"The bond phase showed that scammers had tremendous patience; this phase lasted anywhere from 3 to 11 months before the scammer moved on to the next stage of the scam."

"When I spoke to her on a video call, it was the same person from the photos. She was even wearing the dress that matched a photo she had sent earlier in the day."

“She did not push me to invest, or ask for money. She seemed genuinely interested in me and we spoke for nearly 6 months before she even brought up investments; it all seemed so real and organic."

"It seemed legitimate, there was no reason to think that it could be fake – if she could be a scammer, so could any of my actual friends."

"[the site] was similar to what you would expect on an investment portfolio website; in fact, the prices of stocks and bitcoin also matched..."

"According to recent research [23], these scams have resulted in losses of nearly 75 billion dollars since 2020."

The persons profile was strangely convincing, it was hyper-local to my neighborhood growing up. This account had existed for something like 4 or 5 years and had posts going back at least a few. It was almost convincing. The tell was just that their posts were too targeted, all "Hey, local event is going on" "Hey, local politics thing" with no other thoughts expressed. Their replies section was just littered with replies to people about how things were "awesome" or "great news" without any critique or thought.

The whole thing was very unsettling. It was the first scam where I really felt like it would have been easy to fall for with a standard amount of critical thinking. If I had a hazier recollection of my childhood I might have.

I can't imagine this bot was made specifically for me, I'm not that important, but certainly people in my area. I genuinely wonder if this is part of some larger network of hyper-local bots. I don't look forward to the attacks to come as AI progresses.

[1] https://pikabu.ru/story/temu_neponyatnyiy_razvod_11302944

Any tips would be appreciated. Locking down phone hasn’t really helped, and finances are already segregated to hopefully avoid giving away total life savings.

The interviews with the victims are heartbreaking. There's one dad/daughter pair where the dad has lost almost literally everything, is on camera being interviewed about everything that happened, and is still flipping between "it was a total scam" and "maybe if I just send them another fee payment I can get at least some of my money back" and the daughter saying, "No, dad! It's a scam, and you are not sending them anymore money!"

These are mostly cryptocurrency investment scams. More crypto regulation would help, but the so-called crypto industry doesn't want to see that happen because their product has no other utility than enabling this stuff.

> The term comes from fraudsters referring to their victims as 'pigs' – those they gradually 'fatten up' by luring them into a fake romance or friendship before 'butchering' them by convincing them to invest, often in fake cryptocurrency schemes.

Source: https://www.interpol.int/en/News-and-Events/News/2024/INTERP...

I always answer on the positive, it is very fun to see them try to ask a question that will make me answer 'no that's not me' so they can continue on the next part. Can recommend.

(I knew it wasn't genuine as I'm still paying for my daughter's cellphone)

Anyway, I played a long for a bit but finally told them that I knew it wasn't genuine as my daughter is not that polite when she asks for money.

The pig-butchers had some type of bot/AI/wage slaves for the backend and they used Zendesk for the frontend. I am not happy that Zendesk is being used to basically rob people and I am minded to write up the whole sorry saga here just to inspire developers to steer their companies away from the Zendesk product. They didn't shoot my dad, they just sold the gun.

Amazing how much infrastructure is built up to support these operations.

https://www.economist.com/audio/podcasts/scam-inc

https://www.npr.org/2025/05/23/1253043749/pig-butchering-sca...

The scammers worked with additional people who met them in the real world.

Someone else's elderly father wasn't so lucky: they kept sending all their life savings to the scammers, until the wife divorced him and the family suffered so much.

Their "relationship" developed over about 1 yr, and which point they sent ~£30k to temporarily cover a cashflow shortfall in their scammer's apparently legitimate business.

This was quickly detected by their spouse, who was obviously livid.

However..... not only did they transfer these funds to some limbo, and had received extremely clear advice that they had been scammed, they did the same thing with another ~£30k about a month later.

The funds so transferred went to some account in China.

The repetition of this "aberrant" behavior contributed to the divorce of my relative and their spouse.

In later conversations with the victim, who did eventually realize that they had been scammed, I attempted to reassure them by saying that these scammers are very skilled, and that they were innocent in the whole affair. It was small consolation, though.

Just blocked anyone I didn't know after that and after 3-4 numbers it stopped forever.

I know of a building housing one of these. Obviously they pay the local police and have cover so just filing a complaint or whatever is not an option.

I posted about it here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45037474

Who is working on AI agents startup to automate this? /s