lol I’ve gotten this question. For me, they wanted to invite me to this bad mobile game

Couple months ago I got message from random woman on Telegram, I'm sure from the account photo it self is AI generated, and start play along. After I got some photo of her, I start reverse search the photos and found some Russian forum [1] that some people share their experience about pig-butchering scam

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

I'm surprised that so many of the 26 participants in the paper's study were young and well-educated, with a mean age of 48. I would have guessed a much older group of victims.

My dad passed away about three weeks after being fully pig-butchered, losing all of his money and reputation with family/friends. We all tried to talk him out of it, but it was like he joined a cult, for he cut us off and lost his mind. The whole sorry saga is very hard to live with. The sums of money were vast, cocaine addiction would have been a more cost effective way to go.

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.

I got sucked into reading this paper, and it has completely changed my perception of these scams. They are incredibly thorough and realistic. Here are some quotes that drove this home for me.

"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."

In case anyone else lives under a rock like me, this is only metaphorically linked to swine. Filed under TIL.

Didn't know the meaning of "pig-butchering scam", so I took it at its front value and was a bit confused.