 in Cambodia, may be held in compounds and forced to carry out online scams (UN Geneva). Many were lured by fake job ads. The person typing the friendly messages may be a victim too, working from a script under threat.

That is why the scripts are so polished. They are written, tested and reused across thousands of targets at once.

How big is the problem?

Exact totals are uncertain because many victims never report. What has been reported is large. The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center received 41,557 complaints of cryptocurrency investment fraud in 2024, a category that includes pig butchering, with reported losses of $5.8 billion, up 47% on 2023. That one category was more than a third of the $16.6 billion lost to all internet crime reported to the FBI that year.

The same report describes Operation Level Up, which the FBI started in January 2024 to warn people who were still being scammed. Of the 4,323 victims it contacted that year, 76% did not know they were being defrauded. Victims are usually not careless; they are being worked on, one-to-one, by professionals.

How can you tell it's a scam?

Any one of these is a reason to stop and check. Several together is the pattern.

• Someone you have never met in person starts the conversation and keeps it going for weeks, then brings up investing.
• They want to move the chat to a different app quickly, and they always have a reason not to video call or meet.
• They point you to a specific trading platform or app, not one you found yourself, and often not one in an official app store.
• The returns are steady and high, and losses never seem to happen.
• Money has to go in as crypto, or through a crypto ATM, or to an account in someone else's name.
• To withdraw, you are told to pay a tax, fee or deposit first. Real platforms deduct fees from the balance; they don't need new money to release yours.
• You are told to keep it secret from family or your bank, or the bank's questions are framed as the bank being jealous or ignorant.

The US Federal Trade Commission puts the shortest version plainly: "Only scammers demand payment in cryptocurrency," and online dating and investment advice should never be mixed. Many openings work like phishing, a message designed to look innocent enough to answer.

What should you do if it's happening to you?

Stop sending money, including any "fee" to release a withdrawal. Paying more never unlocks the balance, because the balance never existed. Save everything: the chat history, usernames and phone numbers, the website or app address, and every transaction record, including the wallet addresses and transaction IDs from the wallet or exchange you sent from.

Then report it. In the United States, that means the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center at ic3.gov and the FTC at ReportFraud.ftc.gov, plus the exchange or bank you used, which may be able to freeze funds that haven't moved yet. Other countries have their own police fraud-reporting services. Speed matters: the earlier a report reaches investigators, the better the odds that some funds can be traced and held. This note gives general steps, not legal advice.

Watch for a second wave. Victims who report losses are often contacted by "recovery" services or fake officials who promise to get the money back for an upfront fee. That is the same scam again. The FBI warns that fake law firms target scam victims with offers to recover funds, and that the US government does not ask for payment for law enforcement services.

A cousin of older frauds

Pig butchering borrows from the romance scam and the Ponzi scheme: the trust comes from the first, and the fake gains and small early payouts from the second.

Check yourself

• With this note out of sight, describe the stages of the scam from the first message to the last payment.
• Why does letting a victim withdraw a small amount early make the scam work better?
• What is the one demand that proves a trading platform is fake, and why?

Sources

• FinCEN alert on prevalent virtual currency investment scam commonly known as pig butchering — Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, U.S. Department of the Treasury, 2023
• Internet Crime Report 2024 — Federal Bureau of Investigation, Internet Crime Complaint Center, 2025
• Hundreds of thousands trafficked into online criminality in southeast Asia — UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, via UN Geneva, 2023
• What to know about cryptocurrency and scams — U.S. Federal Trade Commission
• Fictitious law firms targeting cryptocurrency scam victims while offering to recover funds — Federal Bureau of Investigation, Internet Crime Complaint Center, 2025