Bulls Make Money, Bears Make Money, Pigs Get Slaughtered
There's a term called 殺豬盤 literally meaning pig slaughtering plate. It's usually a scam that involves a love scam whereby the scammer gains the trust of the victim slowly and then does a rug pull. It is literally like feeding a pig until its fat and then butchering the pig.
This scam typically affects woman victims of Chinese descent. The woman will get a random message via social media (Instagram, Wechat and even Linkedin) by some random guy (usually quite handsome). The scammer will attempt to gain trust of the woman victims 1st by probing and chatting on and off for a few months. The scammer attempt to understand the victim's likes and dislikes use these details slowly gain the victim's trust. Most of the time, the victim's intimate information (likes, dislikes hobbies) can be revealed via their Instagram profile. A lot of people leave their Instagram posts open to everybody to see and Instagram presents a good place to start to read a person.
This phase of probing and talking back and forth between the scammer and victim can go on for months mainly to gain the trust of the victim. At times, the scammer will suddenly burst out in anger or sound disappointed and angry to invoke woman's nurturing nature to gain trust. Eg they will suddenly go ballistic ask question the relationship status. The main purpose of this technique is to make woman feel that rollercoaster emotion that eventually will make the woman more vulnerable. Once in a while the scammer will ask the woman to provide non make up pictures of her or her normal pictures to test the level the woman trust the scammer, once the trust level has been established, the scammer will proceed further to the actual phase of scamming.
The scammer's social media profile usually are newly created with a few posts about living in the lap of luxury (think fast cars, jets, boats) aka 高富帥. Sometimes the profile seems genuine but in reality the profile was bought / hacked by the scammer from someone else. So doing research on the social media profile sometimes cannot show any red flags.
The rugpull comes when the woman victim is asked to invest into some investment scheme (stocks, crypto, money game) or to help the scammer who pretends to be in danger of loan sharks.
For the investment scheme type, the victim will be asked to invest money into a website/app and then miraculously the website/app will show how the money is growing. Most of the time these investment will be related to some cryptocurrency investment. These website/app will appear to have attractive user interface and sometimes can seem like a professionally run company website. The scammer 1st introduces the victim to the world of investing by forwarding the victim some investment related ebooks or link to read and then slowly try to introduce victim to the website/app platform. Some go as far as depositing money into the victim's investment account just to gain the victim's trust. To deposit money into the app/website, the victim has to buy some crypto stable coins like USDT or UST as these website/app do not have the capability to link with the local bank system for payment, for very obvious reasons. Initially the victim will be able to see her investment increase, slowly the victim gains more and more confidence and pumps in more money into the website/app. When the victim realizes the scam, and requests to withdraw money from the investment scheme the scammer will ask for a security fee for withdrawal. There's another version whereby the withdrawal show successful from the app but the money never goes to the victim's bank account and scammer will call the victim up to act concern and asks the victim to email customer service of the investment app.
For the scammer that comes out with the danger story, the scammer will try to convince the victim to transfer money to the scammer's mule accounts. Once the woman victim transfers the money the to the scammer, the scammer will disappear out of the thin air.
This pig butchering scam originated from China and could be operating in China or Indo China (Myanmar, Cambodia), it targets Chinese descent people and the language used can be in Chinese or English. So far I've seen reports of people from Malaysia, Singapore and goes as far as Canada. This scam is more common than many think because of the shame of reporting and the futility in reporting to law enforcement authorities.
Updates 20220503
It has come to my attention that pig butchering scams also targets males but mostly are targeted to middle aged white man in the west. The scammers will pretend to be some gym going pretty woman (白富妹) and try to entice victims to join their crypto investment scheme.
Do understand that to a 8-9-10 woman, most man (99%) are actually invisible to her. It's not logical for such a beauty to knock on one's door/DM (direct message) out of the sudden. This is definitely a no-brainer love scam in the making.
Other times, the female scammer might not have photos in their profile to create an aura of mystery. The red flag starts when she suddenly talks about investing topics within the 1st few lines of conversation.
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