Pig Butchering Scams: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

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tonight

concerns the Internet, it can be a magical place, but also one where things are not always what they seem, as this woman learned the hard way. Queen Shadana Haynesworth thought she bought this Instagram ad showing a tree that fits a lifetime. room, not the palm of your hand, this is Christmas, seriously, who's responsible for this, yeah, it must be pretty disappointing to order a full size tree and get whatever it is, you must have felt like HBO did when They ordered a comedy show. and instead I got this, unfortunately not all errors are so benign, it's not news that there are scammers on the internet, but you may have noticed that one particular scam is currently everywhere.

A common way to start is with a strange text from a number you don't recognize like Cheryl can we move lunch to 5 when you're not Cheryl or Dave what time is our flight when you're not Dave and you don't have a flight booked even as we work on this piece with various members? from our staff and their friends were getting these messages from Hello, this is Manager Jesse from the florist to this reading is this Dr. John I'm Emily, my horse is recovering well and I'm so glad he wasn't sent to Because it would have worked.

You call me Dr. John. I immediately agree and you assume I'm around for medical reasons. That's exactly what I've been saying. I'm allowed to touch it like this. I am a doctor and I know that most people ignore messages like that, but some immediately get sucked into a conversation and eventually, through a process that we will engage in, we can end up losing a lot of money. It is a scam with a catchy name. News anchors can't seem to get over it. It's called a pig slaughter scam and it may sound like a scary name, but that's because the amount of money victims are losing is painful.

Scammers have a terrible term for what Wendy went through. They call it pig slaughter. the New Mexico Safety Division calls them hog slaughter

scams

. I know, but listen, don't worry, there are no pigs or any other animals involved. Yes, don't worry, there are no pigs harmed in this pig slaughter scam, although the words do make you squeamish. It is worth noting that there is a process by which pigs are harmed every day; This is actually how we get the pork with bacon and other products, it's called hog slaughter and it's exactly what it sounds like, but the name makes a little more sense once you understand how the scam is done. actually works in the world of cyber threats and counter terrorism, special agent hasani has seen it all, but in 2021 he started seeing a new pig slaughter scam, but it only concerns raising little pigs, fattening them up and slaughtering them, and they are fattening his victim. with illusions of grandeur of wealth of love before bleeding them dry, that's hard because imagine being a victim of this scam by watching the news and suddenly discovering that the small handful of people in your situation are the pigs, even though we say they could have been worse , pigs. they're amazing they're one of the smartest animals on the planet they're smarter than dogs most three year olds and Tom Sandal to use a phrase the police never seem to appreciate.

Actually, it's an honor to be compared to a pig. and if you're thinking about it, this seems like the kind of scam that's been around for decades and it's partially true, but the way it works is pretty new and in the short time it's been around it's had huge success just this month. at the center of a big local news story in Kansas where a financial institution was taken down I was surprised I was surprised I was disappointed Kansas State Bank Commissioner David Hearnden is talking about the massive cryptocurrency scam at the Heartland Tri-State Bank in Elkart and a Cryptocurrency scheme the FBI now calls "Pig Butchery." In this case, Hearen says the victim was Sha Haynes, the bank's own CEO, and he now faces charges of embezzling nearly $50 million, a loss that caused the bank to fail

last

August.

That's true, according to prosecutors, the CEO of a bank who slaughtered Peak, sent his scammer into the bank's holdings, and the bank went under, which is alarming for several reasons, including the way the bank works. bank because it really seems like there should be at least one step between the CEO being fooled and yelling. The bank is empty, it is estimated that as of 2022 this scam was charging people over $3 billion a year in the US alone. And it is almost certainly a huge count since it only includes those people who reported their losses to the FBI, so given all that,

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I talk about pig slaughter, why it's easier to fall for what you believe, who is behind it, and what we can do to protect ourselves and others. our loved ones from being scammed in the future and let's start from where this started and to do that we unfortunately need to go back to the place no one wants to go at the beginning of covid, remember?

It's the Steven Miller of diseases, not that we were all too worried about it a few years ago and we've since moved on even though it's still extremely dangerous, but that's when pig slaughter basically took off at the start of Covid, Many of us were isolated and lonely desperately seeking human contact online, making us ripe targets at the same time that organized crime groups in China that ran casinos in Southeast Asia were in crisis. Since, thanks to the pandemic, players were not showing up, they turned those casinos into bases for online scam operations and from there their workers identified people and prayed for their vulnerabilities and let me guide you through the basic steps here, the first is make contact. and lure her target into listening to this woman explain how her scammer, who called himself Jimmy, contacted her at a time when she was dealing with cancer, the pandemic, and the end of her marriage. she.

The first message came as a very innocent message. I said the wrong number. he came back you look chinese you are chinese and I told him that yes he had moved here just before Co arrived and that's why he can't come home he was a lonely man who needed comfort Jimmy sent me messages every day, I remember him receiving these Emojis with hearts it is quite flattering for a middle aged woman to meet a young man who finds you attractive yes of course that is flattering because scammers tell their targets what they most want to hear at that moment we may not all fall for it in a trap gift of a pumping heart Emoji, but if someone sent me a nerd with glasses plus football plus learning plus sad statistics equals fire Emoji, personally, why wouldn't I do it and look, one way to make contact is through that number incorrect text, but we are experts we have spoken to. to estimate that they only represent about a quarter of the initial contacts for this scam, the rest may come through sites like LinkedIn, dating apps, Instagram or Facebook, places designed specifically for you to meet people you don't know, either by love, a connection or in the case of LinkedIn to find out what kind of person is still on LinkedIn and scammers often research their target using social media where there is a lot of information about people so they can pretend they have something in common, For example, this woman who met someone. on a dating app only to find out they shared an unexpected connection, she started asking questions about my family and my past experiences, it was a connection that felt even stronger, she says, when he told her he came from the same city in China where Hutchinson was from.

We adopted, we bonded a little over it, yeah, I bet they did. I have to say that she says something about the men on dating apps who connected so well simply because he did things like ask her questions about herself and listen to her answers. I'm not saying the bar for men is low, but that story started with him asking her questions about her life and ends with her giving him all her money, but regardless of how they start, sooner or later we move on to step two, changing the conversation. towards the money, but even then there is a clever twist because suddenly you won't be asked to transfer money to a Nigerian Prince with an obviously fake email like the real Prince spelled with a instead of an i in dross. he farts about pig slaughter, there is no direct request for money, but rather an opportunity is presented to you, just watch how this man explains the moment when a guy he met on a dating site began to attract him; he spent at least a month talking daily.

For me, in cultivating my friendship, initially the only conversation about money was how much his new online friend had made in cryptocurrency, after all, Scott thought he knew how to protect himself from

scams

. You can invest with me and I will make you earn all this money. and like I'm not giving you money, um that's not happening, um, that's when he started, no you don't give it to me, you set up your own account and I'll guide you, that's the clever hook here, you're not sending . the scammer's money they are helping you set up and control your own account and everything seems more legitimate when there is an app involved, don't you believe it, when was the

last

time you took an Uber?

Oh, you got a nondescript car with someone I've never met. I would never do that, but wait, look at this. I can do it from my phone. In that case, here is my address. Now you know where I live and that I won't be home at night. My name is John. Don't know. your last name, but that doesn't matter because I'm not going to memorize your face either, everything is secure, there is an application involved and the fact that the investment is often in cryptocurrencies can be persuasive for multiple reasons, first, who really knows how the cryptocurrencies.

I know. Your friend's weird husband says yes, but he's a pain to talk to, so unfortunately he must remain a mystery, but people have made money off of cryptocurrencies, so it's unreasonable to think you could meet one of them. them and they can also give you some advice. You may not be very familiar with how a trading platform works or even what it looks like, and scammers have created platforms that look incredibly plausible. We have this video of one that seems to have all the details and functions of a real one and me. I'll be honest, I could also be fooled by the fact that some scammers use legitimate apps that allow anyone to create a trading exchange.

The problem is that there are tools that scammers can use to fake fake results on those apps while they take your money. Just watch this journalist explain how. This gave a victim false confidence in MetaTrader. It looks like any type of normal trading interface that one would use and is available on the Google Play Store. It is available in the Apple App Store. It is an application that has many good ratings and that was one. Of the things that made Sai think this entire operation was legitimate, he believed that his investment was making money if it operated on a legitimate trading interface.

He sees profits and losses over time and this is exactly what he correctly saw. Your friend told you to download an app and you saw it on the App Store with good reviews. You might assume that everything on it was legit even before seeing the Metatrader logo, which looks like three men in suits masturbating under a table, an apt metaphor. for cryptocurrency, if I've ever seen one, some scammers even set up additional features like two-factor authentication or customer service lines, this woman did her best to do due diligence on the site they sent her to and came away convinced that It was real, there was a legal secretary involved in another state guarantee association with a law firm to which she sent money.

She is real. I was able to verify it, so it was very complex and well rehearsed. She spoke with a legal secretary and a law firm before sending money and that's more. I love them and they are very precious to me, but they are also very clingy and one of them is getting stronger and stronger every day, so if you have a building with walls and a phone number I can call. I trust you will take them by the afternoon and at this point in the process things may be looking pretty good for the people who are being scammed.

You've sent a little money to a site that looks legitimate through an account that Your new friend's monitoring and trading tips seem to be working, so maybe send a little more and pretty soon you'll have a nice chunk of money tied up. on this trading platform, but when you finally go to withdraw it, that's where we get to The last step of this process remember that woman you saw earlier whose online friend claimed that he was from the same city where she was born. Well, she had convinced her father to invest too. Apparently they had made a lot of money andthen this happened.

In December, his accounts showed a combined balance of $1.2 million, and Hutchinson decided it was time to withdraw the money. That's when the site told him that before he could withdraw the money he would have to pay a hefty tax bill of approximately $380,000. That's when I thought: something is not right, it wasn't the cryptocurrency The investments were not real all of her and her father's funds had gone into the pockets of scammers in total $390,000 stolen I ruined my life I ruined my dad's life She told me it was all a scam Hutchinson's father, Melvin, and all I could do was just hug her and tell her it's okay, it's okay, it's okay and uh, it was hard, it was hard because we lost everything, yeah, their money was already gone and that tax bill was just an attempt to squeeze them out. one last time and it's not the only brutal story here: this woman lost $350,000, this guy lost $300,000, and that woman who fell in love with Jimmy sent him $2.5 million while she was dealing with terminal cancer.

It is traumatic and humiliating. It took courage for those people to come forward and that's partly why experts think the $3 billion figure we have is too low because most people who have been scammed this way simply they don't report their losses.shame and at this point you're probably furious at the people on the other end of all these messages who want to see them deleted or at least with and that happens, a lot of people post screenshots playing with scammers all the time. like in this exchange where someone responds to a wrong text number with my name is inego Montoya and you don't happen to have six fingers on your right hand, or this one where a scammer writes I'm Sarah, nice to meet you a picture and guess the answer, we court, we court, boner alert and look, look, I'll be honest, that doesn't sound like the right sound to me, that's not what I probably would have chosen with auga auga Boner alert, but reasonable people might not agree at all.

Bodies are different, there's no right sound for an erection alert, but here's how cathartic it could be. The person on the other end of that phone may not be the one you should be mad at because remember when I said this would be done in former casinos by organized crime syndicates turns out they aren't big bosses this complex is where an Indian man named Rakesh says he was forced to work for more than 11 months without pay for a Chinese criminal gang Rakesh who does not want to be identified says he first flew to Thailand for what he thought was an IT job, instead he says he was tricked into crossing the border to Myanmar where a Chinese gangster told him to work or threatened to kill him he warned me like this and work spends 16 hours a day on social media targeting Americans with a fake profile which is horrible no one should be forced to go through 16 hours a day on social media, you should do it because you love it or because you're 15 and the algorithm has made you addicted, you know, completely normal reasons why a lot of these organizations use people who have been trafficked after having been lured to the complexes under false pretenses;

In reality, they themselves are victims of a scam, basically, they could see job ads. for qualified positions such as translators or IT specialists in another country, then go through an entire application process with some going through up to four seemingly legitimate online interviews and flying to their new job, at which point they suddenly find out that their new bosses have their papers and Now I can't leave in 2022 Pru estimated that tens of thousands of people had been deceived in this way and a more recent UN report estimated that hundreds of thousands of people have been forcibly involved in this plan.

They also say most of the victims are confined. to the scam complex and their screens are always monitored by members of the organized crime group and once they are inside, they have provided fake profiles to try to hook people. This is where Rakesh found himself being all day. I have a Russian girl using a fake Russian girl profile I need to scam people posing as a Salt Lake City-based investor named Claraa Simonov Rakesh flirted online with potential targets 70 to 80% fall for a love false Yes, Rakesh was Claraa Simonov from Salt Lake City, so before we go Also, anyone who thinks he is dating Claraa, I'm afraid not you, the relationship is over, it's not you, but it's not her either, it's Rakesh, but it's not him either, it's the head of rh who doesn't let him leave.

The operation is highly organized and set up to avoid the usual ways a scam can be detected; For example, some organizations generate their own profile photos so that reverse image searches cannot be performed, and employees are given manuals like these to guide them. At every step of the process, they are told to target people who look rich and successful. One advises that on the first day, talk about things like your name, age, occupation, and hobbies, and on the next day, talk about your emotional experience with one message divided into two. paragraphs and then on the third day, talk about your business experience, they even give you tips on how to break down people's defenses, we went through several of these manuals and they carefully explain how to build trust and exploit the weaknesses of your supposed clients, as I know funny, make clients fall in love with you so deeply that they forget everything you know.

The cold thing is that that is true. If you're funny enough, you can make people forget a lot of things, whether it's common sense Internet safeguards lessons from earlier. relationships or who have been accidentally learning about financial fraud and human trafficking for the last 20 minutes, we're having fun, right? And if you're thinking, why don't the authorities just close these complexes? Sometimes they are involved. Here's a man who was trafficked to a scam center in Cambodia and explains what happened when he did the obvious on his second day in captivity. He sent an email to the Chinese embassy.

He was advised to call Cville police, but the police never arrived at the property management. Instead they came, they knew he had called the police. L says the managers then sold it to another scam company. He said because I called the police, they had to take care of the police with at least $4,000 and I had to pay for that too, yes. The authorities weren't going to help him, which actually makes sense when you learn that, according to UN estimates, the slaughter of roses in Cambodia generates an amount equivalent to half of the country's GDP, which is worrying because, as Everyone knows, when something generates that much money you don't donate it.

Don't turn it off, you turn it off and pray the magic works a second time. Come on, and the conditions in these complexes can be brutal. That man you saw earlier, Raes took abuse photos like this one of a coworker who had been beaten and Lou. who managed to get out now He works to free others and the stories of what he has seen are fair, a warning difficult to see. I saw a man receive a very serious beating. He had wounds all over his body. Luke maintains that it was this man who was supposedly found hanging.

Just a few hours later, I'm now sure it was him. His phone is filled with messages from Chinese citizens desperate to free themselves from scam companies. There are videos of abuse. Lou says he receives them directly from victims within the scam industry or finds them posted on social media. Group chats and he has wives, it's shocking, that's horrible, and when you know all this, it starts to change exactly who you're angry with because suddenly the people on the other end of the phone don't seem like so much. fun to send a we're courting, we're courting, boner alert text, not that that's not a great text message who doesn't love a boner alert, but there's a time and a place for this, it might not be too from now on when you receive it. a sexy message from a new stranger, good luck, without thinking, it's a man who just got beaten in a labor camp in Myanmar and if anything it's the John Oliver effect, you're welcome and look, I can't say that everyone scammers be someone who was kidnapped, tortured and forced to do it, but even if not everyone who does this is trapped or coerced, the very fact that many are is still a big problem, so what can we do right here When it comes to those incarcerated in these complexes that's going to require collaboration between international law enforcement, so unless you're the head of Interpol, which I assume you're not, there's not much I can do personally now. in this country.

I would say platforms like these should do a lot more to prevent creation. of fake accounts to target people because it is happening under their watch, but the truth is that perhaps the most effective way to prevent this from happening is to make it less lucrative by making fewer people fall into the trap and that is where the awareness of this scam is key. It's one of those rare cases where raising awareness is actually helpful in itself because hopefully you've seen it tonight. This could happen to someone you know. Not only has this absorbed the elderly or those who are not tech-savvy, but it managed to attract a CEO of the bank, everyone has an image of the type of person who is susceptible to being scammed in their head, but to Unless that image is a mirror, it can be wrong, so as a general rule, when a stranger on a dating app says: I love you or crypto within a month talking to you, worry honestly, even if they don't turn out to be scammers, those are pretty good red flags to look for personality and it's worth telling your friends and family about pig slaughter too, it doesn't have to be. big conference or anything you can just send them a link to this show and if they say I hate that guy say yes I do too he's the worst just skip the jokes and if they say I watch it but it seems like a Lego counter, wait. no it looks like the gpt chat response to show me a virgin wait no it looks like harry potter if he just stayed under the stairs just leave the red mod you don't have to totally sell me maybe drop an emoji thumbs up, but please go away.

Look at that and look, if you know someone who has been scammed this way, try to be kind, it's human to want company and it's actually a good quality to trust people and it sucks that the internet should be a way to alleviate loneliness. it can become a tool for exploitation, but maybe if we all look out for each other we can ensure that the worst mistake anyone can make on the Internet is inadvertently buying a great Christmas tree for gay mice because, honestly, don't It's so bad. buy believe me, I know what I'm talking about